A Madness, or a Beginning

Somewhere south of the Appalachians where the accents get heavy and slow like molasses, winding through the hills in a white van with a peeled orange in my palm and here I am all worried about nirvana, trying to think what Jack means when he says this world is nothing but in our minds, our silly human minds too bound by our senses to make sense of this world that we ourselves create. But here’s the thing: my mind’s too scared to leave behind my body, and my bones are shaking in their sockets afraid to crumble into the dust that they came from, and the sky and the earth are both looking blue because it’s just so frightening to lie down and be swallowed up in their great eternal emptiness.

But emptiness is really just mindfulness, balance, the great celestial seesaw between consciousness and acceptance of our place in the universe—very small, really, very plain, but peaceful when we are awake and empty, like the space between a pitch and a melody, that vibrant silence that roars in our ears like blood but not quite. No sound but not absence. Peace is not the absence of war and silence is not the absence of sound, peace is a fragile teeter-totter, beautiful in a moment of balance.

Emptiness without awareness, that just feels like loneliness, the vast alone space in the egocentric center of what our selfish minds of stainless steel have come up with to describe what it means to be sad: alone with all of creation—our creation—too vain to recognize it as our own and call it good. We invented a god to do that for us. We can believe in fabricated deities but not the weight of the soul in our hand, the clarity of the air in our lungs, the cold of the wind against our baby pale cheeks. We invented science for that. All this energy, it shoots from our fingertips when we grasp with young searching hands at the bars of our crib and try so desperately to climb out, to see the world out there, to touch what’s beyond so we can prove that it’s real.

It is real only because we think it into existence. What beautiful minds we humans must have to give such beautiful form to the nothingness that embraces us in one big earthly hug. And like a mother to her babe—too young to speak but old enough to point while standing on wobbly ankles and peapod toes—our Mother Earth tells us shhh shhh listen dear one, the night is speaking to you, whispering her secrets and howling her fury and her voice is so beautiful, isn’t it? All these accidental world noises just the pale flutists of a symphony orchestra, sitting with their ankles crossed under their black skirts in the front row just before the conductor who glances down from time to time, but smiles at the whole, this great cresting wave of sound that rises and swells but rarely breaks but when it does, it’s the most beautiful of it all—the silence before the handclap, or the ringing of an empty auditorium where a musician plays alone, that silence more precious than a single sound, those pale human sounds that we mistakenly take as the proof of life and life beyond us—the clacking shutter telling tales of the wind that we will never see; the screaming asphalt under rubber tires as a car and its headlights rush through dark America is our a proof of motion; we hear the creaking of boughs in a wintry forest and we say we can hear the weight of snow. And to hear the world is to name the world, know the world, hold the world as if it were ours to own. Frail minds! Deafened by ego.

We say we know the wind, that it is ours to keep and hear. The energy of this world is ours to harness. The water that flows or freezes or floats in the clouds is all ours because we have named its chemistry, and by naming we really mean claiming because nothing can be ours unless we first create it, name it, so it becomes real through our senses so it makes sense to us—and that, so foolishly, is all we think we know.

But shhh shhh, says Mother Earth to a babe whose head is all full of abstractions that he cannot yet name or claim. If you are still and listen and you will hear the wind for you are the wind and there is no difference between you and the wind and the wind and you and the wind is you. Be still and listen to the wind within and without you. As you create the wind in your mind with clacking shutters and flying flags and desert storms that blind your eyes with sand, the wind too creates you. Who would you be without the wind? For if you are the wind and the wind is you than neither can go on without the other. Be still and listen to the wind.

The wind speaks of all that you know but know not how to speak. The wind speaks the language of the trees, of the secret inner places of the mountains, of the clouds who weep at the beauty of the world, of a single feather floating, of the ships lost at sea, their sails flapping in sounds for no one but the wind to hear. Be still and listen to the wind, the wind knows all of those languages, and so must you, for you are the wind and the wind is you. The wind sweeps her coquettish skirts all about this fanciful creation. When she laughs it echoes about in this vast emptiness. Tell me, can you hear her in the silence? Can you feel the silver peal of pure laughter? Will you laugh along with her, and laughing be glad, because in this nothingness there is peace, and in this peace there is gladness, and in this gladness, know laughter?

He who listens to the wind knows how to listen to himself without knowing himself or the wind, for he who listens to the wind does not name the wind nor does he name himself—naming would shatter the silence and the absence, and in this no-place of silence and absence would sprout the arbitrary seed of language, sown from the tower of Babel so no more would there be peace, just sounds, shouts, the attempt to name our own creation with our tongues, so loud that we forget how to listen. When man has gone deaf who then will listen to the silence? He will mistake silence for the sound of blood pumping through his temples, mortal, loud, beating like war drums and booted feet. And if man can believe that the shallow sound of his own circulation is the divine whooooosh of silence, then certainly he can believe that it is just and right to die for his country, to deprive his fellow man of that blood flow he counts as inner peace, he knows no better, he has forgotten how to hear, he has been listening to his organs groan for so long that he has gone deaf but he hardly even knows it. He cuts off his own ears for fear of the sound, for solace in the self-silence, for love to grow or fester in the bloodstream.

But love is no love when it rests only within us. Like the wind love must be within and without us. We are love and in love and love is us. Love is no love unless we take it out and try it on, not afraid of the sunlight like a potato that turns green, poisoned by oxygen. Love is no love unless we find it in everything and in our selves, unless we give it to everyone, unless we open our pores and accept it from everywhere like sunshine with no fear of sunburn or sunrise, just that glow when your body is your own and the rocks’ and the wind’s and the world’s—the eternal embrace when you are love and in love and love is you and you’re no longer afraid to give it away because there is no difference between me and you and she and him and we and they. We love one another because love is no love any other way. And then there is not loneliness but perfect balance in the emptiness that is really not empty at all—it is full of nothing.

Be still and listen to the wind, and you will learn how to love. Love is nothing more and nothing less than the wind and you. There is no knowing of love like there is no knowing of the wind. Clacking shutters or creaking bedsprings are just the pale imprints of some great invisible beast in the snow. We follow its footprints but never find the source and we are led astray of our own ignorant volition and intuition, wandering in circles chasing after love but in the end following our own footsteps in the snow, having forgotten entirely about the object of our search and staring endlessly at the ground and our boots so worn that the wool of our socks has begun to show, tracking the traces of an ever-invisible beast that, if we look only for its footprints, we will never know.

Clacking shutters cracking trees creaking bedsprings under a mattress meant for one, handprints purpled bruises on the soft skin behind the ears and under the armpits, the songs we have sex to—Sigur Ros or The Beatles or Radiohead or The Black Keys' El Camino. Or sometimes just silence. Lips and teeth and toes and fingernails. Walls that are always too thin, blinds that never keep out the sun or curtains that mimic the night. Where is the love in all this? We’ve gotten ourselves all tangled up again, sheets and limbs. And off into folklore, pornography and children’s novels, that invisible beast scampers, taking his footprints with him, leaving no trail for us to trace. We’ve drawn ourselves up a map that leads from where we were to where we are and back again, and so proud we are of our own handiwork that we never realize that we’re lost until that emptiness full of nothing starts to feel more like loneliness again and we wake up one warm December morning and realize that we have forgotten, forgive me, how to listen to the wind.

We mistook our racing blood for that great cosmic pulse again, and now it bulges against our veins and ribs with nowhere left to go. That’s what the wind was trying to say, but we just haven’t listened to her for a while except in a drug-induced sadness that feels strangely like ecstasy because they’re really one and the same, beautiful in their oneness. But when we clip them up like newspapers they don’t mean anything anymore, we throw them out of balance and tumble down the teeter totter after them, down and up again, up and down again, never pausing in the center where they and we are all one again. We take refuge in tragedy or comedy (which are really both the same, after all), and neither teaches us to love.

22 December 2011