day 4 of a head cold, into the depths of Norman Mailer's analytical mind, and out again with these thoughts...

The bird outside my living room window flits between the stale satellite dish, covered with brown oak leaves and naked winter vines, and the bare branches of an unnamed tree. It is the ultimate Other to me. As is any inhuman creature.

It is expected, then--dare I say natural--that we would see Nature as everything but the human, for we are the eyes through which the Other is viewed. Yet, it is a sign of extreme self-absorption to be unable to see ourselves as the objects too, to see the world--nature, existence, the universe, what have you--as inclusive of Every thing. To feel ourselves part of some larger entity that includes, at a minimum, the whole of Earth’s life forms, from soil nematodes and unseen creatures of the deep sea to those unassuming, armed critters so hated as road pests in Texas, to the extinct mastodons and pterodactyls we’ve dug up and modeled in bone, plaster and fiber.

Pine Wilt Nematode (Bursaphelenchus xylophilus)
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deep sea creature at the Monterey Bay Aquarium
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The Nine-banded Armadillo (Dasypus novemcinctus Linnaeus)
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American Mastodon (Mammut americanum)
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Pterodactyl
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Mastodon Skeleton
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That is why it’s so hard to understand God as a father of humans, who bids his human children to take care of Nature (the Other) as their steward, rather than understanding God as the mystery and brilliance and overwhelming vastness of existence itself. Indeed, is not God simply a word for the extraordinary the sense that you or I, ensconced in that daily self-awareness with which we navigate our own small world, are not actually significant at all as we comport ourselves to be? That sense of losing our human eyes in exchange for an unbounded self-awareness of a larger being. The largest being there is: the whole of the universe, conceived in billions of small packages, of which you are just one. You cease to become you in the true awareness of God because God is until that moment unaware of itself. In this conception, then, God is present at all times, yet unaware of itself as a whole, and is instead cognizant only of itself in terms of each of its fragmented billions of sentient expressions (perhaps the insentient as well) each going about their day with wide yet small eyes, attuned to the minute details of their worlds. The individual concerns, joys, progresses, and downfalls. And yet God is only fragmented because it gets wrapped up in all its multi-being (not unlike multi-tasking) and forgets the sensation, the awareness of being this enormous, interconnected being outside of which exists nothing and inside of which exists everything.

breakfast of champions and the secret garden

Some things I want to remember:
The feeling I got when I saw familiar faces across the dance floor.
The ephemeral (yet noticeable) sense of letting go of my identity on the dance floor.
The feeling of being admired.
The sense that I am more powerful than I let myself be.
Being connected to a living circle of friends.
The hugs.
marveling at bodies in motion.
The music reverberating throughout my cells.
Being at ease.

I am one lucky one.

related links:
The Secret Garden
Breakfast of Champions

struggle, love, and letting go

today i am struggling. with the elbows that dug into my belly and hips to work out the knots, with the cold air that creeps up on my neck, with the hormone withdrawal that leaves me wanting a hermitage i can retreat to for a few days. but most of all, with this thought:

if i let go of what i love too fiercely, it will come back to me if it was ever true.

i struggle with the thought that it might not be true, and that, having let it go, i will lose it.
i struggle with deciding whether this old proverb fits the occasion - if it does not, letting go might be akin to saying, i don't care anymore, in which case i will also lose what i love.
i struggle with the confusion of this not-so-merry-go-round situation.
i am afraid to let go. i am afraid to cling too tightly. i am afraid to be who i want to be with this thing i love.
is it what i thought it was?

doubt is a ghost that hangs out with me a lot these days, especially now, when the cycle of life within me is ending, preparing to start anew.

i do not know whether i will let go. i will wait a while before i decide. maybe the question will be transcended entirely - made moot - by another state of mind.

oilslick redbill

Today I saw a bird I have never seen before. It scuttled across the sandstone as the tide came in, easy to see in the fading light because of its bright red bill, long and thin. There were four of them, entirely black save for their warning flag beaks. I was with Bob and Erica and Jonathon at the edge of a sea cliff. None of them had seen it either. The bird was even more remarkable then, in the company of those more drawn to the sea than I, with more years of seeing the shore. We laughed together trying to come up with a name for it, promising to remind each other to look it up later. Two brown pelicans flew below us, close over the breaking waves. The Redbills took off with little screams. None of us tried to imitate their warning call (if that's what it was), but took notice, and as at all things spoken aloud at that dusk hour, we laughed heartily at the thought of venturing to scream like the redbill at the office next week. And then I thought to myself, this feels like home. And I marvelled at how seldom I feel truly at home. We all get along swimmingly, and laugh and talk all the time, but I rarely feel such easy comraderie with my workmates - it was a glimpse of what it might feel like if we were just an unlikely group of friends. I think it was because we were outdoors, wiped out, and had no work to do for a whole several minutes. And that meant I could take notice of each of us as people. I could watch our interactions, all the while smelling the salt, feeling the wind nip my cheeks, and watching the incredible flight of hundreds of ordinary, feathered and hollow-boned beings right in front of me.
As all moments do, this one passed soon after it began.
We moved indoors, to finish our two-day convergence of energy focused on the thing all 21 of us have in common: a calling to bring about a food production system that is ecologically, economically, and socially viable for each other, and for all those other living things we marvel at when we take a moment to notice them.
It turns out that our oilslick redbill is none other than a black oystercatcher, Haematopus bachmani. I don't think they were catching oysters on that rock, though. How exactly would a bird need to catch an oyster? (Here I am imagining a group of oysters shooting bubbles out of their shells to launch themselves off the rocks and into the water, desparately trying to get away from the red hammers of death.) Black Oystercracker is probably a more apt name. Speaking of oyster crackers, how did they get their name? Do they compliment the slippery, slurpy throat dive of the lemon-garlic oyster as an after-crunch?
Names are funny. I like naming things, and thinking of names, especially for creatures (including people). I like knowing what names mean. Names are important - they solidify the connection you have with the named thing, what it means to you, what it means to the world. Names are also frustrating because they pinpoint a certain meaning or range of meanings and associations and limit other possibilities. What if we all had more than one name, for different people or different situations? That's a strange thought - what would I name myself at Thanksgiving with my family? What would my name be at work? What would my name be to the people I went to high school with that I don't know anymore? What would my name be in the bedroom? When I am travelling to a new place? I am attached to my name. I don't want to let it go, even temporarily. It's familiar to me. It defines me, in a way. The thought of not being juli is very strange indeed...