XIBALBA BIBLE
(THE ORACLE OF XIBALBA)
BOOK II
1-10
Nairatmyavada refers to the question of a self, or human identity, Atman or Anatman.
“Who climbs up on the Cross?”
***
How to use THE ORACLE:
Too often, one approaches an oracle to discover their future for personal or even selfish reasons. But a real oracle reveals the inner structure or substance of the whole of being and one’s part in it–in time and out–or, a preferred path through. That revealed, you’ll know what to do, or not- what to hope for or not… what to be.
One may use various oracular methods for choosing the selections below. One may cast three coins or a bundle of yarrow stalks as in the venerable I CHING to discover your numbers–each text is numbered. Though, this may require a modicum of expertise with oracular coins and sticks. Or one may simply allow the book to fall open randomly to find your texts, as St. Francis did with the Bible to find his way. DO NOT JUST READ THOUGH ALL OF THE TEXTS. That will only provide a more superficial, critical exposure, like conquering a mountain by climbing to its peak. Then one might as well just read a novel for the usual reasons of enlarging one’s moral awareness and/or entertainment. Rather, choose three chapters at random in Book II for a first reading, then seven texts for a deeper revelation. Choose twenty-one selections for a more thorough presentation of what you seek. Read each selection carefully. (If the reader does not discover something helpful here, I refer you back to the I CHING, a venerable source tried and true, for a second opinion. Though vast in helpful wisdom, the I CHING was devised before the tragic split between Spirit and Matter, Psyche and Body–the Fall–became so violently rift as it is now. It’s gotten worse and requires a new therapy that maintains the essential insights and practices of the past as well as might new insights that reveal a spiritual core for the New World.)
TEXTS BELOW ARE ARCHETYPALLY CONSTRUCTED TO REVEAL A PATH THROUGH SERIOUS CONSIDERATION OF THE READER’S CHOICE. THOUGH THE READERS CHOICES MAY DISCOVER THEIR INTENT ANYWHERE IN THE THREE CYCLES OF THIS BOOK.
__________________________
NEPSIS FOUNDATION
Cycle II
ADAM’S WAY
A BLACK DRAGON’S ABRIDGED HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Adam’s Way pierces the “horror of history” as a Black Widow pierces the skin of its victim. There are mind-altering substances in her venom, which, if you survive, you might be better for the intrusion.
ONE
Introduction
Narrator: My subject is reputed to work miracles. I don’t care if he does or not. I’m hired to do a job. He fascinates me, though. Took a different turn in his life’s project than I did. That’s for sure. I don’t think that you will like him. You will certainly not like me, if you are decent– at all. But that doesn’t matter.
…Stream, sand, white, white sand, boulders and sycamore in the fall. Clear, clean crystal clear air; the fall– wonderful fall days: but the night; I am freezing and alone, I am terrified by everything, each falling pebble from the cliffs above… I Sleep… but am awakened to the moonless night by the cold, and a voice that called my name again and again in the dark. I hide behind a bush.
His writings, like that above, the images; his experiences more than his ideas, haunt me. Leave me curious. Its different than what I’m used to. I don’t believe him. But in order to comprehend these things, you almost have to believe. Well, I pretend to believe. It is almost a sexual high, sometimes… Let me be perfectly clear here. Don’t miss the point.
He feels himself “called.” But to what? That’s what I have to figure out. For several reasons…
Oh, by the way. I don’t know what you are into, so if you don’t like erotic stuff, just skip over those parts. Or, if you’re not into poetry, skim it. If priests or pedophilia offend you, just run through those parts, (the percentage in the priesthood is lower than in the general population, but they seem to attract more media attention.) Though, if you really want to understand what is going on, you have to work your way through both your own attractions and revulsion’s. Own your bias, so to speak. My presentation here is like the Bible, it includes a bit of everything from this world, and the other!
The point, however, is to find the access codes to the money! Fr. Adam, when all the theological bullshit is blown away, controls all that money! We want it. He is the only one who knows the access codes to that computer room in Switzerland that monitors all those investment accounts. At least 300,000,000,000.00 dollars! Quite an asset for a lowly parish priest. I will have that code, then the hell with him and all the rest. But until then, I have to try to understand him. To figure him out. He’s weird though. You’ll see. Oh well, conventional thought only leads to conventional resolutions. But, from his perspective, it all kind of makes sense, what happens afterward, about turning poison into healing of some kind. You’ll see… Plenty of poison in the world. Occasionally, I feel that I am just beginning to see–that I am, perhaps, the poison? Then it all slips away. I resent that son of a bitch. But I’m too close to the end now. I don’t like these mountains either, because this is where he is. I don’t like him. I don’t like you… Hell, I’m getting as screwy as he is. I don’t care… (Calm down. You’ll never catch him if you are ruled by your emotions. Damn! Calm… Damn him! Damn Fr. Adam!)
What must be understood is the impact that nature has had on this man. He was raised in near solitude on his family’s ranch in California. His only company besides nuclear family and a few far-flung neighbors was the surrounding nature and animals. He claims an intimate connection to the land and its flora and fauna. But then, he had plenty of time and opportunity in the isolation of his youth to develop the connection. He is also a trained “religious” and has studied the world’s religions. More than studied- taken them in and been ‘altered’ by them. So, when he talks about a “snake” for instance, he is accessing religious imagery, positive and negative, from 40,000 years of human evolution as well as the scriptural references of his own ‘root’ religion.
It guarded the Tree of Life. The snake, unlike the popular notion about that creature in the garden of Eden, did in the past, represent wisdom and renewal of life as it changed its skin every year and came out of holes in the earth, the Mother deity. It even represents resurrection. Since it comes up from the dark into the light. The snake was thus connected with the ‘feminine’ energies: The Goddess was predominant in the matriarchal religions prevailing before the patriarchal take-over 5,000 years ago. According to some; Adam, The Greek pantheon–with Zeus on top instead of Hera; Apollo, etc.– Judaism, Christianity and Islam, taken together is all part of this patriarchal development across the world. So, the snake represents both enlightenment/salvation (see Kundalini, or Brazen Serpent) and resurrection as well as the workings of the dark powers: fertility, fecundity, birth and death, dissolution, rebirth and healing- wisdom. The caduceus of the American Medical Association as well as the brazen serpent from Exodus are positive images. In the Old Testament, the snake could also be seen as the unavoidable threat of development. A very real threat, from Adam’s perspective, now fully manifested as nuclear or environmental destruction. Knowledge, power; knowledge of good and evil- Perhaps the metaphor of human genius. There is more, according to Adam, in the story of the Fall than just the political and cultural evolution of a “hunter-gatherer people” to agriculture and empire in Mesopotamia; a time frame spanning thousands of years as some anthropologists would have it. Contained therein is a warning. (We have to look past the human rights issue of the wrong done to women in such a patriarchal set up. Such a bloody history…) (Hell, I’m such a bleeding heart. All my colleages say so. But such a set up gives rise to so many bleeding hearts- minds and bodies as well.) The price of progress, I’d say. Even though the wrong of it is undeniable. Adam’s interest is along a different and for him a more vital, and dangerous, track.
The technical language is Original Sin. The urge to personal power. Never mind the big picture. The resultant loss of innocence, the betrayal of their relationship with, and dependence on God(s) in the natural set up, in what was then a lush part of the world around the Persian Gulf. Very different than now. But, perhaps due to some change in climate, and politics perhaps, came the beginnings of agriculture. Thus, the beginning of serious technology; leading to the birth of civilization in Mesopotamia- And the bloody warfare of empire building on a grand scale. Conquest. The scriptures complain about this “aberration:” The development of technology, as well of ‘civilized’ religion—great temples instead of direct archetypes of nature, everything, according to human genius.
But the dark side of that, and here is the warning of concern to Adam: this bright genius of humanity also has a capacity for self-destruction. And so we find ourselves at the other end of the spectrum from that difficult beginning. Now we can destroy life on this planet. Corporate suicide. Rapidly- if we do it nuclear fashion. Bit by bit, if we continue the exploitation of resources of the planet- over-population being perhaps as destructive as the atomic bomb.
This story and these characters, operating sometimes consciously and sometimes sub-consciously, as is the case with all of us, face this problem and try to resolve it.
Her mouth opened to his, as his opened to devour. But he pulled back, slowed, then, all the rapacious cruelty of the past, and more than just theirs, catalyzed into a swift and almost desperate union. His first nudge strangely terrified her. She gave a long gasp and then her whole body opened up. His, hard, thick, rthymic pounding, she moved with it. For an instant they were bound together. He stopped. He stopped and held it. Just inside. His face agonized.
Chris and Agnes in this above passage from Chapter One are beginning to discover underlying truths about certain hidden possibilities in their affair. Adam understands this process as dangerous and necessary because of the desperate issue of his concern. So, he is willing to experiment with Chris and Agnes, with otherwise forbidden alchemies. For him as a celibate, it is an internal process. But, for Chris and Agnes, it is external and physical. At least, at first. The connection here is Tantra, which is a school of yoga in India. Both Hindu and Buddhist claim its doctrines. It is very large, very holistic. Very good. But it also has the notion that breaking all the usual taboos is also a vehicle for achieving truth, salvation or enlightenment. It is very powerful. Thus, Adam’s interest.
So let us begin again. Adam thinks he can help people. But in a different way than some hypocritical ‘bleeding heart’ like me might. Anyway, I don’t care about that…
Adam is my quarry. I’ve studied him. I’ve studied what he studied. I have a network of “assistants” that keep him under surveillance. He ranges in his operation from preaching the kindness of God to something some might call “Satanism.” Doesn’t bother me. Fascinates, rather. I get paid to follow him. And to get that little something from him. 300 billion dollars. Small change compared to some of my other projects. But he’s interesting to me somehow.
There have been many “other projects.” The Vietnam War was one of my more successful efforts. Oh, not by myself! But it was a ripe opportunity. My clients made trillions. Suppliers, munitions makers. Not very nice. Neither my family nor friends know what I really do. They all think I’m a nice guy. I don’t care. Easy to fool people if you are good at what they admire; sports, wit, money, success. It doesn’t take much. Three hundred billion isn’t much. But my current clients want it bad enough.
Now, “listen, my son, to the precepts of your master…”
TWO
AGNES AND CHRIS
We are roiling clouds pierced by the mountain.
Dominus Vobiscum
At times,
I might rebuke this bright passage between two black holes and can only envision the final fall.
But, then
I remember the cover tossing joy of holding you, or talking to you-
Then, I laugh in the morning light, hardly able to wait for the next bright dance to come, hardly able to wait for my next chance to fold myself in your arms…”
Et cum spiritu tuo.
***
Narrator:
Here, two of our characters take on a new, though not surprising role in our history. We tell a different chapter of their story anyway. They are young lovers, Agnes and Chris, with all the energy and enthusiasm appropriate to their age, but their love takes them along this path of increasing realization until eventually they join with Fr. Adam to effect the intentions of his esoteric rituals.
…And how archetypically American that we should have first explored our love in that dusty barn on Chris’ family’s ranch in ‘60s Southern California. Days were still smog free. Clear, clean heat waves rose from the broken pavement of the road. Small herds of cattle rested, chewing beneath scattered trees on the dry hills. Dry stack of alfalfa bales stored in that hot barn and covered with the old horse blanket was our prickly, uncomfortable bed for those early explorations. Sometimes the alfalfa stems and leaves would get caught in our clothes, between our sweaty legs. The cows didn’t care. They would eat it anyway. We were so young when we first started but we didn’t get serious until much later. Not serious. No, that’s not the word. “It” became a terrifying compulsion. Compulsion? Not exactly that either…
Night after night, I would go to my room and find Chris waiting for me there. The room was in the attic of our huge old ranch house. Or we would agree to meet in that isolated hay barn at the back of the property. Chris always seemed fresh, fragrant with some new cologne. His body would be so warm that at times it seemed he must be on fire. He kissed me, offered me his naked body. Nor did I resist him.
It was so often so rough. It was almost rape. Sometimes we would fake a struggle. Chris would rip away my blouse, my jeans. Then he would drag his hands over me, my skin that had the resilience and perfection of a baby, back then. I would slap him. He would only get more excited and rape me against the wall. Sometimes I would suck him, ravenous for him. He, emitting his little moans as if in joyous agony.
There were wild times, mostly in the otherwise quiet afternoon hours before our parents came home after work, when he would come over, take me somewhere secret or sometimes in the open where our struggle would be spiced by risk. One time we stood for it, my back up against the gatepost, next to the public road! There was not enough time, ever, for us to get our fill. Sometimes he slapped me really hard as I invited his hot cruelty. But then, maybe I would deserve it because when he was tender and needy, I could be cold, even cruel. It didn’t matter. We both liked it because it only heightened the game. Back then, when we were in our teens, we hardly ever spoke at school. Even when we went to high school, we didn’t speak much. We had different friends. Chris went out with different girls, I with other boys. I even had a couple of short-term boy friends. One time, “just to show me”, Chris seduced my boyfriend. Came at him from behind, he said. Chris said the boy really liked it. Chris said he didn’t mind either. But I know a kind of shame overwhelmed him. That he had sex with another boy. Dominated somebody like that. Even if it was just to show me. Maybe then, he started to question himself.
We didn’t see each other for a while after that. It was the fall semester. He was the quarterback for our football team. I was a princess in the court of the homecoming queen. He and she had a relationship. I hated her then. Him too. But he wasn’t really interested in her. He was just bored and confused about his life, so went along with what everybody else wanted. When he was a senior, he liked to go out drinking with his jock buddies. They would usually end up getting into fights with other guys. Drinking and fighting was much of what they did back then in that country town.
He had gotten into a lot of trouble earlier in his life. Bad genes, I guess. Even went to reform school when he was twelve or something. I don’t know the details. Like I said, we didn’t talk much.
I was in the choir at church, Our Lady of Perpetual Help. I love music. I can imagine it in my head. It justifies everything. All my stupid mistakes, and misunderstandings. I like it when it’s wild and savage like rock and roll. I like it soft and gentle like a love song. Especially a tenor or a mezzo soprano. I like just to let the music drift or soar around inside my head. I like best to sing myself. By myself. I’ve got a damn good voice.
It was then that I met Fr. Adam. We had many talks over the years. First, the childish talks of a little girl talking to a big, pure man that she admired and loved. Then, as I got older, we talked about more serious things. And he tried to help guide me in my life. Chris and I both knew him from Youth Group activities at Church. Chris was not raised a Catholic. Fr. Adam tried to discourage me in my relationship with Chris. I don’t think that he thought that it was normal. He never seemed judgmental, though. More perplexed. But let’s face it, I always did what I wanted to do, then explained it to him afterwards.
One night that fall Chris waited for me outside the Church after choir. The wind was blowing, dry leaves scratched across the sun bleached, asphalt shadows of the road. We hadn’t met for a long time.
“Do you want to come with me tonight?”
“Where to?”
“I don’t know. We’ll drive somewhere.”
“It’s late and I’m tired, Chris.”
“You can sleep in tomorrow, there’s no school.”
“You have the precautions? I don’t want to take any more chances.”
“Got it.”
“Well, maybe. All right. Let me go home first, then, I’ll sneak out my window. You wait by the road, park your car behind those trees across from the gate and wait. I’ll be there before midnight. It was ten.
We drove to a place about an hour away. It’s called the Devil’s Punchbowl. It’s now a park, but it wasn’t then. It’s where the San Andrea’s Fault comes to the surface. We walked to a place that over-looked the edge of this deep chasm, strewn with huge boulders. It was nearly a full moon in this late autumn warmth of California’s Indian Summer. We could see anyone coming from a long ways away, where we were, but it would be hard for anyone to see us, night or day. It was a perfect place beneath boulders and pinion pines. We spread our blanket on a bed of soft, fragrant pine needles.
Do you want to love me?
Love? Agnes knew that she wanted love. But, Chris? Agnes knew that she was lonely. Afraid of her life, but in love with it and anxious as an eighteen year old could be to get on with it. She would be in college next year, most likely on the East Coast. But now she was only lonely and tired of waiting. Yet, their relationship, which had such a dark, deep, wordless understanding, did not seem to require love.
“What do you mean, love?”
“I don’t know.”
She knew that Chris was watching her. Her back turned to him as they sat on the blanket and bed of fragrant pine needles. She breathed deeply, deeply, quivering just a little as she released her breath. It felt good to breath so deeply. She knew that Chris was watching her. And such a sharp stab of desire caught her that she was appalled by it. Desire radiated from him, radiated out over the chasm into the darkness and seemed to stretch into eternity. But he did not touch her yet.
“Love you?” Chris’ voice spoke so low that Agnes could hardly hear. …A tiny sound outside a cave in the dark.
“Love you? I am in hell for my desire… for you. Have you never guessed? Have you never seen beneath everything that I’ve done since we were children? You, always you. But there are so many kinds of love. I lust for you. I want your body that I know so absolutely. Sometimes I think that I want your soul. I really mean that. I want to be so close to your soul that yours and mine would seem one to any angel who might be watching. Nobody could see two, but only one bright, glorious, full light– us. So, close that even God would be jealous. Even God.
“Don’t say that- You don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean, my lust is so strong that I could rape you to the hot center of the earth and even that boiling, molten rock would not be hot enough to touch that part of me that wants to be inside of you. (He laughs at his own exaggeration.) But there is something else I want even more. I want you. You. I want to touch your soul. There is love you see and there is love.”
“They aren’t two things. Don’t tell them apart. Give me all of it. Come here to me.”
In the soft autumn air, there was the rush of a breeze. And did the earth tremble just a bit? As a soft fall of garments sounded the beginning of something different. For as Chris gazed into her eyes, so close, so naked… he peered so deeply into her, she was afraid. But when Agnes looked back there was nothing but the gentlest desire, in him, on his lips, between his legs, that hardened and began to massage her body. Chris sucked at her lips, her tongue, his hands digging into her as they held her. Her mouth opened to his, as his opened to devour. But then he pulled back, slowed, then, all the rapacious cruelty of the past, and more than just theirs, catalyzed into a swift and almost desperate union. The first nudge strangely terrified her. She gave a long gasp and then her whole body opened up. His, hard, thick and pounding; she moved with it. For an instant they were bound together. He stopped. He stopped and held it. Just inside. His face agonized. She did not understand.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Why did you stop?”
“Just wait,” he gasped after a few moments.
Then, he started again, his lips pressed to her neck. Working between her breasts with tongue, nipping slightly her nipples, pink and hard, with his teeth. Entered her again. Pumping, pumping. Then he rolled over away from her as if wild with pain. And she reached out for him. He resisted. She tried again. His body perfect in its youth, modeled by the soft light of the moon. She felt his sex. He recoiled painfully. But she, very gently took him into her mouth, surrounded his organ with a wet, gentle warmth–a delicious, gentle but then ravenous sucking. Stronger, more and more until, just before he would cry out with release, he pulled out and held her with his strong arms at a determined, confused, questioning distance. And once again he rolled away.
After many moments, maybe years, she reached over, touched so tentatively his broad shoulders as he lay rolled up in a ball. Then she took him in her arms and held him. Whether in ecstasy or agony, she could not tell. She just held him in the moonlight. Many moments passed, maybe hours.
“Why?” She asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You must know.”
“I wanted to see what we looked like inside.”
“Like that!?” Many moments passed.
“What did you see?”
She felt him withdraw, within himself, away from her. She glances, almost frantically, about her cave as if lost. Yet, something was evoked, boding power beyond imagining. And the moon slipped behind the mountain, leaving them in the dark rocks above the chasm beneath the pinion trees. A night wind blew up the canyon wall and whipped their fragrance into the world.
Note: Tantric yogis traditionally choose from other yogis or train ‘casteless’ people for such metaphysical exercise as suggested by Chris and Agnes above. As a very high level lama, a Geshe, told me once, monks must practice such in their imagination to draw up the goddess energy from the root charkas about the perineum to have union with the god at the crown of one’s head–the integrations of knowledge, salvation. Narrator.
***
LOVE POEM I
I.
There are the stars
the moon
the wind
and the pine tree.
The wind blows
one pine needle rubs the next
the stars and the moon transport their light
through momentary years of pure and empty space
to each other
to me
I shall become the wind and the pine trees.
THREE
Narrator:
I view my youthful explorations of the human body a little differently than Chris and Ag, I guess. But, hell, different strokes… They get weirder as we go along. I have to admit that I felt a certain fatherly affection for them. There have been so many others like them though, that we’ve had to sacrifice. So, I don’t get too attached. Well, anyway… Let’s get back to Adam. Here below, he tells his own story. We are alike in some surprising ways. He also uses writing and stories to try to figure out his life. We are of the same generation. I suspected this when I was first investigating him. So, I gained access to his files as soon as I could.
…What I would like to display for you about our main character now is how he begins to develop his very peculiar relationships with nature.
He was already ordained a priest and is working in a parish in Southern California. His pastor, or superior, is on vacation. It is after Easter, about a week. He plans this ritual for Friday evening. He has already explored such esoteric disciplines as Shamanism, Buddhism, and the Hesychasm of eastern Christianity while he was working on a Master’s in the seminary along with theological and pastoral studies. He found that shamanism “resonated deeply” in his personality. It is Friday night, about midnight. He goes out on the patio off the suite of rooms used by the absent pastor of this parish. There, in that patio, he sets up a “mesa.” That is a shamanistic altar in the manner of certain South American medicine men. It has what is called “campo del recho” for the good “objects” and a “campo del esquino” for the evil objects and a “campo medio” for the crucifix. Then he begins to work. Indescribable. Except for a few superficial aspects, the real workings are within him and his gift, his relationship to these objects of power. And the way that it all communicates with the world around him. …And the beings and powers that dwell there. He says he is offering this whole experience as a form of prayer and has no other intentions. There was a fire. Objects were transmuted, transformed, melted, reformed into objects of power, as he relates in some of his notes I’ve purloined. When the ritual seemed to reach its own maturity and conclude itself, he extinguished the fire. It was around dawn. He cleaned up the articles of this working. Returned to his room to sleep for a couple of hours before he had to be up to proform a wedding in the Church.
Before the wedding began, the church was struck by a tempest. Not just a storm, a completely unexpected squall! What the news reports called a freak storm. The winds were of such force that they ripped a huge banner off the front of the church. The banner had been secured against the mighty Santa Ana winds of southern California and survived those for several months. But this storm in its strength simply ripped it off the front of the church as if it were a kitchen curtain. Hail, and huge raindrops. Buckets. Fr. Adam was amazed and surprised by this. After a while, it dawned on him that there might be some connection between his ritual and the storm.
After that, in the following months, Adam decided that he must test this new found “relationship.” There were seven like occurrences by the end of the following summer.
I’m semi-retired. I’m a businessman. And I find him interesting. He’s an artist and he writes. Getting copies of his writings have helped me very much to chart his development as well as to figure him out. The following describes another one of the ‘tests’ mentioned above, and is the beginning of his most important experiment to date–he seemed to think.
***
MONTANA RITUAL
(Alaap)
My name is Adam and I am a Catholic priest. But like others of my generation, I have been influenced by the study of many religions. As well, I have a certain bent, a talent if you like, for things that seem to some… well, esoteric, even magical. But really they are about the human heart– transmutations of human personality. The following story will provide a good example of what I mean.
Invoking rainstorms was part of last summer’s work. I did it to test my talent for such things. In doing so, I traveled from the place of ‘primary ignition’ for the spell in western Montana to the place of ‘primary impact’ in eastern Montana. I was hitchhiking and was given a ride by a young couple in a new car. We drove across a land nearly empty of the Twentieth Century but for us. I was surprised that they picked me up. They looked affluent in the mid-western way of middling wealth. They were well-groomed, clean, in summer whites with spots of pale color. We passed quickly the usual information of wherefrom/going, and why. We were silent for a while.
The wife (I assumed marriage) turned to me and said, “I just feel moved to talk to you about the Lord.” “Oh,” I said. My first and several other rides on this trip had been with born-again Christians or ex-Catholics that told me about their religious experience. “I want to ask you if you know the Lord.”
I didn’t want to say that I was into rainmaking and raising elemental dragons at that moment. So, I talked about the Lord for a while, somewhat professionally. We, all three it turns out, were professional evangelists. I, a Catholic priest on leave; they worked with a Protestant guru in Michigan and were on their summer break from their mission.
They planned to start a new mission in a rich Virginia suburb at the end of the summer. I told them that they should avoid being a pseudo-Gospel stamp of approval to the values of the rich and powerful as so many other Christian apologists had been. I felt pretentious about saying such things but what did I have to lose? I’d be back on the road soon anyway.
When we got past that, they told me about their plan to found a chain of houses for unwed, pregnant, teenage girls. That seemed to be a good idea as well as being profitable. In the midst of this conversation, I found out that their summer was being spent driving recreational vehicles and new cars from coast to coast for dealers who wanted to help them through financial rough spots of their lives in ministry. They were apparently in just such a rough spot until they were to start this new mission in Virginia. All they owned was in the trunk of that new car. The wife was enthusiastic about the value of fasting and hardship. The husband was less enthused and generally resented the experience, if not the idea, of poverty.
They dropped me off near a town as sunset illumined a silhouette of roadside landscape. We were then in a part of the state that seldom, if ever, I was told, got rain that time of year. And that was a year of drought. It was dry– from the parched sheaves of wild oats along the road, to the cracked earth where I chose to lay for rest. I could not rest for long, though. Some strange disturbing energy urged me on. After several hours of walking through the night, I found a place of refuge, near a special hill that seemed to have a special energy about it. I rested and waited for the storm that hit the next day with lightning, hail, wind and torrential downpour.
I didn’t like the way those Christians used language when they talked about the “Lord”. It seemed fake. It seemed to me that each word stepped away from the vital experience of a spiritually enlivened being. Yet, I liked them somehow. The surprising point that I want to make is that they helped me affect that rain ritual. Added their intense energies to mine. They might be chagrined to know that. But the expression of their real aspirations added to mine has left me with a sense of quiet, washed-clean, effective enchantment. And whipped up one hell of a storm!
***
Narrator:
In such a ritual as above, as I have recently learned, a ‘connection’ is made with nature through the psychic medium of archetypal gods, sexually perhaps or using spirit animal messengers (or sacrifice) or asceticism to effect one’s intention. The point here is to use these powerful, natural motivations as vehicles to effect one’s own intention.
Adam relates further that both the development of these powers and their use are available for all people and certainly the proper subject of study for any interested scholar… and even for a committed Christian since Christ is the heart of all things, according to their faith. According to Adam, all things are originally good. All things can be used in ‘His’ service, as they say. Our first chapter treated the affair of Agnes and Chris and is intended to illustrate this point. They are his closest associates who exemplify the principles of his approach.
There is something that I should mention that I discovered about Adam’s rainmaking experience in Montana. He omitted that around that same time, within a week or less, his bishop had died and his family’s ranch burned down. Then, within a month his father died of a heart attack, an aftermath of the fire. He says somewhere that when he was a boy, he dreamed that he killed his father. Stabbed him in the heart.
Well, there is always a price for learning. In any case, I am closing in on him. I’m here in Nepal, where he was last sighted. He’s somehow involved in the local political scene. It looks like what India is doing to Nepal, is what China did to Tibet. But not so brutally and violently, only more slowly. Because of Indian policies, there are now five million Indians living here and one million Nepali. A slow poison, a stab in the heart, they say…
So many changes everywhere. It’s a new world and we intend to survive in it. We’ve done well so far. I’m surprised that he has survived at all, given the intrigue that surrounds him; the Church, others… Everyone wants the money. But there is something else. They are afraid of him. They make me sick. Filthy, frightened hypocrites.
I must figure him out. Thus, this writing. I’m trying to keep it clear in my mind. To get the story straight. I’m a private agent, a businessman. Not really a writer. This is a report on what I can piece together from conversations, stolen documents, spies, bugs–fish, wolves… whatever. Who do I work for? You’ll see.
First, I have to figure him out. Then, anticipate his moves, nab him and coerce him into giving me the access codes to the money. Before I would just observe and wait. But now we are out of time. I have competitors… I won’t be beaten to the gold.
I think that he would want to convert me. He’d be happy to, I bet. But I’m not sure to what!
(…I am beginning to believe that he might be a very dangerous man. Suffice it to say now, as I am writing the hopefully last draft of these “notes”–more like a novel! I am sitting next to a little Shiva temple, beneath a huge Bodhi tree, above a rapid confluence of two rivers, just beneath the Annapurna range of the Himalayan Mountains where I intend to encounter Fr. Adam higher up. I have to conclude this project. I have other projects—like, I’ve been working out some financing for covert government germ warfare; AIDS, new strains of TB, etc… That’s another story, nobody’s supposed to know. But now you do… X-FILE stuff.)
***
LOVE POEM II
I would probably never leave this cycle of whirling endeavors
by choice
even if I could float with stars
or fly with the wind in gusts of scattered ashes.
Sometimes though, if tired, having lost the vision of what
I should be, or if the hoop-wavers with their rings of daily
demands leave me tripping in sawdust piles of dreaded
indentures, and only prayers for the inflicted spark to die
pass over my string of worn beads, then
it’s the thought of you
that keeps me here, looking to the dawn
that will find us together again.
FOUR
The Bishop
Narrator:
Now we deal with the correspondence of Fr. Adam with his Bishop. This bishop was known to be a great financier. He could pull a financially troubled diocese out of the red and set it up to survive in a modern economy. But, Fr. Adam’s first meeting with him was not abusive. Actually the bishop gave Adam his freedom. He offered him a parish of choice in his diocese or leave to go to somewhere else. Though the relationship was fraught with many problems, they embraced when they parted. Not that long after, something changed the bishop’s opinion. So, even though he had said that he was going to leave Fr. Adam in the “gray”, (“a good place for a shaman/priest, the in-between”) and not “ex-communicate” him, the bishop censored him and forbid him public ministry. However, Fr. Adam had already established a good relationship with another bishop who protected him in another diocese and worked in the parish where he met Agnes and then through her, Chris. He also began there a Ph.D. program at the University of California at that time. This he hopes will give him the freedom to pursue his ‘quest’, but will also provide an umbrella to guard him from the fall-out of negative opinions and actions from society, family and Church. It does, for a while…
Adam hopes that the second bishop is more the norm of bishops than the first. Though, that ‘businessman’s bishop’ is an opportune foil for Adam’s purposes. I think that he recognized what he might call a “divine opportunity” when he saw it.
Whatever, Adam addresses these following missives to their still credible, he believes, apostolic authority.
Dear Bishop,
Issues of magic, sex, poison and violence are topics here only in so far as they can be seen as catalytic agents to the progress of this history. The sexual reference is important, as it is able to turn biological cycles and psychology towards a larger vision of God. The violence and poison themes are useful as they are used to transform leaden religious and secular formulations about the world into the white gold of human realization.
Admittedly, the events recorded in this story are interpreted experimentally. But that yields some high, at times disastrous, as well as colorful, potentially salvific results. It is an interpretation that seems to be the reasonable product of what has happened to me.
Narrator:
At the time this was very confusing to all of us. You might wonder how I knew so much about his goings-on, besides the usual surveillance. Well, hold on to your hats, boys! This is too great. Chris is a double agent. He is working with us as well as Adam! It’s hard to control these characters though. Sometimes they do just what they want, with not so much as a “by your leave.”
That is, until the Kashmir episode, coming up. Something happened there. Changed him. I don’t know what, yet. I’ll find out. But, don’t worry– there is another.
Adam continues:
In this work a spell is cast. It is a spell of mysterious intent. It is a “turn of power,” a “Word” spoken to cast a net of transformation and freedom. The casting is investigated with whatever means were available to me as an artist and poet; as a student of spirituality and theology; as a Christian shaman, for want of a better term.
The intent of this work is spiritual and political. I undertook its completion in order to understand better the pastoring of souls as a Catholic priest (in part, a political process) and to resolve some spiritual quandaries that seem to be of importance in our times.
The method of investigation is exegetical, shamanistic searching. In this, my interest is to develop an understanding and approach to the spiritual life that addresses more fully the whole physio/psychic, spiritual human being. Though parts of this work react strongly against the fierce dominance of positivist, rationalist attitudes in our culture, it is not a denial of the value of discursive reason. Rather, this work insists on the importance of the shamanistic or mystical process of discovery as central to the development of any realistic worldview…
…I studied witchcraft in Los Angeles.
Narrator:
The above speaks for itself. But, the following, I believe will convince everyone that Fr. Adam is either quite insane or one of the worst and most powerful criminals in history. From a document entitled,
Prelude to the Dawn
I don’t remember where I was going, but I was hitchhiking along an interstate freeway in the Mojave Desert of eastern California. I remember liking that desert very much at night as I was waiting on one of those great, curving, snake-like on-ramps that so easily and lazily drive one into the otherwise inaccessible interstates. In the desert there is still enough room for such an entrance. I love the spaciousness of it. Some people are uncomfortable out in the open like that. Not me. I like it. But, what happened there, would be uncomfortable for most and foreshadowed ‘discomfort,’ to say the least, for many.
As I waited in the night for a ride, another hitchhiker came up on the on-ramp. As he did, a great long semi went by. One of many trucks to pass us by, this one had the word “GRACE” in huge letters painted diagonally across the side of its trailer. This other hitchhiker was a big blond man. Fairly young, kind of sloppy looking.
“How’s it going?”
“Alright.”
“No rides?”
“Not looking for one.”
“What are you doing here then?” (There being nothing else out here but this freeway intersection.)
“I don’t know.”
Silence for a while. He leered at me. Our conversation went on in a strange uneven way for some time. Then he went to another section of the on-ramp. Then, he went behind some mesquite bushes. Later, he stepped out again. He beckoned me to join him.
“I gotta get a ride, sorry.” Later, he came back out from behind the bushes and stood on the on-ramp for a while. Then he went behind the bushes. Came out. Beckoned to me again. Being bored. I went down to where he was on the on-ramp.
“What do you want?” He just looked at me.
“What are you doing?”
“Come on.”
“Come on what?”
“Do you want to do it?”
“Do what?”
“You know.”
“Do what?” I’m a little dense sometimes.
“Sex.”
“Sex?”
“Yea!”
“Back there? In the sand?” That struck me as funny and ironic.
“Why not?”
“In the sand?” There was a warm wind blowing dust and litter across our feet.
“Sex!” He seemed a little annoyed.
“Ah, no, I don’t think I want to do that. Is there something about me that makes you think that I would want to do that?”
“Everybody wants it. Come on. You’ll like it. I’ll do everything so it feels real good.”
“Everything?”
Silence. Another truck went by like before. GRACE. I remember standing there looking up at the sky. There were so many stars. He started talking about the stars. He knew the constellations. In fact he seemed to know a lot about stars. Then,
“Come on let’s go ‘rest’ back there for awhile.”
“No. I want to try to get a ride. Thanks.” We stood in silence for a while, trying to get a ride as cars and trucks passed. Then we separated. I went back to where I was before. The night was clear. There were so many stars. After a while, he joined me again. We thumbed in silence for a while. Then,
“They won’t let me see my son.”
“You have a son?”
“Yes. A little baby boy.”
“You married?”
“Yes.”
I was surprised.
“My wife won’t let me near him. She’d call the cops. She got a ‘restraining order’. I can’t go near her or him. That’s why I’m trying to get away.”
“Why did she do that?”
“Because I liked to suck his… you know.”
“You liked to … huh?”
“I really liked it. I did it while she was out. But she caught me a couple of times. I hate it. I couldn’t stop myself. I wanted to kill myself. But I love my little boy. Just, sometimes I can’t help it. I see him naked and I have to do it. I can’t stop. It doesn’t hurt him, does it? He doesn’t know anything.”
Silence.
“You get off doing that?”
“Yea. It’s the best. Maybe when he’s older… Maybe I will see him again.”
“Not if your wife got the police on you.”
“I’m supposed to go in for some kind of cure. I don’t want to do it. I can’t help myself. Cures don’t work.”
“Maybe, it’s not your fault. Maybe you are under too much stress. Maybe you were abused. So, you do things you normally wouldn’t do. Maybe if our culture were not so high pressure and cutthroat, you would be more normal. It’s not so bad. Maybe it’s normal to want to kiss your baby. But you went too far. That’s all. Because of the pressure maybe.”
“That’s a lot of shit. The baby is the only beautiful thing in my life… What do you really think? Please!” After an awkward silence,
“I don’t know.”
Silence. Then, after a while, we separate again. He went back behind the mesquite. Not much later, I got a ride away from that place with so many stars and dry, hot wind.
__________________________________________
Narrator:
I can’t recall if the above scenario happened during or before the story “Mexican Earthquake” to be related soon, but it seemed to warn about what follows now and presents most of the essential psychic elements of this, according to Adam, “most potent, and spontaneous spell.” (Martial Arts: “sink into the Tan Tien [chakra/energy center in the lower abdomen, the “center”] to escape an over-whelming assault. Be careful, the Tan Tien will solve the problem but it has no morality.” Adam’s spell is spontaneous in the particulars but in the larger scheme, the intention is to escape/defeat/resolve an over-whelming assault.)
Some essential elements cannot be spoken. To be honest, I don’t know all of them. Only Adam does. Frustrating for a storyteller. There is enough here though to point the direction, especially in combination with the other stories. In this spell, dysfunction is used in a different way, turned around to restrain what really destroys. Perhaps our own poison will save us. Who I am and what we have become will be revealed in the end. What we can do… But will this esoteric approach of his work, be enough to satisfy? The future is volatile and confused to see… But the threat portends darkly, says Adam.
Apparently the bishop didn’t deem pastoral care for Fr. Adam in his interest, since, as we shall witness, he turns Fr. Adam’s case over for investigation by forces with sufficient reason not to be friendly.
Now, as the narrator of this story, I should remain detached. But I must say that I feel a bemused sympathy for our main character and his perhaps-extreme reaction to technology. But now let us return to the issue of Chris and Agnes. I will have more of Adam soon enough.
***
LOVE POEM VI
What I despised before
if now connected with you
I prize.
What shall I do, when by chance you meet your love’s life?
Where is my love to rest?
Will I wander shores where my green tree is left to blanche?
FIVE
Narrator:
Agnes has graduated from high school with many honors and has begun her new life as a college student in a prestigious university on the East Coast. The world is beginning to open for her. As she is exposed to life at the university, her former life seems small and provincial. She begins to turn away from former interests, even Chris and his unusual explorations. Their relationship has its ups and downs. They stay in contact on and off. In one of Chris’ letters he mentions an important history.
…One of the English teachers at college took us up to a meditation center in the mountains for a field trip. I really liked it. In fact, during vacation, I might spend some time up there. The monk who showed us around said that I might be able to do that, if I wrote to the Guest Master of the monastery and requested to come as an observer. So, maybe I will. That means that I might miss your visit home. I hope not. Really, I really hope not. I miss you so much.
All my love, Chris
***
Covey
The shadows from our narrow wood
have disappeared beneath these first low clouds.
The white fall
muffles to silence all but
the call and scurry of a dozen plus quail feeding near-by.
They are dark, nervous patches on a crystalline field of white.
The snow is only somewhat thicker where it has fallen
than where it is falling.
SIX
May 25, …
Dear Father Adam:
I have received your letters in which you ask that I approve your current status as an active priest in the Diocese of ———-, extending “this privilege” to include our Diocese as well and in particular to witness a marriage validation here.
While you are correct in saying that my concern for you is sincere, I am afraid that you do not fully comprehend the nature of your suspension by me. Insofar as this suspension has involved removal of your priestly faculties and the prohibition for you publicly to celebrate the Sacraments, or to discharge any ecclesiastical ministry whatsoever. I discussed this matter with you and gave you the reasons for the serious action I have taken.
…What you did in effect was refuse to serve the Church in——— to which you committed yourself at Ordination five years ago, except as you see that service to be compatible with the pursuit of an academic degree involving “commentary on comparative life-views with teleological implications.” I had no alternative but to suspend you, and I have no reason, in the present circumstances, to lift that suspension. Consequently, you cannot witness a marriage in the (my) Diocese ———.
You mention that you have been granted faculties of the new Diocese and are exercising a pastoral priestly ministry in the Catholic Community there. You ask that I approve/allow this. The Bishop of ———- will act according to his own conscience, but it is not logical for me to declare you unsuitable for priestly ministry in the (my) Diocese of——– and at the same time approve your ministry in the Diocese of ———.
You remain in my prayers.
Bishop …
_____________________
Dear Bishop,
…I did not say that this Ph.D. program would be “necessary” for me to address the issues of concern about which I had written you. I told you originally that this program would allow me the freedom to do… … you gave me your permission to go, What in the world changed your mind?!
***
Narrator: Our record of their communication here is incomplete. Our account, two pages below, begins again as Adam continues in his explanation to the Bishop about this “spell of drinking poison…”
Awaiting Satori
I
Snowstorm
White, gray, milky blue-gray.
White, undulating around animal tracks
and single, yellow stalks of wild oats.
It covers a plateau: smooth, particled,
over a hidden path, over a plateau, to the edge
to a fall.
Trees,
apples trees bare in their orchard,
crotch full.
Then translucent white, not so very, but gray and black also. Slick, hard above flowing water, and willows, frozen in the stream.
Silent
before the first sighting of the sun
after the first light.
It has been a long freeze, a long wait.
I am silent
The snow touches all things bare to the sky.
________________
Satori II
The Desert
Rocks.
Gravel.
Dry Branches.
A hilly path of crumbling rock.
Long silent days.
Rocks,
hot to touch.
The brush is dry,
seeming dead.
Here, a flower
tiny beneath its bush
one
several,
a miniature meadow
of moist repose and glory.
This warm stone
cools
light-washed
beneath its dry tree.
SEVEN
Mexican Earthquake I
Dawn
1.
I met Fr. Chris when we were both in the seminary together. He was a strong, intelligent personality. He was very dedicated to helping people and to the Arts. He appreciated very much that I was an artist, complimenting my paintings highly. In fact, he bought a large one. “Theotokos” Mother of God. This painting depicted a large mother figure standing behind an adolescent Christ, just about to leave Mother and embark on his Father’s business. That and a subsequent mural that he encouraged very much were my first artistic “objects of power” in my other vocation. Or should I say the fuller understanding of my priestly vocation. An “object of power” is some ‘thing’ that has psychic, magical or spiritual power of its own. Why? Who knows? This concept underlies the understanding of how fetishes, mandalas, and icons operate.
He had expressed interest in my art in the seminary. After he was ordained and was out working in a parish, I remembered his interest and sent him a picture of the painting, “Theotokos.” When I put the photo and the letter in the envelope, I remember that my consciousness shifted a little bit and I felt that something momentous was being engaged. I knew that some ‘power’ was being sent along with that letter. Perhaps our fate was sealed with closing that envelope. He bought the painting. From that point we shared a tragic destiny—for a while.
2. (Remember that these are early ingredients of the spell.)
My first parish assignment as a priest was in Santa Ana, California. It was a mostly Hispanic parish. Immediately, my new superior sent me to Mexico to study Spanish. When I left for Mexico, I had every intention of learning Spanish. I didn’t. What did happen in Mexico was this:
In Cuernavaca, I discovered that handsome city and the nearby village of Tepozlan to be powerful in the ways of the magical “energies.” Really powerful. Not long after arriving I had a vision/realization, a ‘message’ if you will, that told me if I stayed I would be badly hurt or would die. Some great harm would come from staying. I refused to believe it. I wanted only to fulfill my assignment and not cause trouble. I cannot emphasize this last point strongly enough. However, in my heart I knew the premonition was true.
My first weeks there were highly ‘energized.’ During the second or third week I had six strange dreams: The first three were powerful flying dreams– one of these dreams I controlled from a waking state. The fourth dream resolved problems in my mind that I had with my current superior. The fifth dream was about my home, then me and family; my parents were represented as spirit animals, a great, silver-back male ape and a mother bear. There were other such animals, but the dream concluded with a big deer-like creature coming over the hill. But the sensation was wild–really wild. Dangerous. With this, I knew that the energies were out of control. I was nearly overcome.
In the sixth dream, I was a fledgling golden eagle. That seemed to complete some stage of initiation. (My seminary training included not only theology and pastoral training, but elective studies in tantra and shamanism– the way of the warrior.) Tantra is the combination of magical rituals and religious philosophy in India. The way of the warrior for me, is an interior attitude of “impeccable” action. The right move at the right moment. From a monastic milieu, ‘do only what is necessary. But the necessary thing is an absolutely right thing that needs to be done.’ Discerning that is the ‘great art of religious life.’
Then, during an exploration of downtown Cuernavaca, I ate some food that made me very ill. I seemed to sense that something psychic was happening, although I couldn’t say at that moment that I knew this would eventually allow me to go home before real damage happened. The following Saturday, a week later, I was finally well enough to visit downtown again. I went into a little chapel that I had seen in passing at the end of a crowded alley, at the top of a flight of stairs. I was delayed from entering by a”sadhu,” (holy man, or merely a crazy transient?) And an immense, white dog, (Cerberus?) with pink eyes, guardians for the other world. The transient was dancing joyfully to rock music. He frightened me. He looked straight into my eyes, then went away. The dog was quiet until he saw me in the crowd and began to bark wildly. I finally got by and entered the chapel. I sat to pray and then noticed a statue. It was a special statue, subject of much adoration and petition from the faithful. It was a painted wood statue of Christ that I had seen in a dream, when I was in college, ten years before! That dream was of particular power and eventually led me to the monastery. I had never been to Cuernavaca before this trip. It was the same statue that had come alive in my dream and looked at me. The look was mesmerizing. Yet, how disappointed it seemed to be in the worship of the world. Disdainful, not of the worshipers, but of the modes of our worship.
By now I was sick every day and had just enough energy for classes. I slept the time otherwise. I decided to take a few days off to go to Oaxaca because I sensed it was a place to rest, to recover and to wait. For what, I did not know. I went there and I waited. A priest I had met and with whom I was traveling shouted in his sleep our first night there, “Here it is!” in Spanish and I believed him. I stayed and continued to wait; though the priest and I parted the next day. (He went further south to visit the camps of Mayan refugees from Guatemala along the Guatemalan/Mexican border. That was where real ministry was happening according to this young ‘peace and justice’ priest.)
That afternoon I met a young man from the United States in the market place. He described himself as a yogi, a disciple of a tantric guru of good reputation in the U.S. and I described myself as a priest. We hit it off and began a spiritual exchange that went on for several days. We did some kundalini energy exercises. Cathartic –a great exchange.
I returned to Cuernavaca. I became very sick once again and finally had to return home much altered and mystified by my experience. But this will not be the last trip to Cuernavaca.
3.
Over the following year, I had increasing trouble with migraines. In a migraine complex, one’s blood vessels in the brain dilate, which can cause debilitating anguish in one’s brain and body. I have had migraines since I was 10 years old, but infrequently. They’d grown worse in recent years. I went through the various neurological and psychological therapies. In fact, because of the migraines, I first went to the psychologist who introduced me to the study of the “energies”. Now, perhaps the conflict between this natural spiritual vocation and the public role of a Catholic priest, or just the normal tensions of parish life, produced great stress. The migraines increased to three or four ‘screaming’ episodes a week. Deadly. But the medications were more dangerous than the migraines. During this time, in the midst of full-blown migraines, I started to have certain realizations. I began to equate the agony of the migraine experience with the suffering of people in the world, and then to the agony of creation’s mysterious evolution. This seemed more than sympathy, empathy even.
Though, associated often with the agony of the migraine’s physical effects was a sense of clarity and beauty and insights.
4.
During this same time, I had two other experiences that have characterized and helped form much of my attitude about religion and human identity. The first has to do with the cure of a man suffering from intense pain. (My second healing, the first being a severe headache and life style crisis of a friend in the seminary.) During our healing session he described the “cure” as a mental image of a bubble of pain that passed from him up my arm, then disappeared. There were no drugs involved with this cure.
The second experience involved a young girl who had had what could be categorized as a spontaneous shamanic initiation. She had no religious background and was from a mostly uneducated family. It is unlikely that she could have known about such things as “shamanism”, but what she described to me are the universal “symptoms” of shamanistic initiation. (See Eliade.) This reinforced my developing belief that shamanism is part of an atemporal, universal human inheritance and not solely the property of Stone Age tribal peoples, (or of New Age dilettantes). I determined that shamanistic intuition remains a vital active force in the modern world. This “calling” figures hugely in what is to come.
***
SLIVERS
Silver swift behind the rock,
beneath the water,
sliver quick, and slipped
beneath the surface of a cloud.
Splicing between particles
is the Word,
a field, unified to completion,
peeled to a seed of fig.
stig-mat…
divided
dismantled
undiscovered is the Name
before and now the same
beyond sight and angel’s measure
man of sorrow
tears of blood,
transmuted in the clay,
from the first breakage of time
from that arrogant first moment
to an intimate mingling
of clay and light…
EIGHT
Ag to Chris:
In my dream I see across a room through a ceiling-to-floor window out across the ocean. The window seems such a long way away. Then, outside is the figure of a man. Tall, darkly shadowed. He seems well proportioned. He is naked. At first, he is outside. Then in. He comes to me. He is wet and cold. His limbs so smooth but for light hair. I warm him with my body warm from sleep. At first, he is unresponsive. But as he warms, I see that it is Chris himself next to me and we make love. Sweet, warm delicious love. You are the sky. I the earth. Your rain clouds cover me, your thunderhead a great rumbling delight in me. For you it is like mating with the universe. You are heaven and I am the earth. I am both me and you. Strange, wonderful sensation. You on top of me now. I massage your thighs with my legs–in the dream, long, athletic legs. I resist and surrender by turns. And finally, open entirely. I take you in. Entirely it seems, you fill me so. Perfect. The stars, galactic powers flow through us, it seems. Two worlds merging, enlivened by each thrust and each moist massage. Energies flowing from chthonic centers flood our bodies with fierce pleasure, satisfaction in every cell enlivened with electric delight.
Narrator:
Ag wakes, turning slowly beneath her covers, flushed and awake now like never before— Maybe she has read too much of Ann Rice or Castaneda. Or maybe it was her Christian catechism. Even at that, it is hard for me to imagine two universes mating. But maybe it is just a manner of speaking. Tantric teaching has the microcosm of the individual equivalent to the macrocosm of the universe. There are many meditational exercises reinforcing this concept. On a psychic level, that might be the case. The lore is clear; in that inner realm of the psyche, there are no barriers and the rules of physics do not apply. According to Adam, the trick is making the transference from one realm to the other. Then, once that is mastered, he says that magic and miracles are the norm. Most people these days don’t even believe in the “other” realm. Not really. I didn’t… don’t–certainly not as something accessible under normal circumstances. Any such lore in-depth has not been part of the curriculum for these two youngsters. Well, except that Agnes was raised a Catholic. Got a little there maybe. Maybe they are just gifted with really unusual insight. Intuition. Or, Fr. Adam got to them!
By the way, don’t think I like being a writer. Too much work. Too little profit. Not that I need the money. (I am a very rich man.) Though, it does force one to think things out. Especially about material like this, so foreign to me.
Dear Chris,
That was my dream. Your talk about going to the monastery in your last few letters… It really scares me. You have been gone all my visits home so far. Now, you are going to be gone the whole time that I’m home next time as well! I think that they are selling you a bill of Goods! A soft sell. But a sell none-the-less. Religion! If it weren’t for Fr. Adam, I would leave the Church. I don’t attend mass anymore anyway. Don’t tell my parents. I will when the time is right. You are running away from your issues. You should stay in the world and face your real problems. Such as me. If you loved me, you would wait at least until I get home. What are you doing? I don’t understand you. Maybe we should start dating other people. Seriously, Oh God, did I say that. I’m really confused about us. Ag.
Dear Ag,
Maybe you are right. We should part. You know, go our own ways for a while. Maybe what we did was wrong; I’m pretty confused about a lot a things. I think the time in meditation at the Center helps me a lot. I will always have loved you. I don’t know how to say what I want to tell you. But there is something very important, so attractive for me in the monastery. I… well…
All the best, sweet, delicious Ag. Love, Chris
***
Sky Lights
I.
I live beneath a river of clouds;
rain masses moving beyond my reach.
I watch the slipping light-boats
run their rapids down each
white-capped undulation in the sea.
Here, jetty rocks hold
for hanging froth,
for falling foam
from full-bent breakers,
the last leaping roar of ocean-going waves.
(c. 1978)
Pasture, fields
We were green incisions
breaking rocky sand after huge, hill slipping rains
Then the blue hills on long stalks, and golden orange sweeping to a climbing sky
sweet horse-breath tough muzzles
long hair, pulling lips and yanking teeth, naked and bareback we rode over cliffs into a peaceful ocean…
Wolf purple and Indians brush the slopes with salt skin sweat enough to lubricate the long soccer run across high school into
College, friends forms shapes
Color that keeps to itself to inspire only in love
Love that leaves and comes back and leaves
So that there is only God but God doesn’t want ‘only God’ or he wouldn’t have made us.
(2008)
NINE
Narrator: Adam is, ironically, more and more, trying to explain himself to the Bishop, who could no more understand Adam than an ant could understand the anteater. The bishop only senses the danger and sensing it, acts. At least, this bishop eventually does act clearly. Have to give him credit for that. His thinking might be convoluted but you can have a real exchange, however turbulent, with such people. I find Adam’s continuing allegiance and loyalty to such leftover dinosaurs as the bishop and his organization, amusing. Adam is, at least seems, very, very idealistic. But how could he be so idealistic and control so much money? Seemingly, with such success?
Our records of his correspondence remain fragmentary. I will give you, Sir, what we have. I’m afraid that our competition in Magnum Dei got to the material before we did. Maybe there are others as well who are interested in accounts of this case.
***
Adam:
…Bishop, I am exploring some of the main threads of what is available, potent in, 40,000 years evolution in universal human consciousness. Homo Sapiens Sapiens. To do that or to really understand any of this, one cannot just study it or have “an experience” of it. It must be lived. One’s personal life must become the laboratory, one’s experience of Being, a field of investigation. In the process, I’ve become a Catholic priest and explored employments with related job descriptions; Shaman, Hesychast and Tantrika. I am now studying the ways of the Daoist warrior.
Needless to say, these are not the memoirs of a saint. Rather, this story is a “grimoire” (sorcerer’s technical journal) of a psychic explorer, dedicated to the Church and Creation and God, exploring along the boundaries of what is possible for ordinary human beings.
…Bishop, as the Church teaches, I was ordained a priest by the Holy Spirit. According to that teaching, I was ontologically changed to effect Christ’s mission as a priest. I intend to complete what has been begun in me.
Christ, as the Messiah, fulfills the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament. Christ as the Lord of light and life, fulfills/completes the yogic and the tantric intention. Christ as Master of the “energies”, life and death, spiritual guide, as ecstasy itself, fulfills the shamanistic intuition. (See Eliade) As the Sacred King sacrificed to become immortal not only that earth and clan should be fertile and prosper, but that we all may be saved from—what? Death? Christ fulfills and completes the intuition of the agricultural, fertility cycle religions and breaks through biological cycles to… what? (The serious practice of Buddhists, yogis, shamans are valid and applicable in this discovery, this “Grand Affair”.) The Christ is then, from my perspective, the last great step in anthropological evolution… But that was 2000 years ago…
This is not a sectarian issue though. It is the issue of human identity and power; it is the religious question. “Who is it that climbs up on the Cross?” Why? Or who is the Buddha, for that matter? (Who is it that can help themselves?) What is a Shaman? Saint? Sorcerer? What spell is cast to fulfill the human capacity? And who casts it? God? Ourselves? To what end? What is the Warrior? (The Artist?) …and what does it do? This is what I have intended to discover and display for you.
Sincerely, Fr. Adam,
More from Mexican Earthquake:
5.
At this time a more intimate involvement with our shamanistic heritage was progressing in me as I had the following dream about a black scorpion. I was in a room at some kind of party. A young man with blond hair was talking to me. We had some kind of teacher/student relationship. A black scorpion came out from under his collar, walked around his shoulder, across his chest to the open shirt neck. I moved to brush the beast off. (I have a peculiar aversion to arachnids.) I brushed it, rather, down inside his shirt. Either I am dangerously clumsy or this was a necessary interiorization of whatever the scorpion and the boy represent for me. (Perhaps the boy is the androgynous other world guide of ‘religious studies’ fame; the boy combined with the bug represent that venomous ‘power’ in me.) Or…
The scene of the dream shifted to another room where there is a large ark-like box about the size of a small car. It is a dusty, black, wooden box. On one side are many various sized shelves, windows and doors. Out of one such portal four black scorpions walk onto one of the adjacent shelves. Three are very healthy. The fourth is somehow spasmodic. The three healthy scorpions raise themselves up on their back legs and from a black telescope like appendage spray me with light. The dream ends.
Late the next evening I was telling a friend about this dream. While telling the tale I began to dream while still talking! I told my friend that I was dreaming as I spoke to him, rather shocked about the dual levels of consciousness myself. Then, I continue the conversation by describing the dream. The four black scorpions turned to crystal and seemed to be some kind of transmitters, mystically, to the contents of the box, because the walls of the black box become transparent. In fact, the walls disappear and are replaced with not only a vision of the universe but a sensation of heaven itself. Wonderful.
I did not suspect anything esoteric about black scorpions. Even though, I had been stung five times by a black scorpion when I was in a Zendo meditating a couple of years before. At that time, I had had an image of a black fang piercing my back before I got sick or the wounds were discovered. I never saw the actual creature. A MD diagnosed the species.
…
The Migraines were terrible. I determined that this migraine problem must be resolved. Medical therapy hadn’t worked, so I would try something spiritual. Pilgrimage appealed to me since I had traveled as a pilgrim many times in the past. It was for me a major spiritual technique to engage the powers of the unconscious, of the gods, of God.
6.
Subsequently in meditation, over a period of months, I located a place along the eastern border of Turkey that held promise. So, I made arrangements to go there.
On my way to Turkey, I stood alone outside La Vadia, a country railway station in Greece, and was impressed with a sense of a kindness and simplicity that is the ambiance of all our endeavors. I was on my way to Thessalonika, then Istanbul via Pythia as it will say on my ticket. I’d just left the Pythian oracle at Delphi where visions and dream were kind to me. The journey continued in kindness across Turkey. Kindness in the people I met, kindness of God who provided the way and at the last moment in the mountains east of Kars, in the kindness of a fellow traveler, a guide who for the moment was obsessed to show me the “Akchekale,” the “White Castle”. I knew that it was ‘the place’ I was looking for.
…It was a long way from anywhere on a promontory above a deep river canyon… Behind these ancient ruins of a castle, I sat alone in my ritual before the gathered flowers that sang their pure violet to the sacred fire and the devil-chasing bell that sang to silence taking my song along with it. In that deserted, white castle, outside its dark tower, between an abandoned water well and a razed church, in that place unvisited much, even by Turks much less tourists, a wind blew up the river-cut chasm thousands of feet down. Then, everything fell away,
fell away…
Then,
The Word, the Christ, whispered across perception… and it seemed at that moment that I had died, for how could human biology contain such love. It would have been the same for Buddhist, Christian, Moslem, shaman or priest, for it was the heart of all things.
There, in that place of an ancient wound, the sacred fire was invoked as some creature roared, a wailing cry, a terrible sound that tore through the canyon.
This travel joined my need for healing with the healing that I believe is inherent in creation.
I could not look back at the castle when I left, for fear, for respect. I seldom think about it now because when I do my eyes tear, fully, remembering such fullness. At that moment though, it was smooth and easy in its blessing; pale green, brown rose, yellow
the light set the land
dancing.
Now that some time has passed, I still have a deep sense of satisfaction about this pilgrimage. Unlike any of the others, it is as if the pilgrimage finished something successfully. This is an important juncture. It is true that since then, my migraines- three or four a week, stopped completely for a long time. But there is more. Perhaps the satisfaction lies in the fact that, somehow the whole approach works. It can resolve personal problems of significance and there is indication that it is a viable means, an empowerment, to address and resolve the issues of the world community by this ‘working’ of/with the gods, the psychic structures of creation; delving into and adjusting the unconscious of the universe. Can one do this? We’ll see. If that is the case, as now I clearly believe it to be, I anticipate the next event in this evolution eagerly but also with great fear and trepidation.
Let me interrupt this spell’s list of ingredients to explain the problem addressed here as I see it and my attempts at a solution.
The Problem:
In the pilgrimage to Turkey, there was, as you know, Bishop, a personal problem to be solved, migraines that were hitting me three or four times a week. Blinding, screaming, floor-pounding migraines. During one of these the previous spring, I had the sense that this agony was in some way analogous to the suffering of the world. Somehow it was linked to the painful evolution of human consciousness and the natural processes of the world. In particular, I believed this natural condition of suffering in the world to be amplified to the point of universal self-destruction by the recent revolution in technological progress. (One billion people at starvation level, 10s of millions in concentration camps, 5,000 acres of rain forests destroyed per day, not to speak of unprecedented numbers of animal species eradicated.) This is the product of human ‘genius’ that has also recently proved its capacity to destroy the world. I have sought a different approach. Any “reasonable” solution to this problem is going to be self-defeating since the sole use of human reason, which produces all these technological wonders, is the unavoidable problem. That is the battle for which I am trained. This is a war secreted within the very structure of human personality. The battlefield is the human and world soul- or psyche.
SOLUTION:
Since I was able to effect the migraine of my own body, the microcosm, using the techniques of pilgrimage, etc., the next thought was to apply the same general techniques to the body of creation, the macrocosm. In a sense, to take the world on a cathartic pilgrimage! The first step is to identify one’s personality completely with the processes of creation, then began to ‘adjust’ the various elements of this larger ‘self’ as one might in psycho-, medical or religious therapy. This is an experiment that curiosity, intuition and need encouraged me to make. The point is to alleviate the suffering of the world and/or to facilitate this poignantly dangerous moment in our evolution. The Helping Spirit, my familiar, that I called upon to work this magic was the Holy Spirit and the method is an extended form of geomantic thurgery. (Geomantic= earth energies; thurgy= the ‘working’ thereof.) I.e., to discover and connect with the psyche of creation, if there be such a beast. Move in relationship with it to change the direction of our self-destructive corporate attitude.
This is what happened:
After returning from Turkey, I was sent, for the second time, to Cuernavaca in Mexico to study Spanish. The mountains above the city are powerful indeed. And a nearby village, I mentioned before, is known to be a center of Mexican witchcraft; might be benevolent or hostile. I went there one day and visited an old Aztec temple in the strangely formed rocks above the village. I felt in that visit a strong psychic companionship with the place perhaps some of the population. I started a ‘ritual’ there that continued on and off for three days. It included a fierce migraine–The first since eastern Turkey several months before. Then the Mexican earthquake hit. It lasted at least five minutes and devastated Mexico City. 10,000 to 20,000 people died.
I don’t think that such ‘co-incidences’ as the ritual and the earthquake are directly related. At least, I hope not. But perhaps the shaman moves differently in nature and so participates in creation in a different way; perhaps loses qualities of normal personality; becomes nature or a force of nature. There was a connection that I cannot quite describe… between the ritual and the earthquake.
In any case, this is one of a series of disasters that I associate with this experiment. While in Mexico, I did the drawings of mountains shaking before the earthquake. Also, I started drawings for the mural of the Resurrection– Christ bursting out of the earth. I painted it—40 ft. x 20 ft.–when I returned to California. It was ready to be dedicated during the Rite of Light at the beginning of the next Easter Vigil in that California parish. The mural was the iconic heart of this part of the experiment. It was to gain considerable attention a couple of years later. This, the second work of art associated with Fr. Chris, as you will see. It depicts a fully developed and powerfully active Christ.
7. SICKNESS AND SALVATION
On Good Friday of that Holy Week, the day Christ was crucified, my friend Fr. Chris was accused of molesting altar boys and had to flee his parish. Even though the ‘boys’ were post pubescent and there never was any “skin on skin” contact, still some level of crime was engaged, apparently. I have long felt fatalistically connected to him. I supported him. One cannot cut a person off because of illness, or sin. ‘Christ came for sinners not the just.’ ‘The Good Shepherd leaves the flock and seeks the lost sheep.’ And so on… But as well, I ‘sensed’ this to be a moment of tremendous ‘power’ and ‘energy.’ Chris was accused of relatively little when compared to real sex offenders like the guy who cut off the arms and legs of his victims after he sexually abused them. None the less, Fr. Chris managed to get his name and the Church involved in nationally broadcast and oft-repeated news stories as well as a legal nightmare.
I felt that this was a special occasion. We had to respond in a special way. But my understanding was intuitive and I could not explain to my superiors what I did not yet understand myself. They did not respond well to what must have seemed to them my very confusing behavior. “Why wasn’t I satisfied with regular parish life? Why did I need to go on these pilgrimages? What has all this esoteric stuff got to do with mainstream parish ministry?” Perhaps they would have recognized what was happening if they had followed a different spiritual path. Spiritual pilgrimage and esoteric ritual do not usually appeal to institutional managers in praxis. Though the bishop, your predecessor, was patient and counseled me to reconsider when I finally began to take the action described below. But, his benevolent influence was not to last much longer.
8.
Before the news about Chris’ problem broke, there was this disturbing event. I had begun the mural. The scaffolding was up. The drawing was on the wall. But one day I developed a headache, a migraine. (First since the earthquake in Mexico. The second since Turkey.) This was January 1986. I couldn’t work that day. I felt terrible. In the middle of it, in a daze, I got up from my darkened bedroom and went outside to look at the mural wall. The whole street next to the mural wall, including the adjacent intersection, was cordoned off by police barricades! I investigated further. A truck going through the intersection had flipped over and killed its driver. There is a little dip there, but high-speed cars usually only scraped their fenders. For the truck to flip over seemed odd, as well as tragic. I sensed that it had something to do with an ancient dynamic of sacrifice. A sacrifice to empower the ritual that the mural came to represent with the life energies of the one sacrificed, and/or to communicate with the gods by sending such a person to them as a highly favored ambassador. That’s the theory. I found the idea repugnant. I dismissed it from my mind immediately. But it came back. I’ve never been able to think of that incident in any other way. (I fear for myself the madness of an unrestrained egotism. Yet, this most ancient danger of a warped ego is always present in any attempt at “power” or even virtue. Whatever the case for humility, my sense was that that accident was a dedicatory sacrifice demanded by the process of the spell however it may offend my moral sensibilities. I don’t know who the victim was but according to the lore, sacrificial victims go directly to the highest heaven. I hope so.)
My rather dogged “support” of our “fallen” brother who had that problem with the altar boys, himself a victim of abuse, earned me a leave of absence from my diocese. Without my intending it to be so, my friend’s troubles became a means of freedom to continue work on the rest of this ‘ritual’ craft. I both wanted that freedom and I wanted to stay in the diocese as I was, to be a “good priest”.
Whatever I wanted, I was removed from my parish, (a traumatic experience) and given three months leave that summer of 1986, “to cool off.” I then continued the ritual without distraction.
9.
I ‘sensed’ that the destination would be Yemen and that I was to start in the wild lands of Montana. Finding such places is a process too lengthy to describe here. In Montana I was to test some of the meteorological aspects of how this spell was developing.
This was the third rain ritual of the season. There seemed to be a definite relationship between the ritual and the rain. It seemed like an assent from God. Something larger than my conscious intention is building. (I am priest to this harsh love. It is the way of the warrior’s care. The Great Old Man, guide/archetype, travels with me in this.)
(When I had done certain rituals, there were closely timed changes in weather that surprised and frightened me. This time I wanted to see for sure if I could make it rain. Well it did… that story is told in detail elsewhere.)
10. Now Yemen.
I arrived on the plain of Sanaa. Immediately, I felt a powerful sense of revulsion, foreboding. There was something terrible in the surrounding mountains. Opposition.
Then I almost had a sexual encounter. High arousal, but no final follow through. Though terrible regret followed. Regret that I had even come that close. But thus humiliated, I was free for a while from the usual ego delusions of being in control. Perhaps that was required to accomplish the larger ritual. The energies were up. I began a small ritual at twilight. I felt completely lost, completely off balance and overwhelmed by the presence in those mountains. I wanted out. Instead of staying two weeks I wanted to leave immediately. As in the earlier rain ritual, I laid out pictures of the mural, burned incense, experience fierce anger fired by the frustrated sexual arousal. A challenge is sent. All the elements of the spell were present, but I was barely conscious of them. They work on their own with a ‘deeper than conscious’ assent. (I realize that I am interpreting in a seemingly arbitrary, irrational way, but the more “rational” norms of interpreting experience take us, in my opinion, only more smoothly to the worse, even ultimate disasters described in “The Problem.”)
Since I arrived in Yemen, I had been having a series of spontaneous visions. In these I have a staff of iron now with a ‘throwing strap’ of leather. I strike the earth, again and again, with this staff. The vision came to me repeatedly. I strike the earth with the staff again and again over a period of two days. At one point I am exhausted by this action. Two saint bishops come to my aid. One is St. Augustine. I’m not sure of the other. The last vision as I board the airliner to leave that place, is of planting the iron staff in the field of battle, the plain of Sanaa. It is challenge to the destroyers. Or, was it merely rousing another dragon.
Yemen was, to say the least, disconcerting.
Around that date, the day I was in Yemen, a lake in Africa exploded. A gas cloud from beneath the water rises, then descends the sides of that mountain to kill everything for miles around. Other disasters follow. I fly to Paris. Take a train, then hitchhike to Spain where I am to meet my mentor, Panikkar. When we meet, a drought of several months breaks with a big rain. (Fires had burned the forests around the monastery on Montserrat near Panikkar as well as the forests around my favorite monastery in Big Sur.) I tell Pannikar the story of my day in Yemen. Curiously, coincidentally, I tell the tale on St. Augustine’s feast day. A letter from my diocese is waiting for me at Panikkar’s home, advising me strongly to come back to California. I feel that I am meant to go. Panikkar thinks as well that I should return.
The day I return home, my father has a heart attack. There is an airliner crash in the town just north of where I am staying. There is a riot involving thousands of people on the beach just south of that house. Quite a welcome home. My father is dying. It is obvious that I must stay here for a while.
My diocese asks what I intend to do. I take a parish assignment. I intend to stay. I am reluctantly given a car and time to deal with my family situation. Not long after that, the car’s engine bursts into flames while I am driving it into a parking lot. My father dies amidst very beautiful shamanistic signs. These are terrible, poignant moments.
My new parish assignment is with one of the worst pastors in the Southland. It didn’t work out. I came to understand why the four previous priests in this assignment left before the completion of their assignments. The new bishop offered me a new parish or the old one. Or, freedom…
I chose freedom. The bishop released me from my parochial duties leaving me free to pursue other, more esoteric interests for a time.
11. Next Summer
I was preparing to leave on a small pilgrimage to balance the effects (disasters) of the previous summer. While visiting my mother near San Francisco, she and I drove to Mendocino on the northern California coast. Before we left on this drive I sensed that I should take certain magical objects with me; something of a ‘ritual’ nature was happening. That day an earthquake struck nearby on the northern coast where we drove and a giant tornado, one-half mile wide, swept across the plains of Canada where I was going. With this the pilgrimage kicked in. That was clearly the sense of it.
As I said, the purpose of this pilgrimage was to balance last year’s journey, which involved raising that dangerous “dragon” in Yemen. This year’s pilgrimage is dedicated to and placed under the patronage of the Blessed Mother- She, reportedly being good with dragons, purity of intentions, and refuge. Unusual storms and other such phenomenon seem to be associated with the rituals of this process. I don’t believe that the rituals caused them but somehow were intuitively synchronized to creatively take part with them. Take part in a way that re-defines our humanity and shapes the future. I can only describe this re-definition as “shamanistic.” Perhaps it is something other. But even that is not sufficient, since I believe that we are involved in a ‘re-evolution,’ or at least a re-evaluation of what human personality is.
The destination of this pilgrimage is the holy precinct of Denali Mountain in Alaska. (Mt. McKinley) The purpose is purification and balance to energize the projects that will occupy this period of freedom given me by my superior.
…
Since this full story is told elsewhere, let me say simply here that this difficult but powerful and beautiful pilgrimage began coincident with that small earthquake in Mendocino while I was driving with my mother. At that same moment, a huge half-mile wide tornado struck in Canada, where I was headed, and later the ritual concludes in L.A. with an all-night vigil, just minutes after which, an earthquake, 6.1 in magnitude, struck Southern California! Thus, the pilgrimage ended as it began, and the sacred mountain still looms in my imagination.
I called the Spirit of a Storm: I invoked a war—-
As you will see for yourself… if you persevere.
_______________________________
12. POISON AND VISION
Narrator: Most of this material was either lost or unreadable. What could be deciphered was that Adam realized that he had been ‘chosen” by a powerful Spirit Animal. That he discovered this in an extended encounter with some young martial artists and that their master used Kung Fu magic to attack Adam. That the master ended up in jail for a humiliating crime–technical child molestation– Poison flowed freely. But it was turned in a way that not only set the young men free from their psychic indenture, but the master learned of his own dysfunction and was better off for it. This seems to be the point of the use of these dark energies: fire to fight fire.
_____________________
That concludes the basic list of ingredients for this “Spell of Drinking Poisons.” Its effects now continue with increasing momentum.
Later in that spring I was planning an exhibition, to conclude my stay as artist-in-residence at an Episcopal parish in Long Beach. The month before the event, about which there was to be a certain amount of press coverage, another related story broke. A woman, who lived just across from the mural I had painted on the back of that church in Santa Ana, took the Church to court to have the mural removed. She felt offended that the figure of the resurrected Christ was not only nude but seemed to be sexually excited. (She was also offended by the deep blue background.) I certainly did paint the figure of Christ nude and there is an abstract suggestion of genitals. That is orthodox, necessary and not unusual in the history of Christian art. But it is so abstract that few would be likely to find anything sexually arousing in it. I think of it as a Rorschach test. The image reflects much about those who are looking at it by their reaction. The fact that there are two 12-foot mirrors at the bottom of it indicates that theme very clearly. The sexual excitement seems to me to be a natural part of a normal, healthy, human response to what has to be the most exciting of total human experiences, the resurrection. When I actually painted it, I was not clear about Our Lord being sexually excited. I don’t mind that others think that He is aroused. It’s quite natural. The public reaction was amazing. According to the newspapers, this poor lady spent $20,000 in lawyer’s fees trying to get the mural removed. The local paper ran a front-page article, with full color picture. Several other papers picked it up. A national wire service did as well. There were stories on national TV and caravans of people began filing past the church. (Nobody paid any attention at the completion of the work two years earlier.)
All this rhubarb came just two weeks before my exhibition–first in fifteen years and a major turning point in the pilgrimage. The newspaper reporters began calling me just as I was planting a prayer pole and lighting incense at its base in front of the Episcopal Church compound where I was to have this exhibition. These were times of high magic. The mural was the icon of the Yemen experiment and was the image that answered a prescient call to the service of culture and the world that had brought me off the pilgrim’s path 10 years earlier. From there I entered the seminary and ministry in that diocese where the mural was eventually painted. The mural is an ‘object of power,’ a shamanistic technique that will depict and engage true human identity through the image of the Resurrected Christ. It, symbolically, is an answer to the disastrous side of human technological genius.
This is the heart of the Yemen Experiment, and the conclusion to Mexican Earthquake I. If there has been any effect in the unconscious depth of Being, it is already happening. In some spiritual way these happenings are connected with the Tantric energies that have been building for some time.
I am not proposing another cerebral theology here. This is catholic action.
***
SKY LIGHTS II
Sea pull your sucking best,
waves and sea–
even if you held me firm in your limpid, liquid grasp,
I would from you or any holding hand,
be free.
Now try this,
sidle up close so your smell can be known
Come up in green stalks so wild and thick they inspire blood
And pour over geography with the defiance of leaves…
Electric runs
And water courses
Green and diamond
Drops glisten and treasure like grease gravy on mashed
lightning in our subtle hearts.
Ride your bike like hell down this side of the hill now that you’ve given up drinking poison and have a smooth voice that would calm the UN
Charm to wed mist-hung climates and my power to change the weather.
TEN
Agnes Visits the Monastery– and some Erotic Resolutions
Narrator:
After breaking up with Chris, Agnes dates widely, including a helpful policeman and an unscrupulous shaman who takes advantage of her. Then she meets and forms a healthy gentle relationship with a medical student, Robert, who introduces her to Tantric theory that he learned about during a study year abroad in India. As is evident in her musings, she is a natural ‘yogini,’ and once started becomes impassioned with the intentions of Tantric Yoga. Whenever she is having sex with anyone she is always thinking of Chris. All this, including her meeting with Fr. Pat and a dream in which she is encouraged to trust Fr. Adam is leading to her preparation. This includes a series of erotic scenarios.
(Omitted here are several scenarios of Agnes musing, fantasizing, remembering about family, death, insights into Chris, relationships in general, meditation, art. Don’t ask how I got this material!)
We need to move on to more pertinent mattersl:
First, here is how Chris got to the monastery. He meets with Fr. Adam. After meeting with Fr. Adam, Chris’ dreams and the meditations contain something of Adam’s intentions. Chris and Agnes are developing a ‘dreamtime’ relationship that transcends their separation. (!?) When Agnes is having sex with anyone else she is always thinking of Chris. And Vice-Versa. Perhaps, appropriate to their tantric relationship…
(Sometimes Chris reminds me of that radio announcer on that TV program, what’s his name, you know, on Northern Exposure. Or maybe, Keanu.)
***
Chris’ conversation with Fr. Adam:
Chris: Agnes told me to come see you… uh, (pause)
Adam: Yes, she mentioned in a recent letter that you might stop by. (Actually she’s been talking about this one for years. So talented, she says. So coordinated, athletic; so tough, so smart… But unusually imaginative, very intense. I think she is so infatuated. We will see what he’s made of. She wants me to… well its hard to say what she really wants me to do with him. To guide him through a process that will help reveal his vocation, life purpose… That’s possible… We’ll see.)
Chris: Father, I think about Agnes all the time, most of the time. Even when I’m not thinking about her, I end up thinking about her… Intentionally not thinking about her. I might conjure up images of an unconnected line, lose myself, you know… (a forgotten sweater in a bus), …wander in the landscape inside my head. Where I used to be free… Where it was almost light. Pick-up meandering phantoms and hold them between components of gray matter. She’ll be there. She is an elusive butterfly. I am tripping over rocks with net in hand. She was the only sparkling prod in my lost lobel lumps able to initiate a welling up from deep electricated passages, tripping, running, fumbling from the tongue, unexpectedly to fall on the dinner table, the word, marriage; connubial joy, and responsibility. In the middle of our relationship it was like that. But then, it became something else that I don’t understand.
Adam: Maybe you are too young for marriage. Maybe marriage is not for you.
Chris: No that’s not it. She is still the one who excites me to the point of not being boring or bored with the state of males and females chasing, checking, tasting one another. As you know, Father, she worked on a help line with people who need it. She is conversant in French and English. She mimes and acts well, is generally sympathetic.
I have fallen off curbs looking at her.
She is the only one who fits into the above-mentioned categories and is in love– with other men, considering me such a very good friend.
Adam: Well, we all need friends.
Chris: Yea, I know. We all need friends. But what does any of that mean? Even love? What I feel for her is something else. Oh, damn. Excuse me. What do I care? I am waiting to have my resumes received and filed and while waiting for the master’s program information from those possibly green-leafed colleges to arrive, I’m waiting to make enough money to rent a studio and for that gallery to look at my drawings. It is a serious possibility that I should, while I am waiting, forget all this, my family, my friends, and become a brother at the monastery. I hear that those monks respect the Arts.
In the meantime, I’ve started another drawing, have plans for a large painting, and am in air-sucking delight with this year’s yellow-gray-black cottonwoods and the almost white-yellow of last year’s wild oats engulfing the south side hill sage and yucca plants. I am waiting for spring- not that winter isn’t nice. I like the cold wind, rain, smogless, freezing days. See what I mean, Father. It’s hopeless. Isn’t it?
Adam: You sound a little frustrated. Poetic, but frustrated. Let’s see. What else has been going on in your life, besides college and Agnes? After all, Chris, most of these teenage romances don’t last. I mean, take for instance the themes in popular music. 90% are about failed love, or love that is unrequited. So, think about the rest of your life. What was it like when you were younger?
Chris: I recently reached the fourth degree black belt in Kung Fu. I spend a lot of time on that. I just like to fight. I don’t know, Father, I’ve had some rough experiences. My family is pretty screwed up. But loyal anyway.
I knew a man once. I call him Wolfman because he was wild and cruel, though not usually mean. I met him outside Jacksonville, Florida. I was hitchhiking to California. It was January. He picked me up on the way to Dallas. He was a biker. But in a car this time, black leather coat, etc. Hard expression. Recently betrayed in love… While we were traveling across Texas in the darkness of that winter night, something flashed across the road in front of us. It was luminous. It looked like a wolf. Not an ordinary wolf. I thought that we should stop there to investigate. But forgot that intention as he began, at that moment, to tell me about his life. His parents had disowned him when he was ten. At eleven he was sent to the Texas reformatory school for burning down a Holiday Inn. At fourteen, he and a friend stole an expensive car and drove it to the Mardi Gras in New Orleans. As an adult once he got picked up in Texas on a mistaken identity. The cop had cuffed him to the cop car and proceeded to beat the hell out of him. But the cop got too close. Wolf wrestled the cop’s gun away from him and shot him in the stomach. When caught, the judge was sympathetic, knowing the cop, and told him to just get out of the state until the statute of limitations ran out on him. So, he went off to western Virginia and lived off the land for a while. During this time he had something of a conversion experience. He started to get into Jesus, but some preacher got into his girlfriend. So, he left girl, preacher and Jesus behind. None-the-less. he was trying to live straight. He was tired of being a criminal.
I stayed with his people outside of Dallas for a day. Then he and I went into town. He wanted to show me around. But first, he stopped at what he called a “titty bar”. It was about ten in the morning. Very plain, mostly nude women strutting awkwardly beneath strobe lights that disguised the extra fat and puckered skin. What he got there was ‘speed’ on credit from a friend. Poor sick Wolf injected it in his arm, in the car, in the parking lot. Well he couldn’t show me the town because neither of us had any money. So after a while he let me out on the freeway west. Too bad, we liked each other. He was an artist too. He painted scenes on the sides of vans. He wanted to go straight. But where could he channel energies like that. My next ride was as amazing too.
Adam: That’s pretty colorful Chris, but what about you? Let’s stick with you for the moment.
Chris: Father… Father–That story about Wolfman… That’s a story that I made up. Well, not all of it. Don’t you see? I…
Adam: What do you mean?
Chris: Well, I’m Wolfman. That’s what my biker buddies used to call me. That’s all what happened since I was a little kid. Before and during the time I was gettin’ to know Agnes. She is so good, real classy. I don’t always want to admit that those things happened to me. That I did those things… She doesn’t know much about that side of my life.
Chris: How could you fit all that in? I mean with school, sports and everything?
Chris: It fits. I’ve just been busy.
Adam: Agnes seems to think that she knows a lot about you.
Chris: In some ways yes. But… I don’t know… Anyway, I put together that little story. It’s about me. It’s true. Except for the part about being disowned. That was a mistake. My parents were going to get divorced and I thought it was my fault and that they really wanted to get rid of me. So, I thought that all they had to do was disown me, then everything would be OK. So, I ran away instead. The fire was an accident while I was on the run. I was smoking behind the motel with some guys. We threw a cigarette in the trash bin. Must’ve been gas or something in the trash because it exploded. They ran away. I got caught. Things just developed from there. By the time I was fifteen, I was back in school though. My parents didn’t get a divorce.
Adam: You’re pretty good at stories. A real talent.
Chris: Yea, real entertaining.
Adam: Well, if your parents didn’t get a divorce, what happened then?
Chris: My parents chose to move to the ranch here because of its remoteness and quiet; and I suppose, maybe, the powerful beauty of the location. It’s certainly not convenient to anything. My dad runs the farm part for the owner.
Adam: Who is that?
Chris: Mrs. Shanta? You know her? Real rich. Real nice.
Adam: Yes, I do know her. She’s a parishioner…
Chris: My folks felt that I would be better off in the country… could profit from living in surroundings where nature is such a strong force as it is here. They were back-to-nature types long before it was popular like in the sixties. Also here we would not be so affected by the city violence and the petty-minded neighborhoods and all that, according to my mom. Whatever the reasons for coming here, it is a beautiful place.
Adam: Yes, it is.
Chris: The cottonwoods that grow along the stream over there clatter in the slightest breeze. In the autumn, when yellow and dry they are even louder. In March and April they are the purest yellow-green. The mountains to the north are the Tehachapies. Sometimes in the mornings one can see the mists rising up the mountainsides, running up the hills, stuffing themselves into canyons, to empty out up over the canyon rims, dissipate in the sunlight higher up. Most of the time the air around here sparkles and shimmers in the clear intensity of the light. The summers are hot; the south wind blows, the wild oats is dry. Afternoons are spent swimming, working on the ranch, sometimes just watching the heat waves in the yard. Usually we go to the pools in the stream. You can see the cows on the hills in the shade of the trees and bushes, swatting flies with their tails, waiting for evening. Just quiet and waiting and chewing. It’s great though. I love it. I really love it here.
Adam: Yes, it’s beautiful here.
Chris: Of course, we live in constant danger of forest fires, as you know. And I experienced my first snow storm here. It just floats down, not driven like the rain. As far as one can see, the white flakes are surrounded by the darkness of the day. It piles up, covers everything exposed. (I fell in love here for the first time.) During the winter the whole area around here is spackled white with dark, weaving textures in the bushes and tall grass. After the snow melts, the oats, then gray and yellow, lays whipped about like fields of limp seaweed deserted by the sea.
Not too far down there, the stream forms deep clear pools eroded out of the rocks. Just below that there are places where the gorges widen to allow for some small woods of sycamores and more cottonwoods. I don’t know what the cause is, but along the stream banks there are some very wide beaches of the whitest sand; white, white sand in dunes and around the boulders. And those clear, deep pools! After the spring floods, when the water level is lower, the flow is quiet, as the water falls from one pool to the next. Frogs splash or scramble under the rocks at your approach. If you stand in the water, your feet look bigger as do the little minnows that are silvery, almost glowing in the refraction.
Adam: Keep talking. I like what you have to say. How you say it.
Chris: Once, one autumn day in that crystalline warm sunlight of pre-smog California, an Indian Summer day, I was laying out in the hills. At that moment, I was involved in some intense, erotic fantasizing, you know Father, how guys are… about perhaps to climax an “earth/mating/sky ritual”, you know, when this suddenly gave way to a complex of vision/dreams, waking and not– other states, …states of consciousness.
Adam: Other states of consciousness, Chris?
Chris: That’s right. I’ve read a lot of books about it. You know Tibet, India, also martial arts. Did Ag tell you? I spend a lot of time doing Kung Fu. I have a black belt. Not that that means anything. I told you that already…
(Fr. Adam’s phone rings.)
Adam: Yes, Yes, Yes, I’ll be there in a few minuets. Is she OK?
No? Well, I’ll be along.
Chris, I have to run. Somebody had an accident and they want me to go to the hospital. I want to talk more later. How do you feel?
Chris: Better. A lot better.
Adam: Have you ever visited that monastery? You know, the meditation center up in the mountains. It’s not RC, but neither are you, strictly speaking. There are Catholics there and Buddhists and shamans sometimes. That might be a good place for you to spend some time. Work out some of the issues that seem to be crowding in on you as well as learn about meditation, and these other states of consciousness that you are so interested in. Practice is the thing. Practice. To know about such things you have to do it. And the way it sounds you need to know about these things. Get a good basis in meditation first. Then, a good background in the history of religion and theology. It’s beautiful if you have the discipline for it. Compassion and practice. With some really experienced practitioners. I know the people that run that place. They are nice people. It won’t do you harm in any case. Give you a chance to think about things.
Chris: Yea, I do know the place. I can make time. I visited there once with a class from college. Maybe I’ll put off graduate school.
Adam: Are you sure about that? Better check it out first. Tell them I sent you. They know me. That is, if you have the time.
Chris: I’m a Humanities major. It’s not exactly a career track major. I have the time.
_________________________
AGNES visits the monastery, more than a year later:
When I finally got permission to visit Chris at the monastery for a few days, The Guest master put me in a cell on the edge of a canyon full of trees, brush, flowers, and poison oak… All sorts of wild creatures live in this canyon. I hear their calls and see them sometimes.
The grass around my cell contains tiny, salmon-colored flowers perfect blossoms that close up in the evening. Today, I spent a warm, peaceful afternoon weeding in the vegetable garden.
Deep canyon, dry in the California dry way of the north, luxuriant of redwoods, oaks and bay laurel trees spreading above the fern-covered rabbit tracks, deer runs and snakes. There are few tracks for human kind down to or up from the bouldered stream.
I had a conversation with Chris. He is going through something. Doubting himself. Questioning everything: … but this is a cruel world, a carnal place. We can only hope in God.
Chris: Homosexuality??? What is it? What is it? Why can’t I see? Is it homosexuality then? Is it that? What does it mean? But I investigated that. I spoke to that first counselor about it. He said that it was common. Then, he told the senior council that I had been active in the Gay world! All I had said was that I unsure of my sexuality. That I thought I might be… Strange man. That caused a lot of trouble. Professional breach. Enough! I know that I am something other. But what is it then? Take this blindness away. I can’t stay in a monastery. I don’t want to be married. I have rejected the usual heterosexual role. I have rejected the alternatives. I’ve given up art to be a monk. The superiors are dubious about that. Is my “artistic temperament” too strong to give it up, or even make it secondary to monastic life? What the hell is an “artistic temperament”? How could I give up art if it was so important to me? It was my identity. Now I am neither an artist nor a monk. I’m a fighter and an athlete. Not much use here. I don’t even have any identification sexually since I have rejected both the alternatives there. For now anyway. What’s left? If you have taken this much, Lord, then why not take the rest as well. Must I wait–even for death.
Silence
Agnes: Calm down, Chris. That is all a little melodramatic. You are not physically effeminate. You are normal physically. I should know. What’s going on with you?
Chris: I don’t know.
Agnes: In all anthropology, there are many, many cultures that have not only accepted homosexual sentiments, but have incorporated it into the culture formally. Many ‘coming of age’ practices involve radical male bonding between older and younger males. Shamanism especially, often involves at lease a period of trans-sexual experience. Shocking for some, but liberating, I guess. The prohibitions are either mindless taboos or maybe with more thoughtful people, reactions against the formalization, as in temple prostitution, of things that should be, must be, spontaneous. The result of a welling-up from deep reaches of pre-sexual aspects of personality–a spontaneous shift…
Chris: God, yes! Where did you get that stuff? You must be taking philosophy classes.
Agnes: Yes, a few, and quite a lot of Religious Studies. And Jung. How about your dreams?
Chris: I am struck into waking by my dreams. Others seem to be walking in their sleep. Blown, whipped by a leaf-tearing wind. Washed by a current; untouchable, all embracing, an invading stream, invading my furthermost retreat. Invisible presence, yet blinding. Moved, carried, carried to the most real land of total embrace. I fear the flood, welcome the deluge.
Fire has eaten the veil and purged the sanctuary. One moment will fall upon the next. Creeping, cascading into this black hole of time until time is lost and a moment will neither follow or lead but perhaps extend into every dimension
… losing perspective giving a total vision of love.
I am struck into waking by my dreams,
(he whispered).
I think that it is this place. A holy place. It brings up all our issues. Maybe I’m having a breakdown. Maybe I should leave here. Leave them in peace.
Agnes: I remember once in Utah, in the morning just before sunrise I walked on a frost covered field. There was a new moon, just a sliver stationed above the blue, mist shaded hills. A herd of elk were resting and grazing in the pasture below the hills. Then, they ran. No, they flowed over the uneven field. They leaped, streamed over the fence- then they were gone. It was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. Yet, sometimes even that seems blunt compared with what I used to experience as the Eucharist in Mass.
Agnes’ mental rumination moves past her memory of that conversation with Chris:
Silence is the most consistently significant experience:
Red-leafed maples,
have cried the death of this year’s green delivery.
Hills are mottled gray
beneath the waiting
of a cloud-shaded day.
It’s as if something had changed
or was about to change…
within the silence
and the dying
within the creation of fall and spring
like a worship of holy things,
still in the singing of Godly things.
A rising,
a stepping over,
beyond earth and fall
to spring without the Fall
and that is all… and All.
The drops of precious water cast up, falling, always. Marriage of instinct to spirit- a ‘glorified body.’ The since-history-began conflict has purified each, prepared their reunion. The light is increasing, there is no way to say what I see. Empty space throbs with the presence, invitation, to a land of response and rivers, all flowing to the source. The physical is made whole. Is no longer transitional. Love fulfilled on earth rewarded with eternity, completion. His glance burns away blinding arrogance.
Monosexual
No, better monosentient. Omnisentience?
Alone. Fascination with the working of self. Alone to seek inside. What or who? God. When? Now. What strange mountain light. What mysterious image of passing flight… “Lies in the field once plowed… Dreams stranger than…” I am most interested in ‘self’ as an always-present realm for investigation. Not just myself or the superficial, egotistical self anymore, the facade that we make out of our talents, fears, and misunderstandings, but the unique self that God has made for his love. I have looked inward to dwell in that internal and inviolable realm within. This interior is one with the entire creation since they both share the same ground. The cohesive agent of all matter and non-matter, that force by which the universe is held in creation. That attention. The self to be discovered is the self that was created to dwell in Christ. To be this self is to be with God. From this base one can not only follow the first commandment to love God, but the second as well to love one’s neighbor as one’s self because that is exactly what they are.
I walk along the beach, there are no peaches or mermaids singing,
human voices only wake us,
fine; to sleep, to sleep
dreaming can be a tricky business as well
But now, since I’m awake, perhaps there is a “breast high shoal in which to dive, ” or “angels to beget” and work to do, painting, poems, books or the cloister. That enclosed exterior manifestation of the interior life. Yes, there is still a chance…
A word, Lord
give us a word, a good word.
In thy kingdom
remember us, Lord,
when you come
when you come
into thy kingdom.
The choir IS
finally quiet.
***
FROM THE DREAM PLAIN an integration of Chris’ and Agnes’ erotic experiences…
#1
The room was like a monk’s cell, lit only by a desk lamp. Like a monk’s cell but for the thick carpet, nice drapes (closed tonight) and the sexual experiment in this night’s life of the two occupants.
What had started as friendship between these two athletes who worked-out together, sometimes shared a drink after workouts, developed to rubdowns in the nude and finally, all-out sexual exploration of one another. But that is not entirely true. What is true about this will, I hope, become apparent soon enough.
The first time the rub-down slowed, continued up the abdomen, then returned; slowly, expanded, rotating a bit, pulsating, slipped, rested in the warm massage; the whole body and mind responded to these titillations; pulsating more and more fully, deeply thrust, choking, flowed spread through the golden short hair.
What place is this? What mountain light?
#2
They remained friends, confided that this would never happen again. They returned to the normal routine. They even agreed that they might go on with the rubdowns since they were sure that they had the discipline to resist such a pathetic temptation. This time the blond was massaging the black haired one, then… Perhaps they had hoped that it would happen like this as he leaped to straddle the other’s chest and shoulders and willing mouth.
#3
It was several weeks before they met again. The lonely pressures of the year’s course and exercises nearing completion seemed to invite the following lapse. There weren’t many pretenses now. In one another’s naked embrace. The black-haired young man returned the passionate assault this time, he wasn’t so interested in sex as the aggression, the desire to prove that he also could dominate… There was, as well, the need for the warm comfort of the physical ‘other’ and the battle. There was little love, so they returned to their meditations.
#4
They determined that the battle was not noble, the sex was meaningless, considering their vocations. But they would continue. Now, however, they would experiment. Full on arousal stopping just short of climax. After parting, there was the satisfaction as before without the desolation. Then, they would start with long meditations facing one another, then gazing into one another’s eyes, then slow exploration of the other’s body and mind. This would go on for hours and then a series of insights occurred to the black-haired young man about the other. One after another, deep painful truths about the other were revealed and communicated. These were later validated as true when the blond-haired young man underwent psychiatric analysis. These had come in the form of visions and images that needed interpretations. But such understandings were there as well. However, it wasn’t until he underwent psychoanalysis that the blond-haired young man paid any attention. Perhaps because he paid.
#5
The bed by the window of his top story room; the view about forty miles of highly shadowed, late afternoon, highlighted, creviced hills. He had seen her first in the meditation room. She got up from her seated position and walked across the room. She was trim, yet full, good-looking, not beautiful. He left his meditations as he watched her move across the room. He felt a searing fire heat a path from his genitals up through his whole body. They are in his room now. He is on top of her. He has removed her clothes piece by piece; caressing, touching, looking for her willing response and finding those special places of arousal. Her breasts are full, are full… He moves rhythmically against the crotch of her body. She moaned softly, then more and more fully. They had several meetings– good ones. Similar to the other. But there was no love, it became boring. They returned to their mutual meditations.
Ancient oak and oat cover the hills, tiny green blades issue between massive waves of yellow and gray oats, silent trees, stable to my mobility–stable. The mysterious relationship between the specific situations and their general context continues to mystify and attract me. It is most religious. Sin not sought, serves to drive one by its very imperfection towards perfection. Sin not flippantly sought, but fallen into, is a tool to polish our humility, clarify our vision.
As each moment passes, it joins the wash of history that is the same as the flood of our un-conscious and spiritual being. The flood comes into time as it flows through the recognition of our conscious mind. A religious experience is one that need not necessarily include either emotion or intellect and is such that it includes and transcends both. We view Being as one who views the vast ocean but only notices an oil slick. The ocean does not lose for our lack of vision. The only one who gains is the oil slick and it can’t appreciate the attention.
This is the place to deal with the religious issue. Life is the sacrament and creation is the voice of God. Somehow I intuit that the solution to the most deadly modern problem lies here.
Oh, this ungainly groping for the hand of God.
What light is this…
We are still being born. Art is artificial form that points to truth. Monasticism is artificial form in which people try to live a truth. Religion is a structure through which the Spirit might breath: whitened bones breathed to life, to fullness of human potential in the Spirit. Every particle of Creation and empty energized space is available to work our salvation. Not necessarily from a personal will, personification is a weak poetic vehicle, but because God’s living presence charges everything with his purpose. None of this alleviates the pain, the thrust, the need.
Hawk
Glide
Pause
Hover
glide on the hunt
Hawk undisturbed
by any secondary purpose or considerations
earned more than my admiration. Then
Terror- Holy Terror
Not ready for holiness
pray,
peace.
I feel blessed to have had this time to walk through a wood in the fall, with you. The day has moved in a ether of moist wood smells, the gentle clattering of leaves, the peace of light filtered through leaves green, leaves—
blood-magenta red
and leaves glorious dead upon the damp ground. Tomorrow, the wealth of the New York Art Museums. Next week the decision about my own vocation. Second week hence the plains of Texas, the Gulf of Mexico, the cities of China…
The eagle wings gently into spreading night. The black Cormorant screams its black whistle above the afternoon cliffs. Wave and wave of white-capped swells flood the sea. Light sails the wind carried waves. Having fasted and have prayed, I am ready for the feast, fresh and clean.
Learn the craft– This I vow
Learn the way– This I promise
Learn the art– This I swear
Of shape-shifting in fire
Of change in light
Of conversion in love
When the time comes,
to change
“There’s no place where it’s likely to go better”
It’s now
Shanti…
peace
Shanti.
peace
Shanti
peace
Agnes: My meetings with Chris during this visit to the Meditation Center were otherwise uneventful. I liked the Meditation Center very much where he was living. He was very into monastic practice and trying very hard for physical abstinence. So our meetings were, shall we say, limited. But good. We talked a lot, which we hadn’t done before. And not just about problems. I talked about Robert finally. And then the peace–peace that passes understanding.
SKY LIGHTS III
If I lived
among rocks and sand,
a white cage
in the driest land,
with a cold wind to tune my cry,
I would still know the rhythm of your pulsing light,
and breath its loving sigh.
I’m not sorry we never got electric
Weren’t meant to I guess,
I can enjoy the memory much more
When the green oats covered any spare place in southern california, in san francisquito canyon… Or with you in that filthy valley full of fornicating banks and used car lots spangled in prim wrapped banners of red and white strips—barbers gone Wiley. Wouldn’t have mattered– could have been in that flooded field with water up half way to the wide empty mouth/you squatting on top of that great drain without anything but a leather and fleece aviator’s jacket atleastyourpectorlswerewarm that night with moon slivers sliding down the trunks of oak trees and walking on water like the Lord!
Hmmm… that wasn’t you, but it could have been.