Just Ask the Basil

            I was harvesting basil from the garden when I realized just how wondrous life is. Another example of how when I put aside what I assume to know and my habitual ways of defining experience, entire worlds are enlivened, quickened as when sperm and egg are joined. The garden is a likely and befitting place for this to happen. For many years I looked upward for truths. Later on I looked inward. And now I find treasure on the ground.

            The basil I was harvesting is a variety called Genovese Basil. The smell is deep and fresh and welcoming. The leaves are large and very green. It brings to mind springtime and laughter. In the same garden there is kale, garlic, onions, marigold, cabbage, and others. They are all different from each other and they are all beautiful and vital in their own distinct ways. Yet, all grow from the same dirt. They are watered from the same hose. And they all reach up toward the same sun. I think about this and all the explanations of how this can be seem to be after-the-fact descriptions, feeble and watered-down attempts to dampen and mute the wondrous and miraculous happening right here under our very own feet. Life can be scary when it escapes out of the box. Behold one more example of creating God in our own image for the lack of courage to be. Ask any basil plant you happen to know.

            To use an analogy to help me share my experience with you, it is as when light passes through a prism and that which has no color manifests color. We could say that the garden is a prism for the will to live, and the seeds are storytellers. Isn’t this what they do, quickened, they tell stories, just as our own lives do? And each story, born of life and light beyond our means to see becomes something of its own, distinct and vital, molded in space and time?

            The smell of fresh basil is awesome. An entire universe beckons. And beyond that there are others.

            

Dance

            You are at the winery for a performance including flamenco dancing and poetry.  An older man with a strong, deep voice reads poems of Fredrico Garcia Lorca mixed in with some of his own work inspired by his years of living in Spain, some of them while the dictator Franco still ruled. He recites Lorca’s verses in Spanish and repeats them in English. His own are in English. All are drenched with the love of freedom, of earth, sun and wind. There is a guitarist playing classical and flamenco music. He plays intermittently during the readings and more boldly when the dancer steps up, a woman dressed in a long red dress trimmed with black lace. She wears black, large-heeled shoes for creating her own music against the wooden platform. She is passionate and attractive. She too recites poetry during her dance, all of it in Spanish, all of it from the hand and heart of Lorca. It is late afternoon and children are playing under a sky darkened with summer clouds. There is thunder in the distance. You are surrounded by hills, one of which is adorned with two wooden crosses leaning precariously atop the razor-like summit. Grapes are planted nearby. You are drinking wine made here. You are with a few friends.

            It is quite a day: wild, spacious and passionate. You feel a thirst. It is both a wanting and a having. It is boundless and undefined. It is more real than a thing or the wanting of a thing. It is simply a thirst. There is no fear, no thoughts, no meaning, at least not yet, but when you do come back to yourself, you feel an empty place within, not like that boundless thirst but an aching and a need. Will it be satisfied and filled one day? How or who? When? You think of a lost lover. You are grateful but lament anyway. Life has changed. The thirst is not the same nor is the drink as deep. Is it age? Have you been hurt? Have there been too many attempts at things and relationships that you tried fooling yourself about? And it is hard not to wonder if you had never known the kind of love that satisfied that deep ache for a while, would you feel this way now? You think, “ I need to find what I need within myself, not out there, not with another.” It is a thought. You know it is a good thought, but today something has opened and thoughts seem irrelevant at best and a distraction the rest of the time.

            The poet reads, his voice sounds like the heels of the flamenco dancer against the wooden floor, strong and decisive. Then he evokes the defiance, fear and anger of a bull facing a matador. Late he takes you into the Pyrenees Mountains as a refugee from political oppression. People die. There are people who are like the bull, looking at their oppressors unflinching until the last of their blood flows out, who say, “ I am here. You may take my life but not my thirst.” You become the poet and the musician singing of these tales and hopes and they become firm beneath your feet. You stand on them. You see death as one color of many. You are beyond fear once more. You love the color of the sky, the touch of a lover, the taste of wine, the dark earth and the smell of rain. You feast.

            She, the dancer, spins and taps. She is tall and her facial features are as sharp as her figure is full. She reaches out, then up, her arms twist around each other and she spins and stomps and looks beyond you to the hills and the vines, the river and sky, and she recites poetry in what may be the most beautiful language you know of. You know some words, but not enough to worry about meaning. Unburdened of meaning you are free to listen to the sounds of words, to her voice and feeling, and it is good. The guitarist watches her; she looks at him; they do this for you.

            You are grateful for being thirsty. You are grateful for those you have loved. You are glad there are young people who bear and raise children, who dream of what life can be and have the strength and time to build, and farm and create. There is redemption and healing for you and the world. You remember how little you know of your own future, or for that matter, of the present. Is your thirst a remnant of the past or a seed waiting its season? You don’t stay with this- it is too confusing, and it is a good day to drink wine with friends and enjoy the poetry, music, and dance. You see life as a deep dark well. We drink of it. We thirst for its water. Thirst and water, they are like dance and music: there is no negation, no satisfaction at an ending. They commingle in their yearning like the arms that reach and twist and spin round and round. Thirst is the beginning and end. Together there is fullness. We dip our cups and drink deeply. We have friends. We are not alone. Friends that sit with you and drink with you and want you to have your fill even if it cannot be so, for thirst drives life down to the smallest of our cells. There will always be an empty space and there will always be a well to drink of.

            They have finished. The dancer relaxes and looks around her. You and others applaud. You drink and talk with your friends. You feel good.

One Man, One Abortion

            For years I took refuge in being honest, but after being confronted by an anguished lover who insisted on integrity, the sanctity of honesty paled, and what was once a refuge now resembled a hideout. It was not a comfortable lesson but it stuck a chord of truth and was without resolution: I am still working at it. If it has gotten any easier at all, I suspect it comes as a consequence of aging. I hesitate to think I am much wiser. I try though. It is hard. I get lonely at times. I yearn to be close to someone. I want to touch and be touched.

            Am I being honest? Am I acting with integrity? If I can intuit that someone will be hurt by my lack of commitment or inability to love in the way they are yearning for, is it fair for me to love them in my way, to give what I have to give even with well-intentioned disclaimers? Is it better to love and be hurt than to not love at all? What of fulfillment as sexual beings and of social needs?  Could it be that I am making too much of things? Am I afraid of the unknown? Or of being loved?

            During a time of crisis, years later, with these questions burning with relevance and demanding to be answered, I came to a realization that much of my yearning for sexual fulfillment was actually a yearning for something else. I was needing to express a tenderness, a soft heart, a wanting to love that I didn’t know how to express in any other way except wordlessly and naked. It was a powerful and palpable realization. I came away from it with a resolution to be more expressive of this soft spot of mine in everyday encounters. I understood how unfair I had been to place so much meaning and need upon my relationships with women, how unfair I’d been to the women, how so much need generated vulnerabilities and fears that were at the root of much strife. And seeing all this helped, and for a while I thought that perhaps I had resolved a lot of my questions, but I had underestimated once again the need to be close, to touch and to be sexual, and so, the questions remain.

            I share this story with you. I’m not sure of the connection with what I’ve said above except that it reminds me that what we do and how we do it has consequences. While I don’t often have remorse for things that, in hindsight, could have been done better, I do for the things that I knew better of while letting baser emotions rule the day. This remains as one of the things I have remorse for.

            Briefly, we had known each other as friends years before when we had remade our acquaintance. We were both uninvolved and welcomed each other’s company. I was 48 years old at the time and she was 38. We shared a lot of interests, had fun, and enjoyed the physical intimacy. While I had spent most of my adulthood as a father and husband, she had always been single and was childless. She believed that she was unable to conceive since she had never been pregnant in spite of not using birth control and sure enough, after some time, she became pregnant.

            She was a very gentle woman. Sometimes she seemed timid, and sometimes emotionally frail. She had fought a lifetime battle with depression with the resolve to do her best and find strength in kindness and service. She knew well the lay of the land of the emotional self: there were good days and there were bad days, but always there was tomorrow. She did not ask much of others yet life was not simple for her.  I think that just like most, if not all of us, the bottom line was simply the need to be loved and accepted. I liked her. I found her attractive. We had common interests and had fun together. I did not love her in a way that inspired commitment.

            What dreams were awakened in her and what meaning and hopes pregnancy begot I have no idea. In hindsight I can imagine that she saw the love that she was always looking to give someone, of feeling needed and important, of finding that purpose/meaning to life that can be so fucking elusive.  Could it be that she wasn’t destined to be always alone? Was there a family in her future? And because I did not try to imagine these things then, I am remorseful now. That’s why. Because I was too scared and selfish to give her vision and voice the space to be heard and seen and I am ashamed of this. I wish I had the courage then instead of this drivel now, but I didn’t. I argued that life was hard enough for her without being a single mom and I was not available. I had other plans; lofty plans of my own. Damn, I wish I would have at least listened, not just to her, but to my own heart and what may have been the voice of a higher being.

To be fair, I could have well ended up feeling that abortion was the better option anyway, that I really wasn’t available, and that she wasn’t strong enough and lacked resources, but the story would be different even if the ending would have been the same. She aborted the fetus with my encouragement to do so.

            I think I had ambivalence about right to abort a fetus and as the years pass I probably tend more to the pro-life side of the controversy than the pro-choice side. It never has been a very popular stance among my peers. Regardless, the issue has always been characterized by ambivalence and uncertainty and when the rubber hit the road I became pro-choice. It is another point of remorse, that I didn’t really give voice to my ethical self, and by implication and circumstance, nor did I bear witness to the life within her womb. And again I cannot say if the outcome would have been different but I might have grown with the situation rather than be diminished by it. How we walk the path is what counts, and each step counts. This step could have been taken with more integrity because I knew better. I capitulated to small needs and fears. It was a lost opportunity to nurture something within myself and to be a true friend for someone, who even if I did not love, whatever that means, was someone I share days and nights with, and that, has got to mean something.

“But the thing is, my friend, that once you read it, it is no longer about me but about you.”

           

            

Old Joe

            He was of slight build and in his early seventies when we began to know each other. He was shy, timid in the way that people who have come from other places, languages, cultures, and times can be. Perhaps he had seen too much in his lifetime. He carried a lot of the past with him. Still, he loved life in the simple ways that were strongly flavored by his upbringing on a farm in Lithuania; simple meals, being out on the river fishing, the affection of friends and family, and identity with his religious faith. But, as I said, he carried with him a lot of heavy memories, dark memories born of war, persecution, homelessness, and guilt. Life is not compelled to cooperate with a man of simple desires, especially at that time in the small nation caught between the giant war machines led by Hitler and Stalin. His eyes would sometimes retreat into that darkness and remind me of how much I didn’t know.

            His family owned the house we were renting. When we all came to an agreement to rent, Joe began enclosing in part of the carport for his use on his occasional visits to Pilar. As our friendship grew, we told him that if we were ever able to buy the property from his son-in-law, he could maintain his small ‘apartment’ for his own use for the remainder of his life. And this did come to pass, and he did continue to come to Pilar. As devoted as he was to his family and transplanted community of Lithuanians, he seemed to find a peace along the river that even the church fell short of providing for him.

            It became a routine for me to join him for coffee in the early mornings while everyone else slept.  In his little room we would breakfast together on coffee, bread, cheese, fish, and the ever-present zucchini bread his wife would bake for him. We grew close; very close in a relationship that spanned the very different worlds we were born of. But there is more to be gleaned, a significance that went way beyond our affection for each other. I measure it not by sentimentality, but by the power to affect change: in this case, healing and resolution on his part, and an understanding that I still struggle to articulate on my part, even in hindsight. Beneath the swirls and eddies of the river we both loved to be near there are deep currents that drive it to the sea. They are deep and they are dark. Life happens in places like this- in the earth and wombs, and in places we can’t see with our eyes.

            It happened over the course of years that he told me his story and I listened. What made me his confessor was my Jewish heritage and his burden was of the horror done to Jews in his homeland in those dark days of war. He lived in a place and time when not choosing sides was not an option. The Russians confiscated land from the farmers. The Germans were exterminating Jews. You were a communist or a Fascist. You supported Germany or Russia. First one army would come seeking out their enemies, then the other, back and forth. Some survived the nightmare. Others died in the gulags of Siberia, the concentration camps of Poland, or on the soil of their homeland. Joe witnessed the horror. More than that, he played his assigned role. His family suffered at the hands of the Russians. Their hope was with the Germans. They helped.

            The few details he shared were enough. It was hard for him to relive these memories. He talked and I listened. I did not judge. His suffering was palpable. He lived with an incredible amount of guilt and I do not think he spoke of it to others very much if at all. Those of us never put in that kind of place need to be grateful. For Joseph, besides being his friend, I was the Jewish people by virtue of my birth and as such I accepted his grief, I listened, and forgave him for the horrors we humans are capable of, at least as much as I can forgive any of us, including myself. In war no one wins. Some lose less than others.

            Over the years he seemed to grow more amazed at how things turned out for him, at the closeness we all shared. In his broken and heavily accented English he would sometimes try to express an understanding he had gained, an understanding he was experiencing of the connections between all of us and of the way that things have of seeking resolution and evolution. I am not sure if he saw our relationship as an example of this or a precipitating factor. He was not a philosophical kind of guy. He was often left speechless. Much more was said by the sharing of ‘medicine’, breaking bread, or with tearful eyes and the shaking of his head.

            I am glad he was able to come to Pilar well into his eighties. He needed to walk along the river and spend time by himself in a simple way. It was his apartment until his death. I visited with him in the hospital shortly before he passed away and he seemed ready to move on. Blessings brother......

PEACE by Gary Lark

Some dark windless night

peace will come

It won’t tell us it’s here.

It will be there

when we look up

and see its face

for the first time

at the table

sipping soup,

passing bread.

           

Harry

            I have been hiking and I am tired. I lie down on the edge of a grassing opening in the forest. Spring lingers at this altitude and the ground is covered with blossoming dandelions. The surrounding forest is of aspen trees and they are newly leafed out and vibrant with that particular bright green of spring. The leaves are quaking with a gentle breeze and the treetops sway as if dancing to a hymn they sing to themselves. The creek is high from snowmelt and I hear its song clearly. It fills the air. It smells good here. It sounds good and is beautiful to see. The sky is an incredibly beautiful blue edged by the distant dark green conifer-covered ridges, snow-capped peaks, and the nearby aspens.

            I am really tired and lean my head against a tree trunk and close my eyes. I could sleep but think of my grandfather Harry, my father’s father, and one memory leads to another. He died like this sitting against a tree trunk one night in a wooded area of Pennsylvania. My father had gotten him a job as a night watchman in the same summer camp where I was working as a waiter. He had recently retired from being a plumber in Brooklyn. It is strange how I have gotten to know him better through my memory than I did as a child and teenage. He didn’t interact with us kids much and my grandmother would most often visit by herself. He was a gruff sort of person. I was growing up in white suburbia and he had a lot of dirt beneath his fingernails. His blood runs through me but I didn’t have a heartfelt understanding of what that meant while he still lived.

            He was born somewhere in the Ukraine and escaped the persecution of the pogroms against the Jews at the beginning of the twentieth century. He was a child then. I heard the telling of their escape and immigration to Canada and, for some, to the United States from his mother, my great-grandmother, one of three great-grandmothers of mine that I was privileged to know. My father and I were visiting her in Toronto. They traveled at night, dependent on others to guide them. It was hard and dangerous. One of her sons drowned at a river crossing. Harry was carried across the current on someone’s back.

            Later in my life I would reflect upon and lament the scarcity of shown affection in my immediate family. More hugs would have been nice, but that just wasn’t the way it was. Now I get a glimpse of something else; of a tree growing through persecution, of immigration, of economic depression, the hustle of New York City street life and of people struggling for a better life, one that avoided some of the sufferings they lived through. And I see hugs and “I love you”s packaged in providing a stable home life, a decent education, and regular visits to a doctor or dentist. My gratitude to all those whose blood and hard work, care, and love enlivens me now. Thank you. I include the nameless man who swam with my grandfather on his back.

            Harry’s job at the camp included keeping us teenage boys from getting over to the girl’s side. It is an old story. Remember the Trojan horse? Where there is a will there is a way, and he probably never stopped any of us through either his design or ours. Sometimes we traveled through the woods and sometimes we would travel by ‘borrowed’ rowboat. The girls always welcomed us and we would spend hours whispering and making out in their cabins. I remember clearly seeing him sitting up against a tree in the dark of the night, sleeping or smoking a cigar. It might have been that I saw him the night he died of a heart attack. I might be merging memories but most importantly I remember him being happy out there, away from the city and whatever his life in Coney Island was like. I see him being content and at ease as if that long journey from the Ukraine was always headed to this spot on the shore of a lake under the night’s stars with kids all around, a cheap cigar, and no one to pester him. It was a good death and it is a good memory. Go with peace grandfather.

Cruising and wondering

May 28, Dixon

            This morning I drove to higher ground, but this time it was not to walk in the forest but to drive through the villages, to be with the happenings of people. Before doing that I walked a short distance from where I am living to the studio of a local painter who was having an open house. His paintings were of landscapes, old homes, and small isolated churches. He grew up here and his worked emanated a love for the country: proud, yet simple. The colors were vibrant as if every day, if not a spring day, was one celebrating it nonetheless. I am sure we could have talked more than we did in spite of having just met, but there were a couple of well dressed, older women who wanted to talk of art, of artists they knew, and looked to be collectors. He looked a little weary about the task at hand.

            I drove slowly on back roads through relatively isolated valleys, mesmerized by the landscape and the sky. The irrigation ditches were full, the fields green, and there were still fruit trees blooming. I only wanted to be open, colored by the light and scented by my surroundings. I trusted. There was refuge. And beauty. And gratitude.

            I thought of how we are molded by the land. The earth is truly our home. We are the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the sun. We are many and we are time.

            I can relate to people who live close to the land. By close I mean they let the land speak to them instead of making something of it, adding meaning, be it sacred or mundane. Either way it is desecration, and, to be honest, I find those hiding behind the veil of sacredness the ore distasteful of the two. It leaves a bad taste. One has not yet learned to listen, and the other is too busy listening to his or her own chatter.

            There is that diversity here: an old adobe or log home next to a new Santa Fe style home with the latest styles and technology. I wonder where we humans are headed? I pass two houses where friends lived and have since died. I see young people and old people. It is a holiday weekend and people will soon be gathering.

I Go Blank

            In a writing group I participate in, we were prompted with the following: “I go blank every time I...” I would like to share my response of then and some further ruminations of now.

            “I go blank every time I see a headline like the one of last week; ‘Gifford shot in head, six dead, nineteen wounded,’ and that moment of incomprehension, in contrast to the event itself, is a testimony to some unarticulated belief in the goodness of people and appreciation in the celebration of life and love.”

            I come back, over and over again to that moment when the props fall, the lights are turned on, nothing adorns and all is naked. It is a moment of truth, stripped of justifications, moral judgments, emotional persuasions, and intellectual dissection. Even a glimpse is precious, even if it is painful or bewildering.

            “In that blank moment there’s a small gateway to a long, narrow tunnel through the sarcasm, anger, disillusionment, and sadness of my psyche. I am touched, and then it is gone, sealed once more with all those layers I hide behind...”

            There are questions that drive my inner life, great questions, great being defined by as having no definitive answers. Some have fallen to the wayside, having lost relevance in the passing of time, but this one looms large like a seamless, smooth, steep iron mountain, impenetrable and without handholds or footholds Simply, how does one keep a tender heart amidst the challenges, the pain, the violence, and the suffering of the human world? How can we keep coming back with an open heart and arms, year after year?  It is a spiritual question and quest for me, and that momentary rent of my persona is just enough to show me the path. It is like a lightening flash on the darkest of nights in a forest. Oh yes, over there...

            “...all those layers of truths, of commonsense and acceptance, all adding up to what amounts to a surrender to the obvious.”

            Courage, I am told, is not being fearless, but of being fearful and moving forward nonetheless. I am old enough now to know, with my heart as well as my head that I am mortal and the bigger chunk of my life has already been lived. Friends have died; too many of them were younger than I am now. Will I embrace the voices I hear or not? Will I fulfill my path and honor that which deeply yearns for expression? Yes or no? What is there to lose by hiding? Or to gain by crawling out of those moments that tear holes in my armor? It is hard. I appreciate the help of my friends. We need to help each other.

            “But I don’t really give up. I pretend, and at that, not very well.”

            Thank you for listening to me. May those hurt one way or another that day heal and go with peace.