3. We are damaged, but brilliantly. See how our scars weep music.
4. Riding the busses, we felt sad about our lives, that short stretch between black and black where we don the clothes of the world, disguising ourselves as wonders.
5. Riding the busses, we prowled our nihility like tourists.
6. Years ago nothing could touch us. We were safe from the mazurka of inner-city mayhem. Snapping our fingers we let our heavens collide, as in love! Years ago we were imparadised! Married to a tour bus of our own making.
7. Now, passing the pink and white bodies of newborn animals left for dead by the side of the road, you said, “This is what happens when a civilization turns off meat, when animal flesh is reviled,” and a man seated across from us nodded his head and said, “Ironic, isn’t it?”
8. As ever, there are many slides into sediment and we never know which moment will contain an earthquake. This is our song. We sing about our lucky escapes.
9. Still, I pointed out the window: “Look! A parade!” The bus slowed and the crowd on the sidewalk cheered. A wedding procession sped by.
10. We felt—metaphysically speaking—happy.
4. A
1. Trundolatry. The worship of change. Much easier to live with.
2. A new practice, yes. Relatively speaking. With a bunch of improvements you can’t see. Like the notion of time. You don’t get stuck in the long-term. Diversion remains intact.
3. Agreed. The word worship is a problem. More it’s the belief about what’s great. An exaltation of the short-term.
4. Well, that’s difficult to say. But essentially it’s the rapid wearing out of interest. That’s the idea behind it. As the moment changes so does the interest.
5. True. But somehow the moment defines itself. You don’t have to think about it. Just ride the bus. Check out the view. There are lots of moments and lots of interests. Take your pick.
6. You could say that. But what’s the problem with surface? It’s a fast ride so you have to skim. Everything’s on the menu.
7. Whatever floats your boat.
8. The usual things. Any kind of star. Sometimes food, a colour, a country. Sometimes yourself. There’s no telling.
9. Well, we just stop paying attention. We move on. There’s nothing mysterious …
10. True, again. But interest in this communication is fading. There’s something else …
5. TEN POINT WEIGHT
1. I heard the cry of agitated crows and shielded my eyes, peering at the sky for reasons. A turkey vulture, black and red beaked, was attacking a crow’s nest in a nearby tree. From the crows came a terrible cry of panic. Higher up, a pair of eagles lazily drifted.
2. At the same time, an ambulance backed out of the yard next door, discreetly removing the body.
3. You said, “Did you know that eagles mate for life?” and this thought gave me comfort.
4. It was the same comfort I felt at a party while watching a woman with a bottle of Echinacea dispense twenty drops into her husband’s martini. She had the look of a zealot, dead serious, humourless. She said, “I’ve personally taken charge of Bob’s immune system.”
5. You cringed and headed for the drinks table.
6. But I faced a wall and cried. After twenty-six years, which in married terms is a lifetime, I’d take charge of your immune system, too, if you’d let me. Take charge like it was a medieval fortress and I was Captain of the Guards throwing spears and fireballs at bacteria, multiplying cells, attacking hearts, killer thoughts.
7. But you don’t believe in invisible things, refusing to prostrate yourself before another description of doom. “The immune system!” you declared. “Who dreamed up that metaphor?”
8. When the ambulance removed the body of our neighbour, a cry of panic settled mutely in my chest like a twenty-six-pound weight dragging me closer to you but down, as well.
9. When the time comes, death offers a shopping mall of possibilities, from small deaths to large. Everyone knows this. But who amongst us is not tempted by a final, gaudy flourish? Some give away their money, hoping for a monument. Some become hysterically kind in an eleventh-hour bid to curry favour. This much is observable.
10. And this. It is early June, warm and bright. The pink climbing roses are in full bloom along the side of the house. The lawns are still green. There’s a strong breeze coming in from the sea. And poplar leaves are snapping like flags at a fair.
THE HEARTSPEAK WELLNESS RETREAT
After the guests had left we did, you know, Feng Shui. We had this book, Instant Feng Shui, that did away with the three thousand years it takes to understand the practice and made it, well, instant. Feng Shui has to do with energy flow and balance and harmony and it had just been discovered in the West. It’s the latest ancient thing. And this book, Instant Feng Shui, boiled the practice down to a few handy how-to’s which we appreciated, being on the short side of a three-thousand-year-old tradition. The book had a checklist called “Tips for Serenity” which was a kind of fast track to cosmic understanding and this was another thing we appreciated.
Feng Shui is this ancient Asian practice, a very old practice, we understood, even more ancient than Moses or the Greeks. The most ancient practice there is, practically ground zero as far as enduring, ancient practices go. More ancient than stone worship by the Druids which, when you think about it, was really just a bunch of people in good-looking hooded robes staring at boulders and getting cold at the sunrise.
So we consulted Instant Feng Shui after the guests had left their, you know, negative karma about the place, their critical, snotty comments and their foul moods making it difficult for us to sleep and generally carry on in the elevated, serene way we’d been so diligently practising.
The guests, a pair of hefty, middle-aged sisters from Winnipeg—nylon leisure suits, brush cuts—had rented the suite sight unseen from our ad in Nature Now! It was the first ad for our suite, renamed The Heartspeak Wellness Retreat—: “Experience the life-enhancing calm … ”—and the sisters were our first guests.
On the second day of their three-week stay they began complaining. Where was the ozone-filtered water? What was Eco-friendly about a track house set in the suburban wilderness behind a strip mall? And where, they demanded, with three noisy preteens in residence, was the calm?
Soon after they began directing their malevolent energy towards us from below. We could actually feel it invading our sacred meditation time like a seeping mould. It took the form of chills and crankiness and black-hearted nastiness amongst the upstairs inhabitants—Jason and the boys, the household pets, myself. We could actually, you know, experience our perfect Now being contaminated. The sun may have shone for the time the guests were with us but their souls were imprisoned in a permanent thundercloud.
The dog’s vicious dislike of the guests was their fault, of course; animals know and despise negative beings. Ditto for the droppings left by the cat on their kitchen floor. The suite’s repeatedly overflowing toilet, the rips in the sheets, and the rock thrown through their bedroom window were further examples of the negative attracting the negative. About the broken window, we’re certain it was not caused by one of our boys. More likely it was a message from a large, rock-hurling eagle and doesn’t that speak volumes? Eagles, as everyone knows, are emissaries, ancient emissaries from the spirit world and they always make an appearance when negative forces are at the boil.
It’s a blessing, I told Jason, that the guests paid for the rental in advance. It was an even greater blessing when they cut short their visit by ten days and moved to a motel in the city. Their names were Arlene and Bonnie and they left in a huff. I tried practising Tonglen while they loaded their rented Mazda. I tried practising Tonglen very hard. I stood on the front porch, screwed shut my eyes, breathed deeply, and concentrated on sending wave upon wave of loving kindness to those red-faced beings. Any time you encounter blood-boiling rage, Tonglen is the kindest thing you can do. Never give irritating paying guests a refund.
Af
ter they’d roared out of the driveway flinging gravel everywhere we meditated for thirty minutes. Then we consulted Instant Feng Shui. The book told us how to cleanse our home after unwelcome visitors have left. First you put two heavy stone jars on either side of the front door to usher in new beginnings. Then you light firecrackers. Set off firecrackers in the places where the offending guests have been. And this setting off of firecrackers made sense to us. Tiny explosions clearing the air, shaking things up, restoring harmony. Throw open the windows, the book advised, and light about two dozen firecrackers, mainly in doorways and in places where the guests have slept. And violà!, the book promised, clarity and peace restored.
But we encountered this big problem. It was mid-August and just try buying firecrackers in mid-August. There’s some law against it. Some law that says you can only buy firecrackers during the last two weeks of October, for Hallowe’en. So we wondered, what now? Because our need was pressing—bad karma headaches, pictures falling off the walls, general imbalance and disharmony in our home, the human and pet inhabitants gnawing on one another’s tranquility.
So we built a bomb. Five bombs actually. Five little bombs trying, you know, to approximate firecracker size. But, of course, this was difficult. Jason and I visited Home Hardware for the raw ingredients, the dynamite and fuses and something to put the bomb-making materials into—tubing, we decided, plastic or metal tubing. And we encountered difficulty in the form of suspicious looks from the hardware store clerks who seemed to be thinking, you know, that we were dangerous, and while we’d certainly be the first to admit that there’s plenty of things to be dangerous about these days, animal testing being a major scandal in our opinion and generally, the abuse and neglect of cats and dogs, well, this was not one of those times.
I said to Jason, after receiving a blast of ill wind from the pinch-mouthed clerk while purchasing bulk dynamite and filling out all those forms, I said, what we need to do right now, right here is Light Body. That’s when you imagine, you know, a protective white light surrounding your body. So we did that. We said to the clerk, “Excuse us!” ran outside to the parking lot, got in our car, and practised Light Body. We got comfortable on the front seat—shoes off, lotus position—and took several deep abdominal breaths. We then visualized a protective white light emanating from the tips of our skulls and surrounding our bodies, top to bottom, side to side, like an egg.
When we returned to the hardware store inside our newly created, shimmering eggs everything was serene and delightful. In no time we completed our purchases.
Jason later said in affirmation, “You know, while I was practising Light Body it was amazing. A red light travelled all the way up from my perineum to my sixth Chakra where it became the most beautiful purple colour.”
Jason, formerly in real estate, formerly called Gerald, followed his bliss last year and now does ear coning for a living. “I can’t explain it,” he’s often said of his transformation, “but I felt this overwhelming call for ear wax and candles, for helping people with sinus irritation and tinnitus. I feel like I’ve got a Date with Destiny.”
For a fee he’ll also read your aura. So when he tells you he sees purple he means purple. Thanks to meditation, yoga, ozone therapy, Touch point reflexology, zero-balancing, his Shamanic drumming circle, and a Vegan diet, Jason’s become a mild, pony-tailed, teddy bear of a man and all the women, his clients, just love “Ears by Jason.”
He’s funny, too, but in a joyful, non-judgmental way. When everyone started doing Random Acts of Kindness, Jason, for some reason, misunderstood the word “kindness,” the way you can misread a headline and get a completely different meaning. He started doing Random Acts of Kinkiness and, for several days, handed out condoms and yellow nylon rope to complete strangers. While sharing with me the hostile reactions he’d received, I discovered his error.
“I don’t understand it,” he said, mystified. “Handing out all those condoms and ropes, I really believed I was touching people’s hearts, rekindling our oneness, our kindred spirits. It felt wonderful.”
What also felt wonderful was our successful practice of Feng Shui to rid our home of the bad karma left by the guests. Our homemade firecrackers, our mini-bombs, were each about the size of a Cuban cigar. For safety’s sake, we made sure that each one had a fuse long enough to travel from inside the suite to the far end of the back yard. There, the boys and Jason and I gathered in a healing circle to ask for the Earth Goddess’s blessing before lighting the fuses. And when those bombs exploded our relief was instant. Peace and harmony just came flooding back into our home like from an unleashed dam. We were so overjoyed we danced in spinning, you know, cosmic circles around the back yard—Jason and me, the boys, the dog.
The municipal firefighters, when they arrived with their sirens screaming, were amazed that there’s been so little damage—only one window broken and some incidental burn holes in the bedding. Otherwise there was just this pervasive, healing, sulphur-smelling smoke everywhere.
A month later that smell was still with us working its Feng Shui magic. That is, until we received a registered letter from Wisdom Inc., the company in Phoenix, Arizona that was giving Jason and me our correspondence course in Enlightenment. It was the letter we’d been waiting for. Although we know we’re supposed to live without fear or hope, we couldn’t help feeling disappointed by the letter’s contents.
We’d taken the course, completing all the chapters, writing the tests, pondering the red-inked replies, and redoing some of the questions, as required. We took it all very seriously. Then, when the final exam had been written, we filled out the application form for Graduate Postings, hoping for some exotic background in which to parade our newly awakened selves. Our passports were in order; we’d designated a Power of Attorney, and packed our bags. In short, we did everything that was required, including finding foster homes for the boys.
Now came the reply: Overseas posting denied. Candidates insufficiently evolved. Recommendation: Stay where you are. Take another course. Better luck next time.
We were stunned. We’d been posted to our own back yard.
Jason was momentarily, you know, livid. He’d been hoping to practice ear coning internationally. He started seeing red everywhere and not the good kind of red, either. “I’m forty-nine years old!” he cried. “I paid all that money to go through all those bleeding levels and I have to remain here?”
“Maybe it’s a test,” I said. “Some kind of ultimate test.”
“What isn’t ultimate?” he snapped.
“Exactly.”
We unpacked our bags.
Temporarily, for a nanosecond of my emptied Now state of mind, I was disillusioned. I was having misgivings about the Human Potential Movement and nearly changed my name from Ambika Crystal, Divine Bodywork Pet Counsellor, back to Debbie Thornbur, preparer of income tax returns.
Fortunately, Instant Feng Shui was on hand with its sage advice. “To promote happiness and prosperity and to hasten your journey along the path to Enlightenment,” I read, perhaps a little too anxiously, “place a clear glass paperweight before a mirror in your hallway. At the exact same time each day, stand before the mirror and place your hands on the paperweight. Now, with shoulders relaxed and head erect, gently smile at your reflection. Keep smiling for forty-five minutes. Do this for twenty-seven days.”
This has now become my principal daily practice. While awaiting results, I’ve been writing in my “Vision Journal” as instructed by the knowing people at Wisdom Inc. Our first assignment for the new course is this: We are to imagine that the house we’ve lived in for eleven years with the boys, the dog and cat and assorted possessions, is entirely New. We are to experience each moment with awakened eyes, as if the next moment after that will be one of blindness, deafness and/or sudden, violent death.
This is what I wrote this morning:
Daybreak. Light frost. Sky along the strip mall washed pink and grey. Brushstroke of cloud stretching east to west. I, Ambika Crysta
l, a human haiku in a velour dressing gown, am throwing toast crusts from an upstairs window to the scavenging crows in the backyard below. The cat sits at the side of the lawn, her jaws vibrating at the sight of the birds. Oh, get on with it, kill the bloody things, I want to scream. And scream.
Startled by what I had written, I raced back to the mirror. A double dose of Feng Shui should help.
Now I’m smiling. And for added measure, chanting “Ohmmmmm.” Smiling and chanting at the same time is not as difficult as it sounds. Try this when the journey’s not moving along, you know, fast enough.
BRAVE NEW DESIRES
We wrenched the show away from Hemingway. Talked the reaction out of Parker’s handle. Were walking by when Arbus hurled herself from a nine-volt battery. She fell on us but lived to create a pièce de résistance.
Plath required a stone casket. We hired an army of contrarians and sealed every dormer in the vicinity of her enormity. All Joplin required was conveyancing. Look, we told her, we’ll make sure Everyman loves you; you can end your romance with pilots and borders.
Van Gogh needed perverting but in the end was grateful for our dialectic; he found it calming to know his vision was disturbed. When Poe barricaded himself inside his campaign, we slipped a pistol through his campaign door, begging him to give the worst another tsunami.
Soon afterward we filed a warrant and listed whitening, flight, hostesses, rosaries and rules as the usual suspicions. We locked evolution away.
Woolf was the hardest. We waited at her sickness for years and when the time came, hauled her away from the cerebral. It’s because of her we eradicated all seams.
Seams are brave new desires now—horizons, separations, shape.
DARWIN ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE
The fire at the Drop-In Yoga Centre was quickly brought under control. There were a few moments of fire-fighting heroics, then it was over. Then it was back to normal, back to the soup, back to the personal cop show. Your good guys, your bad guys. Your bang bang bang.
Down the Road to Eternity Page 14