Your worth as a member of the human species and a resident of Earth is not defined by how much money you make, what possessions you own, your looks, your social media, or even by what you achieve.
It is defined by the shape you leave behind in the world. It is defined by what you were able to contribute to the sphere of experience in your life.
Some people earn monuments and accolades.
Some people add to the pool of harmless joy in the world.
Some people create a fire of goodness and courage that burns away the darkness.
Some people leave an irreplaceable void, sometimes within nothing more than a single other person.
And some people toil under the light of the sun or the light of the moon, nothing but nature bearing silent witness to their work.
Ultimately, whatever we do is meaningless. That is the way of the universe. Yet we must do it nonetheless. You matter here and now.
You did not choose to exist, but you must choose what shape you leave behind in the world. You must. And in deciding not to choose, you still make a choice.
For every human that has ever existed or will ever exist, this is everyone’s same charge, same vocation, same calling. This is the one thing we all share.
Reject it at your own peril, because in doing so you reject not only your fellow people, but your own humanity as well. You reject life itself.
We are islands to each other, yet unceasingly bound together.
What fires are kindled in your mind? What waters flow in the deep and secret places of your heart? What shape will you create?
As a human, you have within you the gift of conscious creation. It is what you live and what you pass down and what you leave behind.
I speak to all people. I speak to you. The power of this calling is in your own hands. Choose.
Sometimes, there’s a place where the grass and the sage, pine and cottonwood, rocks and scrub and a cactus or two — maybe piñon and mesquite and yucca and so forth — they all get together and make up a kind of existence that’s mildly intoxicating.
Places like this are important if you’re extra-sober to begin with. Say if, for example, you happen to be born that way.
Little breezes ruffle and shift the scents around. Sometimes the wind really kicks up and does its best to rearrange your day.
Mostly, these areas aren’t burdened with an overabundance of trees or houses. You can see the horizon. You can breathe in deep and feel your mind flatten out. Memory and time stop fighting each other. Your worst enemy might be a fence or two.
I don’t generally have anything against concentrations of trees or houses — or people, for that matter — but I need to be out in the wide angle, out in the open kind of wild.
You can see the storms coming in of an evening. Hear the wind searching. Feel the thunder unroll, look at the lightning crack. You can see the sun breaking in yellow through the mist or dying down red in the clouds, and you can watch it all coming in and get yourself together.
You can give yourself to it. It’s like getting ready for church or mass. Like a wedding or a funeral.
Folks tend to be fearful of a skeleton. Something about bone laid out bare to the weather, I’d wager. Out there, you get reminded you’ve got one inside you. You were born with it.
Things in the land and things within us consummate and live and die all the time. Out there you can feel it, know it for what it is — a sort of honesty uncontrived.
You know how headlights, when you’re near a desert highway, pan across material like a searchlight, casting incoherent shadows past whatever they happen to catch –
sage, cactus green and praying to the rain, hitchhiker’s drugstore cowpuncher boots, corrugated lean-to slumped up against the wire?
Well that isn’t happening just yet.
Coyote isn’t on the wander right now.
The sun is still walking, heading west, knowing exactly where to go.
Daylight melts over dust and hardpan, yellow, umber, ochre, neon hot pink.
Memory melts like daylight.
Those clouds, see. That’s what I mean. Cirro… cumulo… cirronimbulus?
It rises, dark and thick in the gloaming. It drinks the melted daylight.
A rush of cool air. Scattering of sand. Silent stab of arced lightning. One million volts in a terawatt cycle.
Thunderstorms drink memory like daylight. They amplify. They make ready for the night.
You should come tell me what you think.
Silence. Rumbling over the distance of the earth.
Silence.
Cumulonimbus. That’s it.
You’d have gotten that quicker.
Silence.
Scent of the dry before the wet.
Burning gold at the end of the sunwalk underneath the dark tower.
There. Coyote’s on the wander. Hungry.
The semi-truck moves past and headlights cast no shadows beyond a ghost.
Note: a version of this article previously appeared in the Winter 2019 issue of Mélange Magazine.
The storm-dampened scents of Dauphine Street gave way to something old and familiar as I opened the front door of the used bookstore.
Here in the heart of New Orleans, as in all places I visit, I’d inevitably found myself seeking out such places. Without a particular itinerary, and driven by multiple cups of chicory coffee, I found myself somewhat regrettably using Google Maps to suss out the oldest and most promising of these shops.
The smell embraced me immediately as I entered. If you’ve ever been around old books for any length of time, you know what I speak of. It’s somewhere between the dust and age of old houses and a bottle of vanilla in a woodshed. In these places, worthy treasures are never guaranteed; the calming scent of nostalgia certainly is.
Nostalgia, in this case, being the simple chemical reactions that physically occur in books as they age. As time passes, the wood pulp in a book’s pages breaks down into various organic compounds. Lignin, which makes up a generous portion of the pulp, produces acids, which in turn dismantle the pages’ cellulose. This process produces vanillin, benzenes, and hexanols, contributing vanilla-, almond-, and floral- and organic-like smells to the book itself.
This is partially what makes up what some lovingly refer to as biblichor, or “the smell of old books”. By comparison, the recently rained-on street mentioned earlier was imbued with petrichor, or “the smell after rain”. Ichor, the Greeks said, is the fluid that flows in the veins of the gods.
Given that it’s generally the hardcover books made between the 1830s and 1980s that used the pulping and adhesive processes necessary to produce what we consider biblichor, you’ll find less and less of it in volumes printed after the late 50s (when the paperback craze started to take off). Only in recent history have we begun to use materials and processes that deny the production of the scent of nostalgia.
Scent, as we know, is the most powerful accessor of memory- but also of imagined memory, of that nostalgia. You can feel it, in these old shops and old locales. Your mind, after skipping through your own memories, feels as though it’s touching the edges of others- of memories not your own.
There’s something nearly indefinable about old bookshops, something that draws many of us in, I imagine, without a specific purpose in mind. It goes beyond mere charm. This must be one of the reasons we seek them out, for what in the modern age affords us the rare luxury of true purposelessness?
That lovely lack of purpose, I suppose, lands right alongside the lure of the historical- history that can, in these places, end up being far more personal than a tour or museum. When we’re led by a guide (or by ourselves) to tours or museums, it’s with the purpose of encountering something enshrined- something important.
When we find ourselves wandering into a used bookstore, antique store, or the like, it’s not only the apposite lack of purpose that entices us, but the other side of the historical coin- things forgotten or discarded. Things left behind. The unimportant. While monuments widen our gaze within past ages, the trinkets and relics of the individuals from those ages do far more to transport us, and in turn, to ground us.
Among the wayward, proliferate stacks of the old books I navigated around in Dauphine Street, I uncovered a 1961 printing of the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran’s Sand and Foam, nestled in with several of his other works. One of Gibran’s trademark small, unassuming tributes to the meaning of language, art, time, and love, I found inside the cover that this particular volume had been gifted from one college student to another:
December 1962 Merry Christmas Brenda, Gibran says that the obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply. I hope these two books will help you see the obvious more clearly, as they have me. Best Wishes as Always, Gaye
On the following page, Brenda has marked herself as the owner of the book, along with an identifier of her residence at the time: Dorman Hall.
A bit of research shows that “Dorman Hall” was a dormitory at FSU in Tallahassee, built in 1959 after the Florida State College for Women converted to a coed institution in 1947. Researching the modern layout of FSU reveals that the original Dorman Hall was demolished in 2015; but a newer version has been built in its place.
I wonder if Brenda’s still around- happy, retired, perhaps writing a book of her own in her mid-70s. I wonder if she and Gaye remained friends. I wonder if she remembers this book, and whatever meaning it held for her.
Old bookstores make you wonder a lot of things, the least of which involve yourself and your place in the world.
Of course, with time being the great equalizer, this means that you’re as likely to find hidden treasures in one old shop as in any other. This would be proven to me somewhat humorously two years later, when someone pointed me to an even larger stack of old Kahlil Gibran volumes at a library sale in Hot Springs, South Dakota.
The territory of nostalgia is a mostly level playing field, no matter where you might find yourself. Whether it’s milk and coffee, old stone and fresh rain, or old wood and older books…
If you’re reading this,
then please,
sit
and rest awhile.
Before entering,
be aware that
in spite of
[__________]
you’re actually
a very good individual,
regardless of
[__________]
you are forgiven
and are loved by numerous people,
and that even
[__________]
will not defeat you;
though it will try.
If anyone or anything tries to
[__________]
you, or
[__________]
for you,
recall the following:
– you are forged from stars
– you are made from oceans
– you are composed from music.
If you ever get lost,
refer to your map;
in time you will attain
[__________]
and
[__________].
So sit,
and rest awhile-
ye have come already so far
and into the dark beyond
ye must now go.
under the naked lights,
in the depths of the dark,
awkwardly, utterly, ridiculously,
or as smooth as you are
(or think you are);
after work,
on vacation,
on pavement,
on grass,
on sand,
on water, if you’re that good;
dance alone,
or close with another;
whether free, flowing in the air,
or guilty and perhaps weighed-down…
dance with no alibi.
There are little things
in the rooms of wood and brass and string and spotlight,
in between the rock and the roll and the jazz and the jive;
little things with no price-tag
that hammer together the house of the soul.
Did you know
you’ll most likely attend an equal number
of weddings and funerals?
Yes, you may have to tidy up afterwards…
but dance in the kitchen, for heaven’s sake!
What exactly do you think you are?
Friends drove out beyond the light pollution
to witness this miracle-
out to where I came from,
to where my heart
lies beating in the wilderness
where it was forged.
I did not go,
and I have no answers for their questions.
This pen feels like a neutron star.
My soul has flown south for awhile.
That heart, out in the mountains, seems faint-
so faint from here. I strain to hear it.
I wander to the edge
of these suburbs at midnight.
I have no answers for their questions.
The distant voice of the highway
hums in the dark.
I cannot see the aurora, but what did I expect?
A thunderstorm is gathering, though-
quickly, insistently, intently
to the west;
cutting between the solar wind
and the city lights.
It is silent save for crickets
and I force this pen to move,
because I have to.
I have to.
A scent of summer flowers and water cleansing
pulses
nearer.
I force this pen to move
and I have no answers for their questions.
I cannot see the stars,
but they are where they are.
I cannot see the aurora,
but it dances on the face of the earth.
Rumbling echoes fading in the dark.
Electric arclight stabs and spits and forks
staccato into the cloudwall rising.
I strain my ears to listen.
I breathe.
I force my pen to move.
Heavy it may be;
but how else-
how else to hear your heart beat,
to hear you breathe,
somewhere out there,
under a storm of your own
(and, perhaps, a solar wind)?
How else
to hear my own heart,
softly,
singing in the mountains?
A stray dog stops for a moment,
at the edge of these suburbs,
in the rumble-echo,
in the rising summer wind;
we regard each the other in silence.
Finding no questions to ask me,
he resumes his journey without looking back.
through the rainfall,
the sunpierce,
the pine and spruce;
off the trail
of the acorn and ash,
of the prairie lily,
of light and water dancing
on needles and leaves;
past the hidden spring,
yawning cavern,
past limestone spires
and granite punctured
up from the heart of the earth;
in the forest and veldt
of the snake and the lark,
and the ram and the elk.
Your lungs are thirsty,
your heart, hungry,
your mind, tired—no?
And so we pass
into the land of the gods
of life and death.
But what else to be said?
What else,
as we tread perdition
through our doctrine of the night,
seeking a horizon reckoning?
What verdict given?
Shall I say,
“hold your sins & dreams
as you would your breath,
hold them now
until the coming dawn!”
?
No.
It is all ashen
and ground to dust.
Even if you cannot see
that the flame
I carry in my heart
could burn this place clear,
I still must lay it
before this living altar.
Listen.
Birds are singing in the thicket.
There is more music,
deeper in,
deeper still.
There hums a resonation.
What else, then?
What else to offer beyond this—
this sad
and staggering presumption
that I can somehow relay
this sanctification
to you
in words,
as though I have the skill,
and the right?
For I am no priest
and this place
has no need of one.
Here then,
let me lay down a permanence
for you,
and in full artistic grace,
describe instead
the peace
and eternity of this place:
(the song my mother taught me)
__________________________________
Yea, though I walk
through the valley
of the shadow of Death,
and you lament your simple self,
and shed tears in your unadornment-
wait,
for I too have cursed my own shadow.
So let us instead consider
things that carve and pierce,
let us feel the ground
upon which we stand,
for you only know the walking dead
by their tranquility,
and the truly content
by their graves.
Speak to me your nightprayers.
And watch.
We will learn of knots
and grindstones,
of prows and lathes,
of ecstasy, of aurescence,
of momentum.
Let me then become
the bride of the earth,
and the groom of ships
that plow the rising waves;
let me be as one
who stalks and slays fear,
who preys upon the darkness,
who bathes in the falconfall
coup de grace of our prisons,
who devours
the terror in midnight
that chews and rends and swallows
your soul.
Let me sit then at the table
with your demons-
see how I’ve prepared a place
for them.
Now,
pay attention,
for the night is flayed open,
and the maw widens in hunger.
Can you learn to tack into the wind?
Can you sail into the storm’s embrace?
Can you carve the roil,
and bring your sails unfurled,
riding this deathsong
to strike through thunder’s inertia?
This is the only way I know
to cut off the black hand
that holds your heart,
for I can see your song;
it carries out
past the edge of lightning
sunset into glory.
My dear,
your heart is a spear,
and a compass-needle;
your soul is a sailor,
young and bold,
come to spit in the Devil’s eye;
you are Incarnate,
you are Destiny.
I have offered up my lamentations
out of the dust of Eden
and painted them into the night.
I have trodden stars underfoot
and crushed them
into the wine of singularities.
(so my younger self told me in a dream,
reaching forward in the temporal
as I now enter the embrace of the world
and age into my slavery)
I’d pay good money to hear what yours told you.
Shall we build a fire then, in this desolation,
and brand me with the aspect of shadow?
How shall we brand you?
If Pride were ground into powder,
I suspect it could then be an anointing
upon this corruption;
perhaps even an atonement-
simple enough, yes?
Enough.
Show me then-
come, show me,
while there is still some serenity;
let us examine your engines of the dark
and the nightmare-fuel within
(are you watching closely?
energy equals matter times the speed of light squared).
Drift you now to the far shores,
sleep, and dream,
drift with your own permission-
for a song of this magnitude radiant
shall fly only to constellations;
was meant only for the season of sowing.
Do you not see how alive you are?
And do we have an according then, you & I?
For as I see all hands open
in these songs of light and dark,
and music woven out of silence cleansed
in the cloudwalk ascendant,
purified in the cosmotic night,
washed in the blood of the earth;
so do I see you dare to direct your gaze
up.
Now
take my lantern
and I’ll hold your hymns-
say it’s a good trade.
(it’s a good trade)
Behold then:
the field opening verdant in its laughter,
bathed in blossomscent,
how even the black dirt and red clay
sing under the sun
in their rushing to meet the mountains;
for winter will come again,
and still all will sing, still all will sing.
Come,
for the river is deep, and wide;
the water clear, and cool.
I tell you my grace and yours was bartered between us
in these bending waves of wildwheat.
Have you forgotten?
This is an accord, in fact,
with the song aureate in all things.
I know you can hear it.
The dark washes off so easily,
so easily, my love,
so easily.
There was an old father in the desert,
a long time ago,
(have you heard this one?)
who stretched his hands toward heaven,
and told his disciple
as his fingers turned to dancing fire,
“Well?” she asked, green eyes smiling under a mass of white hair. “Do you want the story… or the truth?”
The boy blinked. He hadn’t prepared for anything… profound. Most of the time, an adult (even a great-grandparent) had sat him down with the notion of “Alright now, listen to this and GO TO SLEEP.” He knew, for instance, that B always came after A; and that the hero was generally allowed to kill or break whatever got in his way, and that the girl was always waiting for him since she had nothing better to do.
But this? The story? The truth? He tried to concentrate as he nursed his glass of milk.
She waited.
“Um… which one is more exciting?”
She pursed her lips and sucked at her teeth for a few seconds.
“Well now… that all depends on what excites you. There is Dark in the story. We revel in it. The Dark is engulfing, and comforting. It fills in the cracks and holes of life. When we sink into darkness, in sleep, our minds create and live in stories.
Yet there is Light in the truth. It illuminates and cleanses, and sometimes is uncomfortable. When we are awake, we argue the Light; especially our own version of it.
It is said that Light travels fast, little one. Faster than anything. But wherever the Light goes, the Dark is there. Waiting. This is not a battle, so much as a… balance.”
His eyes were wide as he contemplated the universe at large for the first time. He felt as though he was vaguely in trouble for something he couldn’t remember doing.
“So,” she said, “choose.”
Her mouth turned up the wrinkles in its corners.
“Which one? The story… or the truth?”
The boy looked at her for a few seconds, testing invisible waters.
“Why can’t we have both?”
Her eyes widened slightly.
Unexpected.
Her head cocked back as she laughed.
“Oh!” she said, still chuckling. “There may be hope for you yet.”
He grinned and sipped his milk.
“I’ll do you one better than the story or the truth.”
This afternoon, I suggest you both wander the antique shop, instead of passing by,
and admire the woodwork and what it may retain:
the bread that has been broken at this table, the fears that have been projected onto this mirror, the love that has been made in this bed, the plate, cracked by the fist born from the open palm of affection,
the dresser, once sitting by the threshold, a father, recoiling at the sign above it, which says “Bless this house”,
a mother, leaning on the armoire, saying “Let this cup pass from me”,
a grandmother, holding a bowl, staring at her hands in amazement, saying “I am grown old”,
and a mural in stained glass- a short blessing of sun in the shadow.
If you look closely, you can see
the bones that have broken constructing this life, and the hands that have bled building this house.
These things laid before you
on the blanket,
recently lifted
from my repository
are indeed for sale,
and I’m glad they’ve caught your eye.
Some are questions;
some, answers;
though they do not always match.
I offer collections of mysteria,
and gatherings of the plain.
I offer of the disconcerting,
and the unique.
So, then-
what will you give me
for the lock of whitened hair,
the stretch of cracked earth split by fenceline,
the barn owl’s call in the evening,
this cup of tears,
that lingering late-summer kiss?
What will you give me
for my dog, fading in my arms,
my sister, leaping from the ocean,
my mother’s laugh-lines,
my father’s tire tracks,
my grandfather’s letters?
What will you trade me
for staring into the void of the midnight sky?
And what will you trade me
for judgment,
or forgiveness?
The last 10 years (especially the last 653 days) in the United States have been about so much more than this.
But the Earth, the only planet we have to call home, is the core from which everything flows. The water, the air, the food, the materials we take for granted every single day… are all gifts of the highest magnitude, because they sustain and enrich life.
These things are not inexhaustible. And we are not entitled to them. Somewhere along the way, we gained a little intelligence as a species, and decided “This is all mine.” We decided that separating ourselves from the world made more sense than living with it, and working in it, and being a part of it.
The ocean, the rivers, the lakes, the soil, the atmosphere, the grass that’s grazed, the water we drink, the food our children eat: these things are deeply, inexorably connected. No amount of wishing or wordplay will change this fact. What we do matters, for good and for bad.
We are not entitled to the bounty of the Earth. Mother Nature owes you nothing.
And yet she has given us everything.
Our response has been “I want more.” We style ourselves the dominant species, and thus survey the domain of the planet. Our drive to survive is so strong, that coupled with our intelligence, it creates monsters of us both obvious and quiet.
Without
– temperance
– wisdom
– curiosity
– empathy
– tolerance
survival itself becomes a weapon. Anyone who has ever told you these are weaknesses is lying or delusional.
They are the greatest strengths of humanity. They are the pillars of integrity and progress.
Without these guardrails, our need to survive (and to understand everything in turn), makes us greedy almost beyond repair. Without these guardrails, we remain as children.
Weapons of war survive the sands of time far longer in our shared archeological record, because metalworking provided advantages in weaponry. But the artifacts of the home, of trade, of peace, of art, and of science are far more susceptible to decay. So what we see looking down at our feet, or with the help of a shovel, is a history dominated by conflict.
And yet every other clue in the entire collection, the big-picture history of our species, points to cooperation as the foundation of our success. Cooperation, not conflict, is what we should see when we look behind us.
Conflict is a choice. Cooperation is a ground state.
The voice of pure survival is powerful. It is as seductive as it is comforting. It convinces you that the easy way is indeed possible, and in fact preferable. It says “You need this. You deserve this. Keep it. Hide it. It’s yours.”
It is the voice that justifies the hoarding of wealth and resources while people suffer.
It justifies the destruction of land, forests, water, animals, and humans in the name of profit.
It justifies pollution, sickness, and disease for the sake of success and power.
It justifies averting your gaze from your persecuted neighbor.
It justifies abusing, belittling, and exploiting women.
It justifies destroying children in the name of righteousness.
It justifies the targeting, terrorizing, incarceration, and execution of anyone different enough to be noticeable.
It justifies turning the temple into a field of commerce and a nest of vipers.
It justifies the dismantling of everything good so that it can be replaced with everything holy.
It justifies borrowing from the future until you’re completely insolvent.
Giving in to that voice is where true weakness lies. Following this voice is a submission of your will to an instinctual drive that does not discriminate, nor celebrate, nor imagine. This voice does not know the difference between “doing good for people” and “doing right by people”.
Weakness is not saying “I care”. Weakness is saying “I only care about myself”.
Either everything is sacred, or nothing is. That’s the line I choose to draw. There is no possible universe in which my heart allows me to live a different way. Once you start arbitrarily marking things as holy, to the point of exclusion, you’ve already started down the path of destruction.
Either everything is sacred, or nothing is.
If you choose to draw a circle around a few things and call it “sacred”, then you’ve made your choice. It’s no different than extolling the virtues of your moral high ground by saying “I refuse to choose sides”. That’s still a choice. And in both cases, you’ve chosen yourself.
We need more people in the world who choose to care about something other than their own ego.
If you’re looking for the thing that needs boundaries, it’s tolerance. Tolerance, by definition, requires boundaries in order to remain “tolerance”. You cannot create an environment of peace by giving equal voice to hatred. We lost the plot on this one over the last decade.
“But what about me?” says the racial supremacist. Says the anti-woman, anti-child ideologue. Says the hateful religious. Says the hyper-capitalist as they burn everything to the ground. Says the political opportunist. Says the person who values situational peace at the expense of necessary boundaries. Says the citizen who refuses to let go of their personal anger.
“But what about me?” What about you? There is no room for you here. There never should have been. Don’t get me wrong, we’ll always struggle with these things. But they need to be shut out in the cold. It needs to be made clear, now more than ever:
Sacred: everything.
Tolerance: boundaries.
We also need to reject the reactionary gaslighting that arises in response to the efforts of justice, conservation, cooperation, equality, and progress. Calling those things weakness, and labeling those things hatred, and aligning those things with discrimination, is extremely cheap and basic propaganda. Be insulted that they were ever weaponized against you. We’ve already fought devastating wars over this. We have, in fact, seen this movie before.
Rights are not pie. More for them does not mean less for you.
When everyone wins, everyone wins. It is that simple. If you think everyone gaining the intrinsic respect of rights and the bounties of progress means you lose something, you’ve been lied to. And whoever’s doing the lying is, in some way, stealing from you. Guaranteed.
All humans deserve equal rights.
Humans are part of the Earth.
And while rights are not pie (limited or exhaustible), the body of the Earth is.
We stand at the crossroads of a future, one which I’m convinced rests upon the belief that either everything is sacred, or nothing is. We either destroy the body of the Earth over generations, and continue to allow ourselves the luxury of weakness, or we decide that leaving a better world to future generations is worth more than feeling comfortable and justified.
Everything else that matters flows from this.
Even before I could walk, both of my parents would tell me to “listen to that still, small voice inside you”. Some of you get the reference. But regardless of the path I’ve chosen to follow, I’ve never stopped listening.
I have a tendency to complicate things with words, to get hung up on concepts and ontology, to get too philosophical. Maybe even this piece is obfuscating my core point. In that case, here it is:
A vote for the Earth is a vote for everything.
It is possible for everyone to gain from this. In this approach, abundance becomes manifold. In this space, the only internal threats are imagined ones. And this does not sacrifice any necessary amount of defense or tactical reality.
As we’ve seen, it takes an enormous amount of effort to overcome the driving force of pure survival, distilled greed, and compounded hatred. And things are far from over.
But for everyone who kept telling others (and themselves) “keep fighting the good fight”, it’s nice to have the light shine down on you once in awhile, isn’t it?
Especially for those who aren’t here with us to witness it.
Keep listening to your small voice, and keep your eyes on the horizon. You will hear what matters, and you will see the same sun set and rise over all.
