Grandfather

While walking in the desert I remembered my grandfather. He had come to the US a recent engineering graduate from Kiev, met my grandmother, a grocer's daughter, who later would give birth to my mother; worked as a metallurgist in the steel industry in Pittsburgh and Columbus, and was ill with diabetes and marrow cancer for the time I knew him, dying when I was twelve.

When I was about seven, my little brother and young parents took rail to Columbus from Pittsburgh, a great thrill. 

He spoke to me always with respect, answering my questions about lightning, the workings of television, government and geography, dinosaurs and much more that I don't recall. On Sundays in Columbus we'd sometimes watch the Yankee games on his 1950's seven inch cabinet TV.

Once he gave me a lesson in chemistry titration by taking me to the bathroom and having me hold a test tube, partly filled with the urine I had watched him void into it, adding reagent drop by drop until the color change told him how high his sugar level was. I remember how warm the test tube felt in my hands, and my queasiness, not quite dispelled by his gentle manner. I watched him, propped up in a hospital bed, inject his belly and thighs with insulin; I can still recall his ashen face, the smell of the alcohol swabs in his bedroom, the metallic gleam off the autoclavable syringes.

He was a short, compact man, made more sturdy looking by the steel and leather brace he wore against the ongoing deterioration of his spine. His complexion made sallow by illness. Bald, with soft gray almond eyes. A very neat grey mustache, a few coarse black hairs marking it. I never heard him raise his voice; in fact, he spoke in quiet tones that nonetheless commanded my attention. Something also that made an impression that wouldn't have been obvious to me as a child, only remembered all these years later: a calm resignation, and the strength of that.

I stopped for a moment to look out across the desert toward the western hills. The sky above them purpling and golden this late in the afternoon. Venus could be seen sailing above the horizon, a brightening light in the deep blue. I heard myself say, grandfather, how do you like the desert we live in now? He smiled with my face, looked toward the mountains through my eyes. Suffused by gratitude, I felt the stillness of the day, the gift of contact.

DESIRE

Lately, I've been noticing a vague, undifferentiated desire. Not hunger, but something like it; if I go for something, say a bit of chocolate or some tea, it isn't satisfied. I know what real hunger is like, and real satiation, a quiet hum in the body after some good food. This isn't like that.

Sometimes, I linger with it, and the first thing that peels away is any need to satisfy its demand, which has been amorphous anyway. Stripped of that, it hovers in consciousness, resolving itself into my breathing, or a fullness in my throat, or some other bodily sense; or a thought, or something someone is saying to me; some experience, the desire disappearing in the process. A ghost or a vapor barely perceptible, resolving into the next thing.

It's always disappearing, always not quite there, hinting at some quiet emptiness that is somehow alive. Something like being at an event horizon, feeling the pull toward . . . nothing. The pull itself is the the only movement; the destination is the next thing I'm involved in. Try to focus on it and it disappears into the looking; try to move it around or change it or identify it and it disappears into the effort.

I could say that I disappear and reappear, going in and out of the everyday world of thoughts and things in an endlessly repeating cycle, but how strange to contemplate the in-between, when I am not there, you are not there, but life is!

PLANES

Coming out of work the other day, I saw two fighter planes in tandem banking sharply toward the Air Force base to the south. In the next moment, I shuddered, thinking, there are the killing machines.

Taking the experience apart, what strikes me is the progression from mere perception to the series of reactive thoughts, as if my mind had the capacity for pure perceiving, followed immediately, but not simultaneously, by associative thought, with its own train of emotional reactivity.

It's not significant, I don't think, whether the associations are deemed positive, (Wow! What a wondrous event! Such amazing flying machines!), or negative, (What awful mechanisms of murder!). The point is that they are added on to the raw experience, as if each moment of seeing carries with it a bag that immediately opens, spilling out a chain of reactions, often contradictory, within a system that makes judgements on value. And may follow that with an entire, justified, philosophy.

What would the world be like were the raw experience be given enough space to be just as it is, without pondering or manipulation of the content? A way of being receptive to what is, whether it be the world's objects or one's own streaming thoughts? What penetration into the mystery of these manifestations would be available? When this happens, as it sometimes does, there's a sense of revelation and wonder, perhaps a simple joy at being alive, with little or no separation from the experience. Things appear within a whole, blessed by presence.

FOLLOWING THE RED GOD, FOLLOWING WATER

"This is the moon and stars," he said, "and also these, this chair, this flesh. There is nothing that really separates them from each other, or from any other thing.

"The attention follows thoughts as one would follow a path of stones laid by rivulets from recent rains, leading down toward a wash and west up the hillside.

"Then a thicket of low lying acacia and a hooked barrel cactus on its darker sand shimmering in the muted light, still taking water from last week's rain.

"The path follows stones out of the thicket up toward a nearby ridge, the desert view opening toward the sun setting, a low bar of cloud hanging above it, its underside billowing up pink from orange fire.

"A snapshot opportunity, and a stunning artifact in the resulting photo: A violent slash of red light in the picture's center, angled about thirty degrees from the horizontal, as if the sun's fire had opened a portal within the water and earth. A glowing red bubble on the desert floor seems to spill liquid gold to the ground."