Dancing on the Stump

Is this really what I want to bring home with me from our lovely visit to the big trees - this humiliating evidence of human small-mindedness, the sixteen drunk couples on the stump of the tree that was born in 600 A.D. and felled and skinned and shipped to New York in parts, the rest bowled on in the 1890's. Not really, but the pit in the stomach lingers. (or is that still from too much pie....)

Anyway, the memory I'd rather keep and will is from our friendly late full-moon walk through the giant sequoia grove - the path easy to walk in the milky BRIGHT light, the bears likely asleep, the sequoias, some of them still there towering towards the moon, their 'slow consciousness' as Joe once said, abiding. Then my small-mindedness, smallness, briefness, was a pleasure to experience. (Why is that so comforting, I continue to wonder...) The dance someday will end, the road will return to impassibility, invisibility as the world turns round (even we can't stop that, try as we might) - night and day at once, future and past for a moment meeting as just present which will still speak as it does at this moment, without us, or the moonlight even- the slight rustle from the higher canopies settling gently onto a perfect world.

I am, indeed, Thanks-giving...
How lucky my life. How much I love it here.

courage & criminals

On one hand I have people I love - some of whom are being asked to live with death sentences of one duration and difficulty or another and who are, to a one, so brave and moving in their courage, I am humbled and amazed by them.

On the other, it is impossible not to notice that our runamuck capitalism begins to require that to get at all ahead you must go on and screw someone else - hard (but just in little increments, of course. just here and there): Get in/get out/get on. As long as you don't know the person and it's just about numbers, why not? Just a little indiscretion. All legal. Here and there. Just look what we can do... (the example below is minimal but $30 - $50+ dollars x a million or 3 million suckers makes for a damn nice vacation somewhere).

So. . . Screwed this morning with not so much as a kiss goodbye:
I just called to get info on a credit card. There was a message (from Target- BADBAD Company. For shame. I'm surprised. And unhappy because I like their homewares...) that they had changed their 800 number and referred me to a 900 number.
I called that number, but couldn't proceed without an access code, having been give NO clue what that might refer to. I hung up and tried again. Same thing. I think I just did it twice. Maybe I called a third time to hazard a guess and enter one of my forty three user passwords. So, anyway, I hung up again and called the original number back and - because I was busy with my hands - heard the message repeat four times with that 900 number to call. After the fifth repeat (which surely almost no one hears) there was a message saying it cost $9.95 each time you call that number!

Mother fuckers!
Are these people really going to live in such a different world that they won't be affected when the whole giant pretense of American comfort and promise falls like a 3,000 mile corn souffle and we're left individually sporting that gaunt, knowing look of those who have lost all as we slowly dry up, sick and uninsured, in gated communities that are mostly foreclosed and literally going to the dogs?

Individually we all try so hard, it seems. Even with the little things. I've lost my cell phone how many times and always had it returned. In NYC one cabbie drove in from Bensonhurst off-hours to give it back. I don't know anyone who would steal from their neighbor. I don't know anyone who isn't...good.

So what happens in the collective that exempts us so easily from morality? Why are so out of control - collectively? Why, when we can have the financial viability of this country's citizens nipped away at in aggregious interest rates adjustments and over-limit fees and... disappearing billion dollar airlifts to the middle east (beside the point?)... why don't the increments of our kindness also add up to more than a drop in the bucket.

We must hope they do. Perhaps we have to try even harder, do more than survive the brutal ruptures in our lives, extend our bravery even beyond our impressive individual tolerance and grace in living with our deep individual challenges.

Until we can turn the tide with the will of our collective humanity, we are a cancer on this planet and the world is brave and beautiful in trying to survive us.

dog in the library

When i first see him he looks good, but is very bearded and I overhear him saying he's heading for the Yukon. Not long after I see him again (in a library where a local musician is playing in the lobby; the performance is broadcast on pbs and it looks fun on screen, but in the lobby where he's playing its just me in my sweats, watching it all on my laptop. Quite dull). Later, my friend approaches me most directly in a nook of the library. He is quite truly a vision - his skin so young: kind-of blue and peach and gold, his face clean-shaven, his hair a radiant gold. I try to minimize how schleppy I feel I've become and find myself telling him that I regret just being friends, that I regret not realizing he would have been the best for me, the kindest by far. I didn't know he was so beautiful. Just as I speak the connection vanishes and it is clear he will remain with his dutiful wife. Moreover, he has my dog who is still alive, still my beautiful Zoe. She's gone up and down the stairs with him so she must be okay. I lay down with her and curl around her huge body, her heavy head flopped over my arm - just for a second exactly as sweet and bonded as it used to be. My friend goes home eventually with his family of now three children and my dog is following after on the street. I think she is looking for me but I can't be sure.

I can't tell if I am recognizable.
I have no idea if I have mattered at all.