a pass into the past

Those mountains behind us still look the same (snowier in winter, of course; this was likely August, 1969 or '70).

The three of us have changed in appearance. Our toy fox terrier, Pebbles, is long gone. How she reveled in vacations every summer.

I think we all reveled in them. Long drives south to Oregon, sometimes farther. Camping near rivers, high in elevation, or at sea level, across the highway from the beach. We had a tent, air mattresses that were flat by morning, an electrolytic heater, a lantern. The lantern would hiss when Daddy carried it inside after I'd snuggled deep into my bag, eyes stinging a little from smoke, ready to feel the quiet as soon as the light went out. All that remained would be my parents' voices from their side -- muffled goodnights, a sigh. Darkness deep enough I couldn't tell for sure whether my eyelids were open.

Inside my chest heartbeats resounded in eager joy, awaiting dawn.

collage

Got a good report today from my doctor. At 53, I know there are many negative symptoms the doctor looks for, and if they're absent the feeling is "thumbs up," "you're pulling a A," and so on. But, though I've sometimes idolized them, doctors are not gods. So I will be grateful for their bloodwork and exams, while happily recognizing (as often as possible) my days are numbered. My life isn't my own; it's an amazing process within the organism of reality, the push-pull of truth and error, involving turns toward insensible corruption along with revolutions back into warm rays of ultimate goodness.



Recently I jotted down, "Reality is not a performance. It is an interaction."

This, if true, is all kinds of yes in my book. It makes art better than I ever imagined, because now all art is about Something. Pointing and beckoning to Something I have always known had to exist.





I just knew art couldn't save me. Oh, I tried to make believe it could. I tremendously pushed for it being a thing I could build and make happen. Art on a platform bearing an image of, well, me. Sure, I was convinced art was the expression of my future reality, not the savior itself. But I needed to establish art, make it real, even though I hadn't gone to the future to see it yet. Much mental energy was spent, long days of imagining, choosing, structuring, in light of trying to make this establishment.

If art exists already, however, lighting the way to Something, then I am immersed in noticing art. I am on a journey to engage with art. With, for instance, a tree.









A tree does not save me. But its leaves and branches and girth and location and the birds alighting in its branches and the sunset behind it -- all these aspects of a tree, which is of the highest forms of art, invite me Somewhere, toward Something.



So does a Van Gogh. So does The Lord of the Rings. So does the Old Testament.

Don't forget flowers.









All kinds of yes.

bright voices

For a year I stood in services at the Orthodox church and listened. There is a sense in which it was like standing in my back yard, taking everything in.









The difference was, I had never planned nor desired to enter into the particular "yard" of Orthodoxy.



From my earlier vantage, from before February 2011, the Orthodox appeared like those churches in which people group in order to venerate an institution. I had done my share of that kind of grouping and venerating. My wildest dreams didn't hold a picture of a gathering around an organism, a living Person, in the midst. That was supposed to happen in the future, in the Kingdom still to come. For me to believe there was a nascent way in which it happens now was against the rules of reality as I interpreted them.

Yet I stood listening for a year, and I pondered. There were voices in the corner, in the area of the room the Orthodox call the cliros. Human voices expressing not only whole passages and books of Scripture but the context, the story, which was going on in the landscapes and times those books and passages were penned. As if the wildlife and plant life and solar and lunar life and texture and wisdom of the nonfiction account continued to live.



As if the history that followed a certain century were also caught up in and carried along, new leaf on deep river, with the events of one story. As if what I'd only ever before known were chapters fragmented from the true telling, scorched and shriveled by bonfires licking the hem and the bone.



A few years back I wrote an essay about my Dad and his friend, the writer Richard Brautigan. In it I expressed my regret that no photograph remains of the two of them together. There are only stories. Knowing my dad, having grown up in context with his person, I have no doubt of the veracity of any of his tales. I hear his heartbreak and his joy and I naturally believe.





This is how it happens, whether the offering of an account comes from rivers in the Willamette Valley or from roads traversing the Mediterranean world.

Even when the first ones to relate the amazement, back in a certain century, are people of lowest societal standing. Even when they are women who approach a tomb bearing myrrh.

Their voices still ring.