1.
Some memories are hard to write about because you want to get them right. You don't want to misrepresent someone else, and you don't want to be misunderstood. It can be a painful memory, but it doesn't have to be. I've had very few traumatic experiences in my life, and the few that I have had, I haven't set out to write about. Often, they had been all but forgotten. Instead of intentionally recording them, they have crept up on me in the course of writing about something else, and once I noticed the pain breaking through the crusty soil, I was willing to follow it down until I discovered the root. That is where the best writing often is--in discovering a buried hurt which longs for release. Tears are shed, but it's wonderful to unexpectedly face your own fragility. It's like standing at Glacier Point in Yosemite, being so small among great granite monoliths: I am here, but very small among immensity, and isn't that amazing--to be aware of how frail I am, yet still thriving.
That seldom happens with me, although I don't shy away from the experience. Rather, it's because I've had a fortunate life. A few weeks ago in a writing workshop we were asked to write about metaphorical snakes, in other words, human vipers in each of our lives. I wrote something. I always do when given the opportunity, but I didn't write about human snakes. I couldn't; I haven't had any real contact with that type of people. So, instead, I said something like, I 've been hurt, sometimes deeply, but never by anyone who set out to harm me. That's true. No metaphorical snakes in my life. The very few people who have hurt me were my friends and still are. The only pain they ever caused me was by not loving me in the way I wanted them to love me at that time. Yet, I never doubted their friendship, and still don't, so I only have good memories.
Yet, I'm reluctant to write about past loves. I don't want to be misunderstood. I don't want Marci to think I have some void I'm trying to fill now. I also don't want the person I'm writing about to somehow think there are unresolved emotions that I need to work through. Writing about my friend Andrea was like that. I half-felt like I was betraying Marci in taking a couple of days to mentally once again drive down long, straight, gravel roads outside Denton, Texas with someone with whom I once desperately wanted as more than a friend. Yet, I'm glad I did it. This ultimately is a book of gratitude, and I would be disingenuous to skip over experiences which touched me deeply.
I think I have a fairly undistorted view of life. I lived in some pretty real neighborhoods in my twenties, heard the domestic violence through the walls, passed the homeless and prostitutes daily, spent some of my own nights trying to drink away deep loneliness, and dealt with my own addiction to pornography. I've always been aware that most of human history has been a story of war, bondage, death and disease, which continues into our times. I'm also keenly aware of the environmental peril we are putting ourselves through even as I write this. If I were to step outside my front door and look to the northeast right now, I would see a hillside covered in dead juniper, trees just recently killed by bark beetle. The beetle are always there. Long extended droughts, however, are new, and human-caused. The trees can't handle both the beetles and us. I worry about fire. It seems almost inevitable. Our forests are sick. They can't handle the massive change we've imposed upon the climate through our addiction to fossil fuel. The west is a vast funeral pyre to nations of dying trees.
Even so, ultimately, I view life as beautiful. I believe it's a designed event: a temporary experience to school ourselves in subject of ourselves so that we can be better throughout the eternities. Although this wasn't always the case, I think now that even if I thought I were just a chance occurrence, a happenstance of billions of years of lucky chaotic connections and evolutionary adaptation, I would still be stunned to find out I'm here now to hear my dog snoring and the fish tank gurgling while I prepare to relive a memorable afternoon with my old friend Michi almost thirty years ago. Isn't it amazing that most of us see, smell, hear, touch and taste, and most of all, that we are not only cognitively aware of it, but that we can replay experiences in our head years after they occurred? Or that we can imagine experiences which never occurred so vividly they not only become part of our history but the history of whole civilizations? Take Pride and Prejudice, Their Eyes Were Watching God, or even Seinfeld. That is so amazing--people who never actually existed become so real that they live on in the mind of not of just one person but entire civilizations.
In this light, to not go back an smile over a long conversation and good coffee with one once loved deeply seems like a crime. We are here to give gratitude to those who have touched our lives. Because I'm an insecure, jealous person, I don't like the idea of Marci thinking back on past loves. I want to be the one and only to occupy her mind. But it is important that we take in and are aware of this beautiful thing called life, that we enjoy our own personal, profound, little intricate niches that God has carved out for us in the grand cathedral of creation.
2. Here, now, the oak outside my window spreads tight branches of clumpy, little spring leaves silhouetted against a silver-blue morning sky hosting streaks of pink-tinged clouds. Equally vivid in my mind is the lightening sky east of El Paso, the lemony-tinge at the edge of the blue-gray hulk of the Franklin Mountains slanting hard down into the valley like a whale returning to her watery depths. I can see the edge of the great lit star on the mountain right above where the Rocky Mountains officially end. I can see the city lights spread across the valley beyond. I can see the plumes of smoke from the Chevron refinery lavender-blue before a silvery sky.
I'm up early, standing on a fifth-floor balcony above Mesa Street. I do this fairly often, although probably not often enough. These moments of watching the city awaken amaze me. I stand, holding my cup of coffee. I'm chilled by the morning breeze, anxious to get this Saturday going. I have a day planned with Michi, a day, which in my mind is to be our first date. I have tried for this Saturday frequently, but she is always working. Now it is here.
The morning breeze is crisp. No, it's down right cold. Too cold to continue standing here without a jacket. I may be in the desert southwest, but it's only April. I take one last look at the glow along the horizon, at the streaks of orange-edged clouds, knowing that in a moment, molten light will erupt over the low, jagged Hueco Mountains, knowing that within a few more minutes light will flood the entire valley, backlighting each and every silhouetted structure to the east with a golden glow along the edge. Sparks of light will ignite and vanish instantly, only to reappear and disappear again and again, as traffic moves in and out behind the shadows of buildings. The palm fronds in front of the cathedral will sway, glazed by the intense desert light.
Yet, I go in. It's cold, and we human beings seek escape from anything unpleasant, regardless of the reward that would be gained by staying put and experiencing the sting of existence. It's just how we are made: to seek comfort over understanding.
3. Last night I found out my brother-in-law Jeff filed for a divorce from Marci's sister Charlsia. It bothered me more than I would have thought. They live miles and miles away in Kansas, and we hardly ever see them, though we did visit on this trip we took in 2018 that I'm still writing about here. Why it bothers me so, I'm not sure. Perhaps somewhere deep down I know I was more damaged by my own parents' divorce than I realized.
I think what really bothers me is that we humans get so many things wrong in this life. By nature, we're always in fight or flight mode. That biological response, though saving us from temporary pain, removes us from what matters most--deep involvement in life. We're wired biologically only to preserve the self. That human instinct left unidentified and unchallenged robs us from not only from fully experiencing life, but also from our own potential. As I age, I become more and more aware we're not here simply to experience a biological response to life. We're here also to experience a spiritual response to life. That transcendence comes only through forgetting the self. The lesson we're to learn here is I am therefore I am not. Not that we don't exist. Not that we don't matter as individuals. No, not that all. But that we are part of something so much greater than the sum of our individual parts. My existence has meaning, but our existence together is what it is all about. Happiness is found not through protecting the self, but rather by letting the self go. The ego isolates us from creation; left to our own devices, we're consumed by it.
I'm four. Shadows move across the bottom of the tub. No that’s not right. Light moves across the bottom of the
tub—shadows remain, weaving in and out of the light. There is a window, I think, high and
horizontal on a cracked plaster wall.
The window is frosted, light unfocused, yet focused enough to still allow this
play of light and shadow across the tub.
I hear voices, metallic, yet warm, distant, perhaps from the apartment on the
other side of the wall of the duplex ringing through the faucet. I can’t hear what
they have to say. I’m probably too young
to care. To me, they sound like
congregations of angels, remembrances of a time before I was.
In my twenties, I felt incredibly disconnected from life. I felt this great void gnawing at me from inside. I'd lost contact with something that I'd felt so strongly as that four-year-old watching light and shadow move across the bottom of the tub. I don't know if I heard voices from the house next door while in that tub and they reminded me of angels, or if I actually heard the angels themselves. What I do know is that I was connecting with something transcendent--that I felt a connection to a love greater than anything I've experienced on earth. I've since wondered if perhaps I slipped under the water and was drowning and the voices I heard were not from the pipe at all. I have no idea if that's true or not. I get glimpses of that moment, but nothing concrete enough to say, This is what happened.
As I was saying, in my twenties I felt this great void gnawing at me. I interpreted the feeling that life felt fake as there is no afterlife and that life has no meaning. It paralyzed me. I couldn't finish college. I sought escape through addictions. I related to Hemingway deeply: "Our Nada who art in Nada, nada be thy name".
Biology is definitely part of our essence. We are animals, products of evolution. Fight or flight is part of who we are. But the reason life once felt so false to me is that biology is only part of who we are. I'm certain of this. We are also spiritual beings. That feeling we get of being acutely removed from life is a deep awareness that this is not our true home. Spiritually speaking, we are off to college; we get homesick; we want to return home. Our day to day reality--the one we're supposed to be so entrenched in--doesn't seem real because a part of us remembers there being more.
This is just school. Ego is what separates us not only from others but from creation. People yearn for childhood not because of some lost innocence. That is just the label we've given what we yearn to feel again. I can't remember a time when I wasn't selfish and didn't make bad choices. I've actually become a lot less selfish and make fewer bad choices with time, as do most. Innocence is the wrong label for what we yearn to return to in childhood. No, what I do remember from childhood is long periods of losing awareness of myself and just existing in a state of awe at everything around me, that feeling of being the transparent eyeball that Emerson describes so eloquently in his essay Nature. What people label as yearning for the innocence of childhood is really yearning for a time when they weren't so disconnected from the wonder of existence. If we're not careful, life numbs us to the reality of I Am. Ego is that great separator from the divine. And yet the panic of the ego is so strong that only a few, like Gandhi, slip away from its great, grimy grip and touch a deeper is.
Divorce, I believe, is usually nothing more than a fight or flight response. It's fleeing emotions too painful to handle--insecurity, numbness, boredom, whatever. But it's a response to fear. Escape.
Escape is not what we are here for. Living is. Divorce is a deep betrayal of our purpose on earth--to lose ourselves in the service of others. Family is that divine unit where we are forced into very close quarters with other egos, other wishes, other desires, so that we can truly learn to love and let go. When that gets hard, we seek escape, and through that escape, miss out on the ultimate purpose of life.
That doesn't mean divorce never needs to happen. We can only learn what we're ready to learn, but divorce is ugly for a reason. It's a betrayal not only of the family who gets left behind; it's also self-betrayal of the one doing the leaving. It's dropping out of college without obtaining that masters degree you were born to obtain. Life goes on, but it isn't the same. Deep wounds and permanent scars cannot be avoided when we flee from the obligations of our existence. We are here to push through hard stuff. That's where all the growth occurs. The rest is just distractions. Divorce is betrayal not only of loved ones, but ultimately, betrayal of love itself. It cannot have anything other than deep consequences for everyone involved.
Like so many, I am a child of divorce, a divorce which turned out well for all parties: two marriages that were ultimately better than the ones they grew out of and children (including step and half-siblings) who get along and care for each other. Yet, buried beneath all that is the pain of a failed union.
A Train following a great, gentle bend in a wide valley of golden grain suddenly goes off the tracks. Or so it seems, Suddenly. Perhaps it was headed towards that conclusion of crunch and carnage before it left the station, driven by egos that would not bend with the path. We scramble out of the wreckage and wander off to find new lives, even the little ones, not knowing which way to go, which parent to follow. One so small not knowing what in the hell just went wrong, baffled by an event beyond his capacity to measure the significance.
This is the story of the modern world, the story of us collectively. We live it, we repeat it, and we wonder Why are our children so damaged?
I can imagine a culture where the second child is served up and eaten on his/her fifth birthday. In such a culture, somehow everyone (except the second child in each family) would adapt and carry on. They'd have to. It would be the only realistic outcome. We are evolutionarily built to adapt to whatever horrific situation we are poured into. Prevalence of a phenomenon doesn't make it benign. Even in a war zone, the human spirit carries on. That doesn't mean humanity flourishes best under the bombardment of tanks and torpedoes.
Some marriages must end. Most should not. Our ego-driven cultures are eating us alive. Divorce is only one small symptom of a perverse system driven by the glorification and preservation of the ego, a system which we don't recognize as devastating to the human spirit because like the characters born into a world where every family eats their second child, we assume that because its prevalent, it's natural and right.
4.
I have this memory of my friend Michi sitting in golden light in a booth at Village Inn in El Paso, Texas:
She is squinting, looking out on a world that dazzles her, her hand raised, as if saluting, to shield her blue eyes from a reality outside too intense to take on directly. Normally, her eyes are piercingly sharp and drill into you with deep, unspoken questions. But right now, watery and squinted, they feel frail, paper-thin, translucent and unguarded. Although we've been sitting here all afternoon talking, I can tell at this moment, I am gone. I shouldn't even be sitting here. It's time to get up and leave. I don't know if she'll get up also to follow. I don't know if she'll pull out a notebook and start to write. I don't know if she'll just sit here and continue to gaze. I'm not sure she's even aware she has slipped away from me after a day of deep conversation. But I get it. I know that time. I know that light. My life has been dedicated to follow it, wherever it leads me. It's why I'm here in El Paso in the first place. I get up and say my goodbyes.
That day was perfect. It lives on alongside a few other perfect days. What made it perfect was the ease I felt sitting across from another person who I liked very much--just talking, dreaming and scheming about our futures. I don't remember everything that we said. I remember Michi said something about how she wished our generation had some cause to rally around like the Vietnam War. I have since thought how she got that wish. There are definitely causes to crusade. There is so much going wrong in the world currently, it's hard to even focus on where we need to help, let alone how we need to help. What's more important?--to save our crumbling democracy, our dying planet, or just any notion of objective truth? How does a writer even help in a country where half the population doesn't believe in facts, and the other half is dead to any whisperings from the divine? How does a writer make his or her mark in a world where everyone has access to the media--both as readers and writers--but How to put on your makeup or The perfect keto shopping spree attracts more attention than something as big as the Great Salt Lake or the Louisiana coastline vanishing right before our eyes. And then there is the realization for my generation that we are old and that all we really want to do is retire. Our time to make our mark on the world is for all practical purposes over. The world that is literally burning before our eyes is the world we either helped create or didn't put enough energy into changing for the better. If there is a way out, it will not be through us, but through our children and grandchildren. Hopefully we have given them the tools to tackle a reality too strong for us to handle.
Anyway, that day with Michi stands out almost in singularity, a rare moment of ease around another person. A moment of just being, not unlike what we mistakenly label as the innocence of childhood, not unlike what I felt watching light and shadow and water while hearing the voice of angels through the veil.
Perhaps, that is what this book is ultimately about.
Perhaps, writing this book was an attempt to do the impossible: recover time. It's not an attempt to capture the time spent living though-- No, not those magic moments, like that afternoon with Michi; or similar moments with my friends in Dallas and my brother; or the countless, quiet unspoken moments with Marci and our boys since then. No, those moments stand strong. They are solid, eternal, real. No need to recover them.
No, it's the lost time that I now realize I sought here to recover. All that I lost because of a divorce I was too young to remember--the life I never got to live because I was always protecting myself from hurt from the loss of a father who never gave up on me, just his marriage. But, as a toddler, one can't sort the two out. One can't figure out why a dad once there is there no longer. There is a rip in the soul as gravity pulls an enormous part of you away out into space to follow your father.
For years some unknown part of me floated out there beyond my reach, cut off and crisp in eternal light, yet unconnected, a rock suspended above the earth it belongs to.
There’s a little black spot on the sun today
(That’s my soul up there)
It’s the same old thing as yesterday
(That’s my soul up there)
There’s a black hat caught in a high tree top
(That’s my soul up there)
I didn't know what the Texas trip would mean to me when we set out for Green River, Utah in September of 2018. I didn't know where writing this book would take me when I sat down to write that first blog post upon our return from our thirteen-day trip to and through a state that is so much a part of who I ultimately am.
But now I do. Naming has power. I needed to name a hurt I didn't know I had so that I could move on. Although the road goes on forever, this particular journey is through. The energy that pushed my pen forward has run its course. There is much I never covered. I had planned on writing more about my friend Lucia, about one lovely night across the border and a magical journey along the edges of Lake Superior way, way up in Minnesota. I had planned on writing about lonely days in all but empty topless bars and driving a 1981 Datsun Maxima wildly through the desert while listening to U2's Zooropa. I'd planned on writing about getting drunk Halloween night at a party with Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top and refusing to believe it was him because it was Halloween and people show up to parties in costume. (In the version I tell, I repeatedly pull his beard, saying, "That ain't real; this is a costume!") I planned on writing about bailing out of a cab in Juarez, Mexico because I had spent my last dime catching a bus back from Casa Grande. All of those would make great stories, but that is not what a book is. A book is about discovery, about finding out what you needed but didn't know you were looking for. Books fill a need in others only by filling a need in the author. Good books are not planned, they are created.
I needed to name that I regret of not being more connected to life. I had my friends in Texas--very good friends. I had my places in Texas--sacred places, at least to me. But I always felt so damn disconnected. I hated God and I hated myself because of an isolation I didn't understand. I probably still don't. Perhaps I never will. But, at least it's named.
Dad, when you left me, you left me un-whole. That is not unique. It's profoundly common. Fathers do it all of the time. But, for me it meant living for years with a shyness I didn't understand.
Texas is where the void grew wide enough I had to construct ladders and set them across the gulf. Those ladders--the art, the music, the poems, the long drives, the yearning to be complete--ultimately became who I am.
All I am is because of you: poet, writer, dreamer, husband, father. All I am not is because of you: socially at ease, driven, successful. For the first time, I'm thankful for all of it.
I'm also grateful Texas gave me the space and distance to find not only myself, but also my way home again.
It was a good long journey. Both the thirteen day road trip and the eleven years I lived there. Many fine sights, many fine people. Mostly though--just heat and sky and a highway home--the world the way I like it.
References
Police, The. "King of Pain." Synchronicity.
By Sting. 1983.
