The boy woke early.  By four thirty that first morning he was up, bathing himself, in the marble tub of Sioux Dean’s commodious apartment, an apartment which occupied the entirety of the twenty seventh canto of the building.  Sioux Dean called the floors cantos, and each doorway she called a line.  In fact she and Roque slept that night and every night since in rooms 18 through room 61, on the 27^th canto.   

Before dawn on his first morning, Roque spoke at length, in Italian, with the parrot, who strolled into the bathroom to witness the boy’s bathing.  The professor had delicate nerves, and the boy being in water, unsupervised, caused him great alarm.  The huge parrot sat there silently until the boy struck up a conversation with him about Florence.  The gold was nice there, said the boy, and noted that his little horse was made in part from Florentine gold.  The parrot, whose intellect might be questioned regarding its actual capacity, said he agreed completely on the subject of metals with his nephew, Roque. 

The mimicking professor felt entitled to be Roque’s uncle, and the boy himself did nothing to dispute the parrot’s claim of kinship.  This made the bird so happy he didn’t scold anyone that day, and soon enough, everyone in the neighborhood noted that the arrival of the blonde headed boy happened simultaneously with the disappearance of Professor Teufelsdrockh’s condemning declarations.

Sioux Dean, who slept only rarely, was sitting at the table in the kitchen in a black silk robe with red roses, looking over a stack of matchbooks from Wisconsin.  There were several cows on the books, Guernsey cows, which pleased Sioux Dean.  After the boy bathed, he dressed in a little blue pair of overalls.  He utilized the belongings that arrived with him in the horse, though Sioux Dean already planned to spoil the child with a trip to Bergdorf Goodman for some apparel. 

Neither Sioux Dean, Therese Tricoteuse, nor Reno Lane knew much about little boys, so they spoiled the child relentlessly.  However, because of his exceptional character and good nature, this spoiling did not affect him at all.  He was spoiled every day for almost a year.

Roque’s education began on the fifth day of his arrival at the GypsyFaith Matchbook Company.  He began reading the classics, beginning, of course, with William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience.  The teaching fell to Reno who seemed actually to have a knack for it.  For the most part, the parrot watched, though he gave way to his urge to repeat certain poems verbatim after the boy mastered them.  With Therese, Roque wandered the streets obsessively until, within six months, he’d memorized every grid of the island and catalogued the boroughs in his mind.  The first few months of Roque’s life at the GypsyFaith Matchbook Company were relatively smooth sailing, but it was only a matter of time, Sioux Dean knew, before something came undone.

Sioux Dean was on the sixtieth canto filing a matchbook that had a picture of thirteen little ducklings on it the moment it happened.  A matchbook was being moved.  She felt the intrusion.  No one touched the books once they were catalogued, not even Reno.  This was of paramount importance to the balance of the store.  The building shifted slightly, and shuddered in the cool breeze blowing in off the bay.

Sioux Dean stood stock still, and knew where the boy was.  He was all the way up to the hundredth canto, in room 316, holding a matchbook advertising metal buttons upon its face.  Above the strikepad were sixteen metal buttons of differing types.  The matchbook, made in 1931, belonged to the family company of Los Cruces, or had belonged to them, anyway, before the company closed its doors and stopped advertising in 1967 when it could no longer compete with larger operations.

At that moment the Tibetan bells on the front door below jingled, and a strange looking man with a prominent nose, the great grand nephew of Raphael Los Cruces, walked in.  Reno was out back.  Therese looked up at the man and resumed knitting without speaking.

“I have come for the boy,” he said.

 “To, not for,” said Therese.  Therese was apoplectic about correctness.

“To, then,” said the man in irritation.  He had in his hand a small green lizard named Tom from Buenos Aires.

Rocinante De La Mancha strolled into the room.

“Happy Birthday,” said the man.

“You’re late,” said the boy, “I’m almost 5 now.”

“Not until February 29^th,” said the man, whose suitcoat was thin at both elbows.  He wore cheap shoes, but they were polished with pride.

“Give it here,” said Reno, stepping forward.  She had a habit of appearing out of nowhere, had she been drinking in the alley out back like she sometimes did?

The man handed her the matchbook.  Reno took it but stepped closer to Roque, protectively.  The matchcover was identical to the one in Roque’s hand, one he’d moved from its place just a moment ago.  How had he gotten down so quickly?

“How long have you been traveling?” asked Roque.

“Twenty-eight years,” said the man.

“Alone the whole time?”

“Yes.”

“That’s hard,” said Therese, who knit behind them in silence.

“What do you want from us?” asked the boy.

“But it was you who called me here,” said the man in confusion.  “Tell me why I’m here?  I’ve waited a long time for you.”

“Let’s sit,” said Sioux Dean, who watched the dialogue in silence aware that the balance had now been turned.  The GypsyFaith Matchbook Company was in peril.  The boy was triggering things.

Reno, Roque, Mr. Los Cruces, and Sioux Dean followed the parrot, who waddled towards a circular wooden table with ivory inlay at the back of the parlor.  Thousands of beads hung from the ceiling of the purple room, each one shimmering in the candlelight.  Therese remained in her place, as was her choice when visitors arrived.  She stayed on watch in the front, amongst the piles of worn matchcovers.

“You have not been waiting for me,” said Roque, after they sat down.

“You are mistaken, I assure you,” said the man, looking thirsty.  Sioux Dean handed him whiskey from her pocket.  He nodded in thanks.  Then he stared at the boy.  “You mean to tell me I have left what remained of my family and my home to come to this godforsaken place and you have no intention of helping me?”

“I have every intention, as you put it, of helping you, depending upon what you mean by the word,” put in Sioux Dean.  Roque looked at Sioux Dean with his bright blue eyes.  His fantastic intellect sized his mistress up.  He let her statement remain hanging in the air.  She didn’t know, then, why the boy was there, not really.  He barely knew himself, until that moment this morning when he dared to touch a matchbook, and, then, dared further to remove it from its rightful place.

“You’ve been displaced,” said the boy.  “Your family’s reputation was ruined.”

“That was all a long time ago,” said the man, thoughtfully, sipping the old alcohol in his hand.

“It was just a moment ago,” said Sioux Dean, whose grasp on the moment slowly loosened.  Something was quite altered.

“Tell us your story, then,” said the boy.

“You know all this already.  In 1931 we owned a great business.  My uncle treated everyone well.  We made buttons, chiefly.  We’d done it for fifty years by then, and before that.  We were experts.  But some, pardon me, American, came in with a machine and even though the buttons were no good, people bought them at half the price.  Our big customers fell off, by 1969 we were bankrupt.  In 1975 we had more debt than we could bear, so we sold everything.”

“You owe nothing,” stated the boy.

“You know that’s not true.  You know he is coming for me, that I owe him more than I can pay.”

“Why did you make the bargain?” the boy led the conversation deftly.

“I thought I had nothing to lose.”

“Always a mistake.”

“I see that now.”

“Too late.”

“You said, ‘- before my birthday.’”

“That was 28 years ago.  I’ve died and risen since then.”

“But here you are and here I am; I have brought my body here to you.  Do what you will.”

“I will,’ said the boy.  By now both Reno and Sioux Dean were staring at him.  The whole building lifted itself lightly, like a bird, fluffing out its feathers for a moment, and then, quietly, settled all back into place.  Professor Teufelsdrockh’s husky breathing could be heard.  He had allergies.

The man sat with a look of grim expectation.  Reno lit a cigarette, handed it to him.  Teufelsdrockh coughed and said, loudly, “I will.  I will.” His bird voice pierced the room, already completely full of keen ecstasy; everyone’s hair stood on end, everyone’s except the boy.

Roque leaned out and touched the man’s hand, “Don’t,” he said, before the man could pull away.

“You owe a debt.”

“I do.  I’m man enough to show up for it, prior to our agreed time.”

“You will do a service for me.”

“I will, upon my life, no matter the cost.”

“I have already paid your debt,” said Roque.

“You promised that you could,” said the man.

“I never make promises.”

“I mean,” stammered the man helplessly, “merely, I mean, I meant to say that you told me at the time it was possible.”

“It is.”

“What must I do?” asked the man.

“Give me the lizard, now, for he is tired and hungry too.  With the pigeons here he’s not safe,” said Roque.  Dean fed a huge flock of white doves that circled the building relentlessly and cooed.

The man handed over his pet without question.

“Go out from here at seven this evening.  For now, you will rest.  You will sleep for you are tired.  Then you will eat with us.  That is all I can tell you right now.  But I will explain your errand to you at dinner, when we share a meal together.  You’ll have 24 hours to complete your task, but for now, just rest.”

Therese, who heard the conversation perfectly, stood up and carried one of her quilts to the man and placed it into his hands.  He took it from her in silence, crept into one of the tall corridors of matchbooks, laid the quilt down like a mattress and fell into a deep, private sleep.  Chased by the devil, he’d been traveling 28 years without a single moment of true respite.  He slept like the dead, not even Professor Teufelsdrockh’s voice could have wakened him.

The group retreated to a small library of matchbooks where a small fire was burning in the small gold tiled fireplace.  The embers twitched as the footsteps fell heavily into the room.

“You are calling them,” said Sioux Dean, assured now that her deepest concerns were founded.

“I am.”

“All the names,” said Sioux Dean, again, with uncustomary concern.

“Yes.”

“And we will accommodate them,” said she, uncertainly.

“That remains to be seen,” said Roque, looking suddenly much older than the wizened front windows of the GypsyFaith Matchbook Company.

“You built this for me, didn’t you?” he asked her.  Reno was getting impatient and left the room, only the parrot remained.

“I did.”

“Then let me do my job.”

“You’ve unbalanced things.”

“That’s my job.”

“Then what’s mine?”

“To balance them.”

“You ask too much.”

“I always do, of course, that is the nature of selfless things.”

“I thought I was doing all I could.”

“No, you comforted yourself with that idea.  But you are, in fact, quite comfortable here, are you not?”

“I am too comfortable, you speak the truth, only I did not know this up until now,” Sioux Dean’s dark spectacles flashed back images of the fire beside them.

“Which is why it isn’t a sin,” said the boy.

“I’ll ask Reno to prepare the food.  What will the man have?”

“Meat,” said the boy, “and wine.  Red meat.  White wine.  And bread, hard, but with cold butter, and salt, and tomatoes with nuts.”

Sioux Dean threw back her head and laughed like she had not since before her father died.

“You’ve been with me a year and a half and this is the first time I know you.  You are impossible,’ said she.

“You are incorrect; I am unlikely.” Roque asserted, with the parrot’s quick echoes following like arrows through the air, “Impossible!  Incorrect!  Impossible!  Incorrect!”

Sioux Dean spent the remainder of the afternoon holed up in a corner with a pile of matchbooks beside her, relentlessly cataloguing, repairing, recording, all the places, all the names in her unlikely store with its unlikely staff doing what could only be termed unlikely things.  But she was happier than she’d been in years.

Chapter 1:  The Reception

The GypsyFaith Matchbook Company, a reddish store on what many called a godforsaken island, adopted a baby on a Saturday when the North star rose above the city.  The store itself, if you can even call it a store, had wizened little windows full of dust, but you could still make out Sioux Dean inside, sitting behind the counter, stacks and stacks of matchbooks behind her, flattened, on shelves, like bodies in a morgue.  The day that Rocinante arrived, Sioux Dean’s assistant, Therese Tricoteuse, was late.  Therese stopped for coffee on her way to work, and found herself lost in thought, tracing ribbons of figures on brown-circle-stained napkins until she came back to life, stumbled out onto the street, leaving her spilled thoughts behind. 

Therese’s waiter at the coffee shop, Kinch, had explicit instructions from Sioux Dean herself: he was, by all and any means, to collect the drawings of Therese Tricoteuse and deliver them immediately to the GypsyFaith Matchbook Company.   Therese knew all about this arrangement, and did not care.  For this minor service Kinch was paid a vast annual sum; he could afford to quit the waitering business.  Kinch remained at the coffee shop simply because he was a sort of adjunct employee of the GypsyFaith Matchbook Company.  Actually, there were many others like him stationed throughout the city.

There was, that weekend, sitting in front of the GypsyFaith Matchbook Company, a rather large wooden horse.  Many passersby had seen it before Therese would stumble over it and nearly knock it head over teakettle.  No one touched the horse, partly because of its location and the mystic reputation of the storeowner, and partly because it was heavy.  You could tell, just by looking at the jeweled dowels, the intricate engraving, and the tiny little diamonds embedded in the wood, that the horse would require three kings to carry it, and then, even, with immaculate effort.  No one saw the horse arrive, it was recalled later, but everyone saw it sitting there in the cool shade of the red striped awning of the matchbook company. 

It was rare to see a customer enter or exit the building.  Many wondered why the GypsyFaith Matchbook Company stayed in business since the owner didn’t need, and obviously didn’t want, money.  They conferred quietly over the precarious position of the little store, address number 9430 on the island’s Wall Street.  Why did Sioux Dean remain invested in a business that never seemed to open or close, a business whose customers were invisible, in a ridiculous building of such great height that little boys, looking up, trying to follow the blank windows to the top might fall over backwards trying to stretch their eyes to heaven.  No one knew exactly how tall Sioux Dean’s building really was, nor how many matchbooks it contained: some said there were a thousand stories to the building and as many matchbooks, some said, “No. Millions.”  Those who said millions were not even close to the truth.

“I’ll have nothing to do with her or that, that thing,” said Miss Clara Bush, upon encountering the horse.  Every day the Bush sisters passed Sioux Dean’s building in order to enter the building they owned, right next door.  They hated Sioux Dean.  The Bush sisters didn’t like the sort of raggedy people who visited the building next door.  In fact Dean had many enemies; no one appreciated her liberal politics and rag-tag clientele.

“She’s a buyer of souls,” chirped Miss Eliza Bush, “and there can be no good come of that.”  She spat out the last word with contempt, ignoring the magnificent horse as she passed.

That day Sioux Dean was sitting behind the counter, her dark black spectacles shining like mocking mirrors at about 3pm on a Saturday afternoon when her assistant finally arrived, much later than usual.  Therese was usually lost, but not normally for several hours.  Today she entered the dimly lit store with a fascicle of treasures wrapped carefully in numerous paper bags.  

Therese’s tardiness didn’t hurt business; Therese never touched the matchbooks, only Sioux Dean and Reno did.  Therese sewed all day long.  In fact, it was unclear what, exactly, if anything, Therese did for the GypsyFaith Matchbook Company.

Today, she laid out her treasures one by one, clearing a portion of the countertop splayed with Sioux Dean’s most recent match book purchases.  Therese’s crumpled paper bags, which she collected in her wanderings along the city streets, were often filthy things, barely recognizable as bags at all.  She salvaged the bags from sidewalks and gutters everywhere and filled them with unusual items that she used to make her famous quilts.  Just now she opened a small brown bag, which might have been used to carry a child’s sandwich, as it was stained with grease at the bottom and curled into a small fist size knot at the top.  Out of this bag Therese drew a bit of string, pink colored, she collected from a spider web in a dark corner of one of the ghettos where she walked. 

The city itself was slowly declining.  Ghetto after ghetto sprung up all along the edges of the center of town where Sioux Dean’s skinny, little shop shrugged its thin shoulders between the hygienic stares of the gleaming buildings on each end.  People worried about the encroachment of the ghettos but Sioux Dean acted like she didn’t notice, or know.  Only her parrot talked.

An opinionated parrot occupied a prominent place in Sioux Dean’s store: Professor Teufelsdrockh.  The professor waddled along with his mistress uttering horrifyingly loud guffaws.  The parrot’s screams were often in Italian, most frequently in mock repetition of some canto from Dante.  He was a rude parrot.

The building was so slender that it was easy enough to pass the GypsyFaith Matchbook Company and never take note at all, with the exception of the fact that the whole place smelled.  The smell, emanating no matter the weather, always drew one’s attention towards the brass doors.  The GypsyFaith Matchbook Company smelled vaguely of old paper, coffee, candlewax, patchouli oil, fire, smoke, stamps and, most certainly, of nag champa incense.

It was an abnormally thin building, swaying gently between the Bush bank building on the one side and the insurance broker on the other.  Sioux Dean inherited the odd building from her father Bernard, the acclaimed Jewish financier, when she was still very young.  There were rumors that the building stretched as deeply underground as it did above.  There were copious rumors surrounding Sioux Dean.

She moved into the building when she was barely 18, hired Reno and Therese, and formed her matchbook company in a matter of months.  At first people assumed she was under the influence of some kind of strain, having, people gossiped, no discernable mother, and then, suddenly losing her famous father with whom she was very close.  But the GypsyFaith Matchbook Company’s existence persisted, long into Sioux Dean’s thirtieth year, and at that point there was no question at all: the business would remain, however unviable it was.

Though the GypsyFaith Matchbook Company had few apparent customers, it did receive tremendous volumes of mail.  Packages by the hundreds arrived every week.  The mailman was nicknamed Saint Nicolas because of all the parcels he had to carry to Sioux Dean’s store six days a week.  He never complained because, like Kinch, he received an inconceivably large Chanukah bonus every year which won him the inordinate affection of his wife and four children.

The store itself, as we have said, was neither open, nor closed.  There were no hours on the brass doors, but instead there was a curious etching on the glass portholes.  The engraving was a rendering of Jolly Roger, but the eyes had been altered a bit, and the engraving was so heavy surrounding the pirate symbol that no one could make it out.  Some said the words were words from witchcraft, others reported that when they laid their hands upon the brass doors of the GypsyFaith Matchbook Company they were mysteriously moved, either in a dark direction or a light one, depending on their stance at the time.  In fact crumpled people often came and laid their hands on the door, but Sioux Dean worked on without acknowledging the pillaging of the power emanating from her doorway.

Dean had, unfortunately, many enemies.  No one on Wall Street wanted whatever it was she was offering.

As we’ve noted, Sioux Dean lived in the building.  Far off into the clouds, late at night, a solitary story burned with a yellow glow, and you could see a figure moving back and forth between one end of that floor to the other.  There was conjecture on the subject of Sioux Dean and her ridiculous building, her ridiculous assistants, and her ridiculous company.  Did she sleep?  No one knew.  Did she eat?  She was tiny.  Did she ever leave the building?  Not often.  A few said they’d seen her, but others, ones who’d been on the street longest, swore they’d never seen Sioux Dean do anything except sit behind the cluttered counter, cataloguing matchbooks or moving about at all hours at night.

“Something’s outside,” muttered Therese, having finally disposed of all her various packages onto the counter.

“Call Reno,” said Sioux Dean, without looking up.  In her hand she held a matchcover displaying a woman in a huge armchair wearing lingerie.  In her tiny hands the ravishing brunette matchcovergirl held a small book entitled, “What Every Girl Should Know”.  Sioux Dean smiled in appreciation.  She dearly loved matchbooks.

Therese picked up the battered phone on the counter, moved it closer to herself, shook it off the hook, pressed a few numbers, and, speaking in slight, circular sentences, said, “Horse, flashing, heavy.”  Therese’s conversations were all that way, curving and bending so you had to sort of catch her meaning as she twirled her words out of her mouth. Therese hung up the phone and meandered towards her leather chair to pick up the knitting needles she was using that day, a pair of purple colored wooden ones, quite large, perhaps an inch in diameter.

Reno arrived in a flash, her tattoos scattered over her arms and legs.

“It’s hot,” she announced, once she caught her breath.  She always said the same thing.  She lit a Marlboro.  Reno was always hot, even when the city’s temperature dropped to a rare sixty degrees.

Sioux Dean was still examining the brunette in her hands, though finally she looked up.  It was a very nice matchbook, very nice.  The brunette looked like she knew a secret she’d never tell, which delighted Sioux Dean.

“Will you please bring in the Trojan?” she said, reaching for a spindly set of tweezers.  Sioux Dean worked carefully to remove the matches from their cover.

Reno had the strength of five men.  She walked outside, hoisted the horse with some effort onto her own hip, and carried it inside.  Even in the dimly lit cavern lined with shelves, the horse glowed, owing its luminescence to the thousands of gemstones on the surface of the horse. 

“Open it, then,” said Sioux Dean.

Reno looked at the horse in measured silence, her keen mind slicing the whole thing to its essential parts, determining where the opening might be hid.  Fifteen minutes later, the clacking of Therese’s needles intermittently breaking the silence of the room, Reno took a step towards the box and slammed her fist very hard on the horse’s heart. 

At this moment two things happened.

The horse fell open, its jeweled hide split into seven equal sections. The horse revealed a luxurious, blue velvet interior, studded with emeralds, and equipped with several crystal flasks.

A small boy, also within the horse, began to scream.

Sioux Dean stood up from the counter.

Therese stopped knitting.

Reno lit a third cigarette and turned towards the back of the store to remove a bottle of ice cold Miller beer from the refrigerator where she stored her drinks.

“It’s a boy,” said Therese thoughtfully.  His screaming continued. She added, “He’s hungry.”

“Yes,” said Sioux Dean, and pulled a small pistachio pastry from one of her pockets.  Sioux Dean dressed in heavy layers, even though the city was almost always seventy degrees.  You never knew what she might remove from beneath her scarves and skirts.  She was a tiny, tiny woman, yet everyone thought she was very tall.  In fact she was less than 5 feet top to bottom.

The pastry was delicate, and its layers leaked crumbs as Therese took it from her mistress’s hand and held it out to the red faced boy.  He immediately stopped crying, and ate.

He looked around, his little downy head scattering the fluttering incense ashes and cigarette smoke in the room.  His blue eyes stared mercilessly at the shop, and suggested extraordinary intelligence.  His face summoned an opinion about the place in a fraction of a second, and then, decisively, he spoke:

“My name is – “

Sioux Dean interrupted him, “De La Mancha, yes, I know, but you are called Rocinante, Roque for short.”

The boy grunted and raised his left eyebrow, “Ah.”

No one ever had to introduce themselves to Sioux Dean.  She knew all the names.  The other two women watched in silence, the candles which burned perpetually in the store flashed brightly, in unison, when Sioux Dean uttered the boy’s name for the first time. 

Professor Teufelsdrockh spoke up, repeating the child’s name in loud squawks three times, and then fell to uncustomary silence.  In the afternoons Professor Teufelsdrockh pierced the walls of the building with occasional screams, almost always in Italian.  But today he was quiet, out of respect for the child.

Roque held out his hand towards Reno’s bottle of beer.  Again Sioux Dean reached into her robes and extended her thin arm towards the boy, who fetched cranberry juice.

“I’m not lost,” he said steadily.

“No.  Found,” said Therese, whose knitting was piled up incautiously in her frayed leather chair.  She was working with a lizard’s tail, pine needles, and an ocean breeze, all from within the paper bags she’d brought in that day.  She stood up slowly and pulled out a many colored robe from behind her chair.

“This would be yours,” she said, placing the robe on the boy’s shoulders.  He laughed.

“There it is!” he said, gaily.  Reno shuffled through the boxes full of matchbooks until she found a bag of antique marbles.

“I ordered these last week,” she said, and handed the boy a green silk bag of marbles. 

Roque shoved his hand down deep into the pile of marbles and said, “Nice.”

“Yes,” said Sioux Dean, again.  Reno, who was the loquacious member of the trio, said nothing.  Outside the store various sirens and screeches could be divined.  But from within the GypsyFaith Matchbook Company there was only the sound of flesh and marbles.  The boy spread the lot out on the Oriental rug and began to play.

The three adult human beings within the confines of the Gypsyfaith Matchbook Company froze for an inordinate amount of time.  Only the boy moved.  His smart, fat hands flew over the marbles, piling them into pyramids and then, seizing one of the shooters from middle, made the whole structure fall down.  He lined the marbles up into rows, and hit them lightly, making them move like dominoes.  He examined them with scientific care, tossed them aside, strove to find new ones, and remained fixed upon them.

“You like cards, also,” said Sioux Dean, finally, after a quarter of an hour had passed.

The child nodded, but ignored her.  The matchbook store’s eccentric atmosphere was unusually charged.  It was always a shocking event to enter into the presence of the three women and the hundred  million matchbooks contained within the walls of the GypsyFaith Matchbook Company (For, in truth, there were that many.).  But the addition of the extraordinary boy made the air so electric that the agony of its keenness was felt violently among the women themselves, who, accustomed to oddities of all kinds, did nothing but succumb to the pain the boy ushered in.  Only the boy seemed immune.

He squeaked, “See there!” and pointed to a bright blue marble waltzing with ivory flecks.  He tossed the marble high into the space where a fan worked uselessly to tear the enchantment from the room.  The marble fell without a sound back onto the thick rug upon which he was seated.  It was Reno who cleaned the store, a service she rendered when she was in the mood.  In fact she had beaten and cleaned that rug the day before, until it was practically spotless.

Another hour passed, during which time only the lighting of Reno’s cigarettes and the gasp of her opening beer bottles could be heard.  Then the boy stopped playing.

He removed a flask from within his coffin, as it was, clearly, a little boy’s coffin, and handed it to Sioux Dean.  She drank from it thoughtfully, as the liquid within was not meant to relieve thirst, but to activate it instead.  Her head immediately flooded with memories of her beloved father.  Finally, the blonde baby boy, for he was not more than 3 and a half, withdrew from the shroud of light that haloed his head, ambled back into his wooden horse, and went to sleep in his multi-colored robe, soundly, as the three women stood in rare rapture.

They noticed scars on his wrists as he slept, and two matching scars on his bare feet.  On his skull there were scratches.

“He’s been in there three days.  What is to be done?  He’s not on my list.” remarked Therese.

“He will stay, of course,” said Sioux Dean.

Reno, whose toxicity was always at the highest possible level, but from which she was never affected, leapt from her place in the room and bounded towards an unopened box of matchbooks.  “I need to see Mickey,” she said, and tore open a collection of Swedish matchbooks for Sioux Dean to sort that night.

Mickey was Reno’s smashing girlfriend, a curvaceous brunette not unlike the one on the most recently examined cover belonging to Sioux Dean.

Reno was crazy about Mickey, who was, in turn, crazy herself.  The teetering infrastructure of the GypsyFaith Matchbook Company hinged upon so many ambiguities, eventualities, and unknowns one had to have tremendous faith to conceive it at all.  Yet the three women navigated without faltering.  The boy, however, altered the whole structure substantially; this could not be ignored.  Reno’s instinct was to flee home, Therese’s was to resume sewing, which she did, and Sioux Dean did something she almost never did: took off her glasses to reveal a pair of very tired olive colored eyes.  She did not feel the burden of the boy, he was full of light.  No.  She did not worry for his health; except for his recent injuries, a more robust child could not be found.  She did not worry that he would be missed, he was meant for the place.  And she did not wonder about his education.  All three women held numerous doctorates in wildly impractical academic areas.  She worried about balance.  In the quixotic world of the GypsyFaith Matchbook Company it was up to Sioux Dean to keep the balance.  How would she do so now?

Finally, having acknowledged all of this to herself she resumed her examination of a Swedish matchbook with three ships upon it, each one in full blown left tack and wondered about the small tear at the edge of the book.  Could she repair it, or not?

Naked aggression doesn’t always work.  If you hit it enough times, it doesn’t always fall.  Fervent prayer doesn’t control God.  Power is not extricated from others, but is derivative, which is why it’s permanently elusive.  You can’t grasp power; either your meditative powers create the philosophy of the aesthetic and bring you into the realm of the sublime, all this passive to the eternal will, or you are just punching futile baby fists in the air.

Humanity seeks control, and so represents that certain things can be earned: wisdom, beauty, redemption.  Nothing can be earned, so might as well relax, ride the wave as it flings you forward.  The more sublime, the more exquisite the feeling, until the intensity of pleasure reaches the border of pain.

Where is my territory?  I own nothing.  I earn nothing.  But I am.  This is something.  It’s everything.  Splendid.  Where I linger and dwell defines me.  Do I waste time seeking the ungettable?  Or do I dispense with that frivolity and commune with perfection?  The terror of helplessness must be endured to a greater and greater extent to move from the seventh degree of separation to the sixth and ultimately to a state of subliminal union.  Again, sobriety, or, more true, discipline, is required, utter and absolute, thorough and sustained, sustained until your discipline breaks you like a crucifixion, and at once there is resurrection, the parting of ways between that which is passing and that which is permanent.  To feel this lifting is to feel the unhinged cool wave of love that has been there, bathing you, moving you, since you were created. 

He who has ears, let him hear.  Do I?  Hear?  See?  Touch?  Taste?  Smell?  The winnowing fork is the consciousness we are granted as the supreme gift.  Do I use it?  Almost never.  I am awake a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the time.  I’m more likely to win the lottery than to be awake at any given hour.

In Nature, Emerson says, “A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss. The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise,—and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections. Hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation, who for a short time believe, and make others believe, that they see and utter truths, who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on the language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature.

But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding certificate that he who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and God. The moment our discourse rises above the ground line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted by thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, cotemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence, good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper creation. It is the working of the Original Cause through the instruments he has already made.

These facts may suggest the advantage which the country-life possesses for a powerful mind, over the artificial and curtailed life of cities. We know more from nature than we can at will communicate. Its light flows into the mind evermore, and we forget its presence. The poet, the orator, bred in the woods, whose senses have been nourished by their fair and appeasing changes, year after year, without design and without heed,—shall not lose their lesson altogether, in the roar of cities or the broil of politics. Long hereafter, amidst agitation and terror in national councils,—in the hour of revolution,—these solemn images shall reappear in their morning lustre, as fit symbols and words of the thoughts which the passing events shall awaken. At the call of a noble sentiment, again the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and shines, and the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them in his infancy. And with these forms, the spells of persuasion, the keys of power are put into his hands.”

This truth is of such quality and magnitude as to be unbearable for any sustained period of time.  Invoke Emerson.  Call him to awaken yourself, again, and find that he is Joyce’s Kinch, a noose knife of freedom suspended in art.

If I am large enough, I do not have to be right.  If I have room left.  There are twenty-five feet of cement beneath my chair.  An arc darts out from me into the world, shooting like a star into the darkness, seeking Others.  Nimbleness is the consistency of the ungoverned.  Can I be quick?  Can I be alert?  Then, as you pass by me, you feel a cool thrush, a moment shivered into beauty, and then a peace.  A piece, the wind blows the chimes.  I feel it passing.  I want to rush towards it, no, away.  My mind sprints, stops, turns into itself, fidgets, and looks around like a child.  Who’s there?  No one?  No, no, not that, Everyone.  I am not alone.  There are others.  They blink back at me.  I see them, at least the place in their eyes where the moonlight registers.  No one speaks.  Communication occurred before our eyes really focused, which is why I can see you now.  Some beacon glides relentlessly over the landscape hovering, lightly, its beams prancing down into gorgeousness, then, after bathing gilded, moon-wings, splashes upwards, again, into the night air, prowling, hungry.

I don’t know anything, but when I see you I am not afraid.  The image is not the reality.  The reality is, and the image an afterthought, the shadow creeping because the sun moves.  What I perceive is not the picture my eyes present, a picture fractured by distance and light and a million random movements.  What I perceive is

But the man himself remains undead. What they clasped to his neck is not clasped there. He has nothing to do with their religion. The symbols they stole are vacant in their hands; no power resides there. And in his name, alone, in his name, alone, in his name alone, I can use this cipher and decipher. I can have it, and him, for free, and he will let me in. And they cannot stop him.

There is a violin-like zeal stretching within my soul when I am reading great things. In Lyrical Ballads Wordworth writes: “For the human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know that one being is elevated above another in proportion as he possesses this capability. It has therefore appeared to me that to endeavour to produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best services in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged; but this service, excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day. For a multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.”

Excitement is within the text itself, Wordsworth is almost unbearably exciting, which he states was his purpose anyhow.

Art is essentially, inherently redemptive. Borromean thought-rings - pain, pleasure, reality. There is subconscious need to prolong that which is pleasurable and suspend that which is not, however there is a supercedent truth; the individual is hemmed in on all sides by a lex externa: love governs. There is also a lie that tries to intercede. The lie is that suffering exists and/or can be avoided. Suffering only exists so long as it is being escaped from. The moment suffering is submitted to, submitted to, that is, to the point of death, at once suffering becomes jouissance. Jouissance has infinite interdependent dimensions. Again, there is the delusion of control – the one condition or accomplishment beyond human reach. If I forfeit control then jouissance becomes epiphany, a sustained experience of love. A razor thin line separates pleasure and pain, the excruciating experience of a reality saturated and startled by joy. The question is not how to reach joy, but how to endure it. Contemplation of the secondary question - how to escape suffering - is a waste of time because the instant consciousness is obtained it is clear that suffering is a construct, not a reality.

What is more interesting is why I need to suffer. What exists within me that makes me run from joy into pain? Running is the problem, sober stillness the eternal, impregnable solution. Finally there is the pressing need to forfeit control, control being the exact lie that makes me choose to suffer. Only so long as I seek control, I simultaneously seek refuge. There is no net, no steering wheel, no cure for humanity. Humanity is my condition. My sanctuary is consciousness. Is full life a butterfly’s or a crow’s path? Neither. I’m scattered, sprawling everywhere, a panoply convected confection of me and Other-love. I fall through space like ashes, the product of divine sacrificial intervention. I am exterminated by my own need to eradicate that which I believe to be the enemy within myself; I am salvaged from my daily wreckage by the eternal fact of love’s hell-breaching, crucified blood cup communion. My slaughterhouse is number 6111966.

Contentment or peace is to call a truce in the internecine war and declare as MacMahon J'y suis, j'y reste. In reality I rest within, I exist within, the arms of love, swaddled, bathed, clothed in joy. Art is the eternal product of the borromean combustion of sustained jouissance. Art is my only force, my only function. I exist to be in ecstasy. I am made for joy, created for the trapezean walk between poles. I only think I’m falling. I am never actually falling. If I am making art, then I am proving my own theory. If I am encountering hell, I am also proving my own theory. Truth traps; if I gnaw off my arm I will discover a deeper knot more ecliptically elusive than is a stem cell. Believing myself to be disenfranchised, I can gnaw all I want, but I will only learn that I was everlastingly set free before I was born. Every great work of art confirms this ecstatic revelation.

Last night an old woman related a story from her girlhood. She said that when she was still extremely young, over supper, she announced to her family that she intended either to become a fireman or a ballet dancer. In response to this girlish confession one of her older siblings said chastisingly, “You might not be pretty enough.” The old woman recalls thinking confusedly at the time: “Must I be beautiful to fight fires or to dance?”

Consciousness is a mast, not a rudder. No one is steering; that’s the mystery. Steering is an illusion. What is wind? Winds are power saturated revolutionary acts which move a person from one plane of existence to another. Sails? Threaded from our flesh fabricked from our soul. Every conflict in every novel is always formed around one person’s free willed movement from one strata to another. Everything evil fights such an act; the act of consciousness and movement upwards is radical and revolutionary and the nature of evil is counterrevolutionary. What the devil wants is stasis, confirmed resignation, quiet desperation, religion as opiate. Rising action, the choice to be conscious, makes conflict, the wind in the sails, the power that propels rising action. Daily there is the climax, the moment in which consciousness is achieved that day, and another barrier to truth is eradicated, another lie exposed as smoke. In every life there is the hero, that’s you. There is also the antihero, that’s evil, evil disguised as status quo, statistics, comfort food, money, compulsions, agendas, plans, distractions. Evil is always about the delusion of steering, control. Evil promises that which it cannot deliver: a rudder. The rudder will always be a mystery. Perhaps at death, when enlightenment occurs permanently, mahamanvantara.

What matters? None of this. Only the moment now, only this space between us, zero space, in which dead downtowns in small towns stop breathing hourly, when each moment leads to another extinction but also where life begins. Light it on fire. Burn it all. Only the flame is real. My ash sword hangs at my side.

Reincarnation isn’t a one-time thing. It’s a continuous process. I’m doing it right now. It isn’t hard for me to define death, but it has taken me years to map out a single sentence about what is life. I’m sweating. Am I alive? Less so now than before I arrived, more in this moment than in yesterday’s. My brain functions nominally, unhelmed. To reactivate it takes more equity in the truth than that to which I have made accessible. It’s like mountaineering backwardly towards a soul ghetto, a Sotomayor-trip out of the barren spiritual pinnacle of inhumane perfection deep into the sown heart of Love. Love is real, though, and truth is the way. I know this much for sure, and it’s enough.

What remains here in the United States is fitting but doesn’t feel right. Just because something fits doesn’t mean I should buy it. Fitting and correct are not the same thing. Everything here is commodious, like certain brands of liberalism, and yet there is pain, constriction. The boa is the least frightening of all snakes, as I have always imagined being able to slip through its unified monofist before it kills me. But now I find myself in the anesthetizing vise grip of vices, all my weaknesses at war with the iota of truth within me, the I losing, over and over again, iambs marching indiscriminantly. I remain sober and conscious for a moment, and then I am whisked away. I hold on in my sleeping dreams to the Christ I know, scary dreams which have centered on the terror of bankruptcy. In this culture bankruptcy dreams are the tap dance finale, when all the little pennies and dimes hit the floor in a twitter and then, like a ghost, I float off, untethered in aghast, debted horror.

Money is no anchor, it’s a float. Love is heavy, and truth, heaviest. If I want to find a way to stand firm, then I had better attach myself to a sturdy brand of the truth. Everything else hovers as I sit here, shell shocked, and try to think my way back to myself, this spot which I currently cooccupy with hell. Americans are wondrously open, generous, and kind; it’s a sort of ungainly miracle that they live in this atrocity. Something greater than death is rules this place. I am frightened by it, and well I should be, as it has succeeded in owning me for a few days now, and will probably succeed again in a few minutes lapse. Slavery, however, is not always accomplished with the consent of the governed, but usually is. Thank God for the gospels, every one of them, Purple, Greek, African, Mexican, Jewish, Islamic, Italian, New York, Original, Buddhist… Thank God that someone else unpaved the way out for me, unpaved and unpaved and unpaved, each time with grass before the cement overtakes everything, the relentless war unrelenting over dominion. It isn’t money that the devil wants, but control. The great cults are not in it for the profit, but for the numbers, the hundreds, the thousands, the sheered billions, the One, the I. Reach me if you can, and because you can, you will, thank you God. I want a voice, not a product. I want my own voice, my own size. This definitive gift has been given to me and I shall have it, and pay everything for it. I have no need for spiritual shopping. Feel the war burn, the castrated dominion of minions shivers with the fervor of one unwashed mind. Sully, do not unsully me. Touch do not untouch me.

He wrote, “I will see if I can see. See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.”

“You are not alone; James Joyce is with you.” This is the word of God spoken to me on my fourth day in the United States of America. It has been 3 years since I have been here. It isn’t abundance I see here, but a compacted infusion of greed armed with violent, oppressive intentions. People perpetually dazzled by a mirage of radiance spasmed by high-speed contractions and prices. Everyone I meet is exceptionally kind and loving to me, to my husband, and to my son. We have made a myriad of friends during our four short days. One new friend has even given our boy a small toy as a token of her love for him, a love founded on a few minutes of introduction. These people we see here are all lambs for the slaughter. This is a world of distractions, unused rooms, – a world of pictures but no words, a world of emptiness, but not room.

I see in the heart of this place my own need for dominion, my own hand as one of the masters of oppression. I too seek riches and ease and comfort. The reason I know I’m guilty is that I hear, see, touch, and taste. I cannot unhear, unsee, untouch, and untaste. I know, therefore I must act. Chaste. I am either one of them or not. If I stay here and participate actively in this culture I damn myself. I am either a little Christ or the anti-Christ, neither homicidal nor suicidal. A choice has to be made, not eventually, but this moment and within every succeeding moment. I cannot live in this place. It kills me. But to escape I cannot run; I have to stand here, silent, thoughtful, and sacrifice the one thing that unseats this devil – the self. If I can kill the self right now, in this moment, I am immunized. I will have to do the same thing in the next moment, and in every conscious moment nacheinander…

Before me is loneliness, but freedom, and connection to love, or their opposites. I read. And read. I read more, and more. A click, the dial turns; the vault opens. I see the heavens, a place too vivid for pictures, too rich for words – reproductions are just, as Joyce says, mocking mirrors. There is more than this, but only if I sacrifice more of this. However much I am prepared to give away, that much more will be given to me. However much I hoard, that much will be withheld, not by my God, but by my other hand. Basta, James Joyce. Enough is enough.

Space is timeless; time is spaceless. Liberty. There is nothing but now. What is now is everything, and outside nothing exists, only I and Love. How do I know that Love occupies now with me? I was born knowing. I have always known it, felt it, and run from it. To occupy space or time is to be unconscious of Love. To live now is to exit both spheres in favor of the only true reality. This is the message of Ulysses, Joyce, not Homer. Joyce kens.

Is it safe to come out now? It has always been, and will always be, safe. If safe means that I cannot die, if safe means that I cannot be condemned, then it is safe to come out now. Love will not condemn me, and has made me and also begotten me. I lock myself into rooms hiding, absurd! There is no plurality. There is no duplicity.

I return from the dead sleep daily, husking off fear. Sustained consciousness is the only sure cure for every ill, including sin.

It is daring to be happy, because it means losing everything. Is it safe to come out now? Yes, it is safe to come out now. Happy means forfeiting the plans, the hoarding. It means that right now is perfect and there is no more begging. How to avoid clinging to the beggar within? It means no more consumption.

And time stops. It matters not how long it takes to do something, only that I am in fact doing something, and will continue to gnaw at it for 100 more years if allowed, and every day gnawing a hole, and every day making that hole larger, if possible, following the thin strand of third or fourth hand reasoning up into the pinpoint of brightness so far above me I am a not even a fetus, but merely an algebraic thought in the mind of God.

I am ready to run. I want to collapse the whole thing, roll it up, start over.

If I can, I will batter my way through the fear now, and enter into the complete silence of the forgiven. I will stop being scared altogether, and maybe then I really will reach the asylum for which I am looking. But it cannot be found by running, will not ever be reached that way. The only sure way to defeat it is to stand very still and let it menace me all it wants, day after day, night after night, until the conscious I, without the me, conquer it and the memories have finally washed through me.

In this season I have nevertheless learned a valuable thing about things, which is not to have any at all. And I have learned this positively, not slightly. I do not have a tenuous, but firm hold upon the idea, this time. There have been many previous times, but always fringed with a willfulness that has entirely been lost now. I look tiredly at catalogues that come and I think, oh, my, not mine. But there is not the slightest temptation to open them, and if I do, like stopping to look at a car accident, I leaf it through and then slough it off, immediately bored and unsatisfied with its contents, which I used to peruse like chocolates, savoring every morsel of my neediness, feeding the beast of my greed until I am thoroughly miserable. But this time it is different. I have the sense of this being an epic and final battle, which will forcefully and determinably change something that has held its ground within me for as long as I have been alive. I look scared even in my baby pictures when I knew something was terribly wrong, and it was, it really was. But in this place there is no one to fear. I have no enemies here of consequence. In reality, if I love my enemies I populate the universe with my friends.

Peace is what I am running to when it is really what I am running from. I think I will be safer elsewhere, but there is no elsewhere. There is only here, now. I want to bolt, I surely do. I want to run away from this sanctuary, this safe haven which has let me be happier than I have ever been in my whole life, that place which has allowed and afforded me acceptance of the greatest and widest terms, that has created in me an awareness of truths which now, even at this moment, are anchoring me securely, trying to get me to stop trembling, and then, suddenly, to stop stock still and stare without wild eyes, but within a mild, impassive sense of dignity, in which I no longer feel any sensation of fear. I hate the sensation but until lately I have consumed a beverage which imitates it. Why did I ever use caffeine? How hardly it left me, making me vomit and giving me headaches so severe I was incapacitated for a day. I want peace. Here it is. Peace I give you. My peace I leave with you.

Peace doesn’t move. Either I stand still or I lose it. Love can do anything, is nimble, but peace is static, has roots, requires roots as the very nature of the trueness of it.

Consciousness is of what? Not pain, not lack, not death. I run from it all the time, and then I stop, I feel it there within me, forgiving, accepting. I scatter myself from it with an array of distractions. The core of life is oxymoronic: tenderly hard, bitterly kind. I run from it like a feeling, but it is not a feeling. It is a presence, without need of attendants. Nothing is required to get there, only a simple meditative decision, the choice to know. There are funnels for it, however, in which to be immersed – water, air -. The infinity of Love is the only infinity. But still there is dread, second by second, of what is to be faced within consciousness, that is, the disappointment of myself. How can I borrow enough love to dare into it? I want a promise which will absolutely not be given. Love doesn’t promise because it is the only eternal, and therefore is itself the fabric of promise. I produce conditions, but there are no conditions. I want a contract, and if there are contracts, then they are documents of the religious ilk, made by the people whom Love has specially designated as its lawyers or representatives. So then if I examine the contracts, I note that in each one there is brokenness. If there is a contract, then it is that I must be Edenlike in nature, that is, defenseless. I wish to have defenses, against what I can imagine, but nothing ever emerges from the dark hallway, only my imagination populates the darkness; nothing alive is in there, only I, and it, live, cogito ergo sum. I can easily populate a list of my sins, twelve in the past minute, six hundred in the past hour, conscious and unconscious together. But in consciousness I never feel judgment, ever. I feel relief, hope, like an animal popping its head above the ground. If I am intentional, then I will rest within consciousness (the only true rest), and I will resist all that asks me to be unconscious.

So much of modern life is a bargain to be unconscious. The more unconscious I want to be, the more expensive be my life. The costs are multidimensional: I hurt myself on many levels when I live without consciousness. It is easy to escape from modern life. All I need is this second in time. I only need just that second. I do not need money, or health, or morality, or friends, or approval. I only need time. And I have time. I have all the time there will ever be, right here, right now. Then, within what seems a white void, consciousness, there is poetry, color. Great books, all art, inhabit it. All greatness inhabits it. External to it is anything common, anything cheap, anything imitative.

Within consciousness there is no need at all. Temptation does not exist. What manner of life is possible there? One with so much time that, as Descartes says, the gods would envy. I can at last conquer only one thing, and this is the contract religion makes with human beings – to conquer the self, this is the narrow gate by which few travel.

To be happy is to be independent of need.  Rene Descartes writes the following in a Discourse on Reason: “My third maxim was to endeavor always to conquer myself rather than fortune, and change my desires rather than the order of the world, and in general, accustom myself to the persuasion that, except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power; so that when we have done our best in things external to us, all wherein we fail of success is to be held, as regards us, absolutely impossible:  and this single principle seemed to me sufficient to prevent me from desiring for the future anything which I could not obtain, and thus render me contented; for since our will naturally seeks those objects alone which the understanding represents as in some way possible of attainment, it is plain, that if we consider all external goods as equally beyond our power, we shall no more regret the absence of such goods as seem due to our birth, when deprived of them without any fault of ours, than our not possessing the kingdoms of China or Mexico, and thus making, so to speak, a virtue of necessity, we shall no more desire health in disease, or freedom in imprisonment, than we now do bodies incorruptible as diamonds, or the wings of birds to fly with.  But I confess there is need of prolonged discipline and frequently repeated meditation to accustom the mind to view all objects in this light; and I believe that in this chiefly consisted the secret of the power of such philosophers as in former times were enabled to rise superior to the influence of fortune, and, amid suffering and poverty, enjoy a happiness which their gods might have envied.  For, occupied incessantly with the consideration of the limits prescribed to their power by nature, they became so entirely convinced that nothing was at their disposal except their own thoughts, that this conviction was of itself sufficient to prevent their entertaining any desire of other objects; and over their thoughts they acquired a sway so absolute, that they had some ground on this account for esteeming themselves more rich and more powerful, more free and more happy, than other men who, whatever be the favors heaped on them by nature and fortune, if destitute of this philosophy, can never command the realization of all their desires.”

Considerable, even incessant meditation is required to satisfy this maxim.  Every religious system says, “Don’t chase after silly things, doing so will make you unhappy.”  But there is a nearly innate impulse to chase anyway.  For some reason the human mind accepts the premise that it is possible to obtain things, and moreover, some think it is a person’s “right” to pursue happiness at all costs.  But there is no pursuit of happiness.  Happiness exists, permanently, as an entity, and can be had free of charge right now.

With matchbooks this is borne out daily.  I search and search for the abandoned matchbook, the one that barely survived, and then I find it and I treasure it; yet then I want to find another, and another, and another.  Someone’s name, the way they expressed themselves, the representation of an image delights the crap out of me.  I love them all.  If I could, if it cost me nothing, I would own them all.

My quest, which requires little money, and a lot of my time, it fun for me, but of course it is absurd.  Who cares?  I do.  I just love matchbooks.  I love them because they’re so likely to be overlooked, and most especially because they’re not “precious”, but rather they occur like weather, at random, in the universe.  They get dumped into a box, stepped on, water damaged; they’re filthy, folded, glued - .  All of their imperfections coalesce into random beauty.  I am absolutely compelled by random beauty.  I find it to be so compelling that whenever I see it, and I see it every day, I must drop everything and attend to it.  Random beauty is Love’s answer to the costly preciousness that drives people wild with consumption, ultimately corrupting both ends of the equation. 

Love’s beauty, random beauty, is my son’s little wet footprint on our balcony where he played a moment before in a thunderstorm puddle, chasing stray blooms into the windowbox below.  It’s the pairing of two words in a student essay.  It’s the story of how our nanny and housekeeper from the Philippines won the local lottery lately (She had a dream in which her mother, who has not been dead two weeks, came to her speaking a number.  She walked into town, invested a tiny amount of her money in that number, and won the whole pot a few hours later.).  Random beauty cannot be possessed, not really.  What do you do with a dissolving footprint, two words, or a story?  Pass it on.  What do you do with a matchbook?  You can put a few up around your house, but what would you do with a hundred, or in my case ten thousand?  Nothing.  You can’t trade them; they’re not “inherently” valuable, which is why they’re priceless to me.  So I make magnets.

In life there must be a focus, beyond work, beyond play, in between.  When I am not mentoring, or advocating, then I am parenting, reading, partying, or playing poker.  But then there is that time in between.  There is that urge to create something with the ridiculous superfluity of Love-given time and passion in modern life, even within a simple lifestyle.  That’s when it is essential to cultivate something non-precious, something that can sustain your attention but cannot trap you in money.  I can squander my life on whatever I choose, and I have chosen.  I often look at my weary husband or my saintly housekeeper and I see that they, too, have made choices.  My husband has chosen to devote himself utterly to his family.  My housekeeper has chosen to bind herself entirely to making sure her children do not grow up like she did.  My choice is infinitely less noble.  But there it is.  It’s my only nearly money-free solution to the constant problem of begetting.

Money does not measure.  Good deeds certainly don’t measure.  What does it mean to measure a person?  By what means can measurement happen where it is not diluted by judgment?  You look for a way to discover height and depth within a soul.  Tolerance.

Tolerance is primarily about tolerance with regard to self.  The greater the tolerance, the smaller the self.  How much self-hatred exists?  All forms of insobriety are acts of self-hatred.  All hatred of others, including those who are “evil” is an act of self-hatred.  All forms of indignation are self-hatred.  Tolerance:  is insult of physical, social, financial kind tolerated?  Is disrespect of all kinds tolerated?

Evil is a thing that pushes, hard, from behind.  Tolerance means absorbing that push, neither deflecting it nor passing it on.  The push echoes in the heart long after it occurs, reverberating within the mind.  Can the push be absorbed?  If it is an enormous push, which often it is, can it be absorbed?

Tolerance is the absorption of evil.  If evil is swallowed it ceases to exist.  It is the self that suffers when evil pushes.  It is the self that decides whether to absorb the insult, the assault, the rape, or to pass it on.  It is the self that decides to run away from suffering into all manners of addiction or to stand still and take it.

How do you tame the self?  How is the self changed?  Evil changes the self, either to match itself or to be its opposite.  If evil is passed along, then the self becomes more and more selfish, self-like, a shade here, a shade there, over a lifetime.  If evil is swallowed, the self becomes selfless, unselfish.

It is necessary to lose the self in order to be happy.  The self is an unwieldy edifice made of smoke that expands to fill all the space within the soul; so long as the self lives, happiness has no room – the two cannot coexist.

The self will fight hard to maintain its nonexistence.  It will be indignant.  It will call especially for its rights, for fairness.  It wants numbers, measurements.  it will judge,, plan, and analyze.  It will seek payment.  It will denounce, if not to the world, at least to itself.  The self loves to talk, most especially to itself.  The chatter begins as soon as consciousness occurs and lasts all day long.  It is almost impossible to escape the self.  Into each room you enter the self will quickly fan out to cover every item inside.  If you go outside, the self will possess you with thoughts about the future or the past.  The self will busy you with ethics, philosophies, and recriminations.  Only a protracted battle will eliminate the self, and even then, at most for a few moments until the self finds its way back again to enslave.

The self cannot survive two things: it cannot survive the present moment, and it cannot survive emotional crucifixion such as when a profound insult is swallowed.  When either of these two events occur, the self dwindles with as much rapidity as it extenuates, and in a moment joy flourishes, happiness ensues, lasting as long as it can.

We are made for these moments.  Each new second, each fresh insult is an opportunity to be free and happy.  Happiness is the byproduct of the present moment as well as to any emotional crucifixion.  The smaller the self, the bigger the person, the more emphatic and individualized the identity.  The bigger the self, the smaller the person, the more redundant and stereotyped the identity.

To measure a person, measure the self.  If you find the self missing entirely you have met the happiest person alive.

There is a bottom to fear; it’s called sobriety.  Literal sobriety is no moral asset in itself.  There is nothing intrinsically good or bad about sobriety.  But sobriety is the doorway through which much good can be accessed; in particular, fearlessness.  When I stop and pay attention I am aware of how painfully and perpetually I fear.  That sensation sprawls through me howling all day long and all day long I want to run from it.  That’s where insobriety comes in.  Insobriety is not so much about the consumption of drugs, but rather about wasting life. 

What is purpose?  Purpose is destiny, the reason for life.  What is destiny?  To come into a fruitful relationship with Love, Truth, and Beauty and see what is produced – this is destiny.  What is built during the moment by moment intimacy created by living soberly and in the present?  Each person is destined to build something unique.  Cathedrals, oceans, continents can be created over the course of a lifetime.  The agony is to survive the gateway, that is, the threat of fear, its presence, and then pressing in despite it, and ultimately through to the other side and into heaven.  The decision has to be made moment by moment, which is why AA preaches “Easy Does It”. 

It is impossible to defeat fear permanently.  This is the damnation of the fallen life.  We are damned to deal with the snake of fear that makes us crawl on our bellies begging for forgiveness when forgiveness doesn’t need to be begged for at all, but can be received in a moment, in a single reckoning.  In one moment it is possible to feel truly beloved and then a shadow passes, sixty seconds lapse, and suddenly insecurity has regained its toehold.  The important thing is not to run, but to stand fast and be emancipated, enfranchised.  There is great urgency to speed up in the presence of fear and this is the exact thing that feeds fear – speed.  The faster life is, the deeper the fear can run.  However, all of the damage fear creates is erased in a single moment of meditative sobriety.  In a single second the lie is exposed as nothing but a smokescreen and then the real, solid elements of life: Truth, Beauty, and Love emerge with enormous permanence and complex intensity.  The feeling is fantastically glorious and fresh like rain.  It lasts as long as it can, and is sustained for as long as sobriety and presence are maintained.

What is it possible to know?  Everything.  It is possible to know what trees know.  It is possible to know what mountains know.  Part of the difficulty of sobriety is not its vacancy but its depth and intensity.  Beauty, Truth, and Love are so enormous, so devastatingly dazzling it’s nearly intolerable, but it is still better to be tormented by ecstatic pleasure than by the staggering horror of fear.

Self-expression is the reason free will exists, so that communion can happen, and the intercourse between an individual and the larger entities of Love, Truth, and Beauty creates something.  The romance begins.  Truth tantalizes your mind; beauty seduces your soul, and Love inhabits your being and you spin within these three, your mind at once clear and free yet seized and excited, your soul exalted and surrendered; within this ballet your being is elevated and grounded all at once, the balance of the universe is gracefully housed in your life.  You feel the profundity, simplicity, totality, and joy, so inspiration comes.  You are gripped by passion until you can’t help but give birth to something – a loaf of bread, a kiss, a concerto, a golf swing – something perfect comes out of you.  Something whole unto itself, something utterly unique, as personal as a child, pours out of you.  It’s so beautiful you can hardly breathe; it’s finer than an orchid, more radiant than an emerald.  Then that work of art and passion toddles out or flies out into the world, touching soul after soul, igniting other individual passions.  This is what we are meant for; nothing less will ever satisfy us.  The dull, miserable doorway that opens up into eternal light is the doorway of sobriety, a grinding, grappling, unpretty, dirty, sweating act of will that never gets easier.  There are rules in life, and this is one of them: if you want perfection you must first strip the hideous glaze of fear from your life by peeling off insobriety and entering into the Now.  All that is perfect is really just a byproduct of the act of will that allows for true sobriety to occur as you waltz across the threshold of heaven, moving freely in a fourth dimension between this world and that one.  Let fear die; don’t feed it ever again.

Perpetual ecstasy is possible.  But the trick to happiness feels reckless because it involves remaining unencumbered of all needs.  Hell puts infinite conditions on happiness.  I will be happy if…  I will be happy when…  So long as this is the thinking process no happiness can exist at all; instead you end up chasing things while sober, and running from things while unsober.  But again, perpetual ecstasy is possible, if you can forfeit dominion, if you will simply let go of your own conditions.

Real treasures can only be received – sex, magic, love, laughter, friendship, sunlight through flower petals, the smell of an infant, pocket aces, tuna fish sandwiches and potato chips.  There are only two kinds of prayers:  please, please, please – the kind that presupposes Love to be a god who withholds, and then the second kind of prayer: thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, which is the only real prayer to the only real God.  Thank you that I am not a slave.  Thank you that tonight there is a moon in the sky.  Thank you that there are people capable of creating great books, poems, and movies.  Thank you that there are musicians and mystics.  Thank you for oceans and sleep and blankets and guardian angels.  Anger ends.  Insobriety of all kinds ends because ecstasy has begun.

Hell is the manufacturer of the “What if..” scenario.  What if I let go of my income and I become broke and poor?  What if I stop being phony and lose all my friends?  What if I am bored and deprived?  What if….  A single moment, a fraction of a second spent in the company of Love eradicates the “What if’s”.  All you have to do is stop, completely, wherever you are, and breathe in and you will know that Love is real, and, furthermore, that Love imposes no conditions whatsoever on Its loving you.  What if I’m gay and…  What if I’m addicted and…  What if I’ve done evil things and…  Spend a single moment, spend a fraction of a second in the company of Love by remaining sober and still and you will know incontrovertibly that Love doesn’t judge, that judgment is suspended not “until later”, but forever.  Then you will know that ecstasy is the condition in which, whether you acknowledge your condition or not, you live already.  Already.

It feels reckless.  You suddenly halt.  You stop, maybe while you are walking full speed to work down a crowded street in New York City, maybe you have to pull your car over in Los Angeles traffic, maybe you have to get up and walk out of a party to have this quiet, apocalyptic moment of euphoria – you say, my God, my God!  And there it is.  No more misery.  Ecstasy begins.

It really is all or nothing.  Either there is something perpetually missing or you are perpetually satisfied.  Ecstasy means you can say to yourself, “I have it all.  I have enough.”  Because there is no “more” or “less” when you discover what has been true all along – you are profoundly, emphatically beloved.  It’s the thing you knew before you had money and friends, before you discovered the horror of insecurity, before you understood time, before all those hellish phantoms arrived in your life you knew the truth: you are important, infinitely valuable, and unconditionally loved.

Very, very young children enjoy things: I watch my son pick up a fallen bloom and enjoy it for twenty minutes.  I watch him appreciate puddles.  He loves texture.  He loves kisses, laughter, and the taste of vanilla ice cream.  He finds joy in leaping the waves that crash over our reef here, and he is fascinated by the little crabs that spring out and scuttle among the rocks.  He likes the sounds that natural blowholes make on the jetty.  He has fun all day long.  At night he likes a good story to read, and to watch movies or dance to music.  He loves to be touched, and to touch.  He likes eye contact, and conversation.  He has no money.  He can’t say much.  He is helpless.  The adult version of this lifestyle, which contains identical elements, is childlike but not childish.

Enough.  That’s heaven.  To be able to stop at any hour of your day and say, “This is enough; I have it all.”  To stop chasing and to acknowledge what is real: you have enough, therefore you have it all.  To be able to say, “Nothing more needs to be added here – I possess love, truth, and beauty.”  Then you know the luxury that money promises but cannot deliver.  You know freedom.  You know peace.  It’s stupidly simple, but the secret to life is to acknowledge that Love loves.  The secret is to act on that knowledge by deciding that if Love loves, then Love loves you.  You say, simply, “Thanks.”  There can be no judgment in Love so you can’t lose your position; it’s a sure thing.  All you have to do is receive it.  Love intends for you to be happy, not once in a while, or when… but right now and every single moment forward from right now.

Love says, “Peace be with you.”  Love intends for you to have enough, not when, not if, but now and always.  Love intends for you to be free, unconditionally free.  Ultimately you define luxury, or you have luxury defined for you.  If you choose to be defined, then you will always chase that which you cannot have and you will never, ever, not even for a minute, be happy.  Luxury is about living.  It’s about looking to experience beauty, truth, and love every day, but not to control or to possess.  Children live in fantastic luxury.  Choose that life and you will know the ultimate luxury because you will have it all; you will have enough.  Today can be that day.  Perpetual ecstasy is possible, right here, right now

How do you get to ecstasy?  Stop being a giver or a taker and be a receiver.  Start saying thank-you and make the decision never to say please again because you have already inherited the earth and the heavens and there is nothing more.

In Walden Thoreau wrote: “Age is no better, hardly so well qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost… the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run”

Today there was a small graduation ceremony for the 8^th graders who are leaving the school and there were two people involved in the ceremony who were fake.  They uttered incomprehensible things to me when they met me and I stared out at them through a fog, feeling their insecurity expand to envelope me like a cold cloak.  I’m not important on our campus, however, they wanted me to acknowledge their presence and I did so.  Disingenuousness is startling here.  Kids aren’t insincere, and Chamorros aren’t either, not as a rule, so it is very, very strange to encounter 2 fake Chamorros.

Phoniness is thaumaturgy, flailing of the arms to redirect attention towards something unreal and you stare at the vapors and then back again at the little human chained to the fluttering smoke and you feel that cold sweat of aloneness that is truly the absence of God.  What is hell?  Fear.  The one emotion still available to the lost.

They need me and yet I occupy no position of great authority and yet they need me.  I do not want their jobs.  I do not know their friends or family.  We do not often run into one another professionally and yet both women needed me to genuflect.  It costs me nothing to do so; I don’t care at all, but the contact itself is expensive.  What I notice in the aftermath of an insincere encounter is that there has been a vampiric loss in my soul.  Something has been sucked out of me and it takes time before that Life is reborn.  Love replenishes itself, but not immediately, and so tonight I feel it keenly, their emptiness, what they left on me as they brushed through me.  Ghosts aren’t dangerous to me, only to one another.  They are instantaneously drawn to any nearby ghosts and immediately engage in all out war.  All they need from me is to watch; they want the only thing they can get from me – my eyes.  They need me to see them, to be with them superficially, the only way they can be with anyone in the slim margin of unlife that remains in this heaven we occupy, this Eden.  So it was today.  The two ghosts wrestled violently with one another as I watched the wafer-thin grotesquery. 

God is everywhere except among the lonely, insincere.  There’s nothing I can do about them.  When I share a room with a phantom their iciness penetrates me and I feel it shiver through me like only hell can shiver and it rattles my soul.  Even now, I cannot sleep.  It’s a silvery, phosphorescent pain I feel tonight.  My head hurts and I feel tight and small, another sign of the absence of God.  So I do what I do when I want to meet Love, I write and read.  The Gospels are everywhere; Love thrives.  The ghost-traces are already disappearing like footprints in dew.  The sun rises again among the living and the dead retreat to the cavern of fear and I am exalted by the absolute presence of greatness, triumph, and joy jettisoned continuously from the hurtling expanse of Love that moves between us every shining moment of eternity.

There are no mortals, only the unloving, those who have not been cast out, but rather have rejected themselves, and so live in the vacuum of self-hatred that is outside the free range of Love.  What can be done?  Only to continue to give them the love and attention they demand, and, perhaps, to be there when their self-rejection wears itself out and they fling themselves back on mercy and grace only to discover it’s been waiting for them there, here, and everywhere all along.  Then they will laugh and inhale and we will have food and play games and be together forever. 

Pulitzer Prize winner Franz Wright writes about this:

“THE ONLY ANIMAL

The only animal that commits suicide
went for a walk in the park,
basked on a hard bench
in the first star,
traveled to the edge of space
in an armchair
while company quietly
talked, and abruptly
returned,
the room empty

The only animal that cries,
that takes off its clothes
and reports to the mirror, the one
and only animal
that brushes its own teeth?

somewhere
the only animal that smokes a cigarette,
that lies down and flies backward in time,
that rises and walks to a book
and looks up a word
heard the telephone ringing
in the darkness downstairs and decided
to answer no more.

And I understand,
too well: how many times
have I made the decision to dwell
from now on
in the hour of my death
(the space I took up here
scarlessly closing like water)
and said I'm never coming back,
and yet

this morning
I stood once again
in this world,
the garden
ark and vacant
tomb of what
I can't imagine,
between twin eternities,
some sort of wings,
more or less equidistantly
exiled from both,
hovering in the dreaming called
being awake, where
You gave me
in secret one thing
to perceive, the
tall blue starry
strangeness of being
here at all.

You gave us each in secret one thing to perceive.

Furless now, upright, My banished
and experimental
child

You said, though your own heart condemn you

I do not condemn you.”

If you want a copy of our first newsletter, which is in no way a sales pitch for magnets, please let us know.

Thoreau wrote, “The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man—you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind—I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that.”

You sort of always know when you find that for which you have been looking.  I knew when I saw my husband smile, from across a crowded room, that he was a joyful man.  It was love at first sight.  I do not think there is anything but.  Love is the uncontrollable emotion, the only one.  I can control my hate and envy, my greed and my jealousy, my neediness, my hunger.  But I cannot control love.

While our little son wore himself out tossing plastic discs into the air we talked about MTV.  When we were still kids, when I was smoking in secret and beginning to think I knew things, there was MTV and it was so fucking cool.  You flipped it on and there was some freak and the music was great and you just knew that MTV was undomesticated.  Which made it unbearably sexy.  I couldn’t get enough of it.  But then someone somewhere managed to put it in a can and sell it.  Then instead of being aa really cool thing MTV became kind of cool and then very uncool.

One way to tell that the devil has been somewhere is that afterwards everything matches.  Like some people who think they know about God.  They all match.  They don’t drink or smoke, they don’t have affairs, they never lie – of course none of this is really true, but that’s the image, the uniform they wear.  A few years ago I was asked to be on this guy’s morning radio show.  But then he found out that my beliefs and his did not match and he told me, nevermind.  I remember what he said to me exactly, because I cried when I hung up the phone, he said, “Study the Word, Aimee.  Dig deep into the Word, and then you will know.”  How I wanted to scream!  I wanted to say all kinds of things about what I knew.  But that was back when I thought I knew something.  I thought I was right, but there is no such thing.  I’m not right or wrong.

Today one of my mentee teachers got her heart broken.  She thinks she’s right.  She asked me to do something for a kid and I said, No.  So she went above my head and heard it again, no.  When you’re a young teacher you want to save people, you actually believe the most outrageous thing.  You believe it’s possible to save someone.  You want everyone to bajulate right along with you.  Your cross is unbearably heavy and you are bleeding to death every damn day and you are filled with righteous indignation and that’s how it is for a very, very long time.  You lay millstones around everyone’s neck, but most especially your own.  It hurts.

But you’ll be damned if you’ll put it down.  So you drag that cross along and along and along and you match yourself to what you think it looks like to be someone who Knows.  You make yourself a hippi or a conservative or vegan or rich or poor or smart or stupid, and that’s your version of yourself.  But it’s not Love’s version of you, and so the burden is heavy, so heavy.  Acting versus being is slavery or liberty.

When your persona is real it’s light as a feather, and ludic.  You are you, floating, winged, drifting through an astonishing galaxy of immortals.  Today I heard the leathery slaps of a white dove’s wings while sitting in our truck outside the post office.  My husband was mailing off packs of magnets.  And there it was, Joy, hearing that meaty smack that only a dove makes as it takes flight.  God but that’s nice.

In the film Bagger Vance, Mr. Vance says, “Yep... Inside each and every one of us is one true authentic swing... Somethin' we was born with... Somethin' that's ours and ours alone... Somethin' that can't be taught to ya or learned... Somethin' that got to be remembered... Over time the world can rob us of that swing... It get buried inside us under all our wouldas and couldas and shouldas... Some folk even forget what their swing was like…Put your eyes on Bobby Jones... Look at his practice swing, almost like he's searchin for something... Then he finds it... Watch how he settle hisself right into the middle of it, feel that focus... He got a lot of shots he could choose from... Duffs and tops and skulls, there's only ONE shot that's in perfect harmony with the feild... One shot that's his, authentic shot, and that shot is gonna choose him... There's a perfect shot out there tryin' to find each and every one of us... All we got to do is get ourselves out of its way, to let it choose us... Can't see that flag as some dragon you got to slay... You got to look with soft eyes... See the place where the tides and the seasons and the turnin' of the Earth, all come together... where everything that is, becomes one... You got to seek that place with your soul Junuh... Seek it with your hands don't think about it... Feel it... Your hands is wiser than your head ever gonna be... Now I can't take you there Junuh... Just hopes I can help you find a way... Just you... that ball... that flag... and all you are...”

You got to look with soft eyes.  Love comes from the heart, not the head.  If I have to think before I act then I am acting.  The other day all the students at my school began a battery of tests I have worked all year to help them pass.  They’re brown kids in a rich, white world, and they fear those tests.  Walls of words and little boxes just scare the living shit out of them.  And so I had to do a little fire and brimstone with them four days ago.  I told them a little voice would start boxing them in, saying, “Can’t, can’t can’t.”  Native islanders are bucolic people and if you put them into a box, or even inside a house or car too long, you kill them.  I don’t mean this figuratively.

I played a song for them and I told them, “Yes, you can.  Yes, oh yes, you can.”

That poor young teacher is carrying her cross tonight and there are so many things she can’t do.  But Love says yes, always, forever; Love never says no.  There is no condemnation in Love; that would be impossible, the two states are mutually exclusive.  Love is a liberator, not a domesticator.

Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden Pond, “as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can.” 

There are a lot of currencies because there are a lot of languages and these are the same thing.  If love is my language it is also my currency.  But if currency is my language then I am not speaking of love.  I switch between the two often.  When I teach I am speaking of love, when I rescue a matchbook I am speaking of love.  But then there are all the other times in my mind when my thoughts revolve around currency.  When I watched the Matrix for the fortieth or fiftieth time, (really) I remember Neo saying that Agent Smith had found a way to replicate himself.  Smith is Satan in the film, and of course his intention is to make copies of himself.  At one point he says, “What’s great about me is there are so many me’s, me, me, me!”  He puts his hand like a sword into the soul of another individual creature and suddenly he replicates; his logo is on them and they become him.  That’s currency talking, “me, me, me.” 

The reason our company works is because it isn’t about the money.  We’re not slick.  It’s that I just really dig matchbooks (and our logo speaks volumes).  Matchbooks are little pieces of random beauty, beaten up currency whose intent it was to sell something once, but then, over time, it changed and developed a personality of its own and instead of selling, now, in its old age, the matchbook is doing something else – it’s romancing.  The language of love – that’s what our matchbooks speak.  Which is why this is going to work, why it is working.  Because the matchbooks speak in susurrus tones, “us, us, us” not “me, me, me”.  I do not think that the past was a better time than now.  Matchbooks do not glorify the past.  They glorify the process of aging. 

No one has dominion over time.  It can’t be hurried.  The aging that shows on the faces of our matchbooks is earned, not faked.  Every little scratch and tear and worn off place is personality.

In Nobody’s Fool Paul Newman is speaking to his little grandson while driving a beat to shit pick up truck through a damn cold part of the US and the little boy suddenly remarks, “This is kind of a nice truck.” And Paul Newman says, “It is kind of a nice truck, isn’t it?”

Trucks, for me, are like matchbooks.  The older, the more beat to hell, the better.  On my morning walk each day an old white dude with a long white beard cruises past me with a loud dog in his truck bed.  It’s like four in the morning and what he does every morning in the jungle at that hour is a mystery to me, because I meet him a hell of a long way out there, way past where most of the ranches end.  I love that truck of his.  On Rota we have a lot of trucks like that.  I’ve thought of doing a little montage of them.

There is a crucifixion that happens that transfers language from me, me, me, to us, us us.  Instead of there being only one in the universe, instead of having dominion, suddenly the me deliquesces into us.  The self has died in profligate, prodigal living, and in its place something holy has risen, something that has been so entirely used, touched, touched to the point of agony, abandoned to the point of despair, and yet, rather than breaking, rather than shattering and being hard and brittle that thing, over time, allowed itself to be beaten, badly.  It allowed itself to be damaged.  Then, like a phoenix, beauty comes, but only igniparous.

I find every day that I face two choices, I can break or I can be broken.  If I break I am speaking in the currency of replication, of banality, ugly as a new car, hideous like a pretentious house.  If I am broken, then I find beauty, surrendered, there emerges from the wreckage pyrrhic perfection, the only kind there can be, perfection that has been handled to the point of no return. 

I’m using used matchbooks to build a used bookstore.  It’s a nice idea, really.  I do not know if, at about sixty cents profit per matchbook (and I give so many away when I get excited wrapping an order), I don’t know how in the world it will work, but in my heart I feel it, and there is life within the dream, life fighting for this little island, fighting the incessant war, fighting for something real that inoculates against the dangers of evil replication, of the logo’d world, the uniformity that devours us all.  Words in great books unleash you, they are as Jose Saramago says, Ariadne’s Thread, leading us back to that which makes us but chooses not to have dominion over us.  Leading us back to the place that treasures time and eschews quick, easy perfection.  It came as no surprise to me that there was a slow movement in the world, a profound, unmet desire for slowness characterized by attachments to magazines like Mary Jane’s Farm, quilting, and paper making.  We want time, the question is, will the self die so that time can work on us?  Or will we race through the present, speaking the language of money, and therefore miss the depth that only time can develop?  I do both every day, run through, slow down.  Only one is about joy.  Death precedes life, not the other way around.  And if death is not embraced, life never arrives.

Stillness is a simple concept – to not move.  But when I stop moving I find the most unbearable joy or the most incontrovertible sadness.  Either I am aware of my great value and the immense Love that surrounds me, or I am stunned by my own despair, my assessment of myself that inevitably leads me surrounded in my mind by very tall walls.

Stillness requires that I tolerate the reality of a loving Infinity.  Sometimes I will not do so.  There is a moment in my morning walk when I have just emerged from the taller part of the jungle and entered onto a plateau that winds along the fishing cliffs.  I often find that I inhale deeply at that moment.  The sea stretches out before me a perfect aqua blue, no land in sight, and the jungle howls out below me, ancient cries piercing the air against the husky male rustle of the giant jungle leaves.  And it is beautiful.  When I emerge into stillness, when this happens, I must emerge into someplace beautiful or I will pass out of stillness and into stasis, from an everlasting light to an everlasting darkness.

I find that what is truly evil in my life, what symbolizes that non-reality for me is ugliness.  If my house isn’t beautiful, if my shoes aren’t beautiful, if the way I am walking isn’t beautiful – then I am irrepressibly sad.  Why must stillness deliquesce into beauty?  Why must the two states occur simultaneously?

Because beauty is what emerges from a longstanding relationship with Love.  Beauty is when you have been known by Love long enough to know what you love.  And what you love, everyone will also love because your love, in and of itself, lends perfection to that which it conceives.  So what does it mean to be known by Love?  I can only say this: crucifixion.

There is corporate beauty and individual beauty and there is of course absolute beauty – the sort of thing you see in a baby, or in the moon.  Individual beauty is cultivated not by careful tending to the surfaces of life – my life can look perfect and yet be terribly ugly – individual beauty is the product of crucifixion.  It means that Love and Self have met, time after time, and done battle, and Self has lost.  Shame, humiliation, guilt, all of these have been willingly, willfully embraced, in moments of great agony, and then, in the aftermath, comes beauty.

There is a woman on this earth who taught me how to submit to crucifixion.  Her delicate, ephemeral work in the diaphanous outpost of my soul saved my life.  her name is Christine.  And in her favorite book, The Velveteen Rabbit, there is this passage:  "’It doesn't happen all at once,’" said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.  Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.’"

I have the most astonishing addictive ability that runs parallel to an equally astonishing capacity for self-discipline.  I lament one and pat myself on the back for the other.  But life in the grip of both ends of the spectrum is troublesome.  You are astonishingly productive and then utterly helpless, usually within every 24 hour period.  So we lead a secret double life.  I’m brilliant at work.  And I am a terrible burden to my husband. 

For the two hours that I walk every day I am with God.  Since I am blind for half that time I am really in the palm of Love’s hand.  Which is when I can hear Love speak.  I walk partly because the evanescent crepuscular hours in the jungle are exquisitely glorious, and partly because Love talks to me in susurrus tones the entire time.  It’s like being cradled, and I love to be cradled.  During one of those hemerine moments it occurred to me quite clearly that there is no such thing as self-discipline.  This comes as a great surprise to me for I have been the proud possessor of such a quantity of that alloy called self-discipline.  I call it an alloy because it is not a pure thing.  It is a mixture of two things – prayer and grace.  There is no discipline.  I cannot escape myself at all.  All this time I have been fooling myself.

A disciple is not one with discipline, but one who sits at the feet of a teacher.  One who, caught up in the moment of joy, follows blindly behind the teacher, wherever the teacher may go.  For 20 years I studied the Gospels twice a day, but I would never approach the letters of Paul because of his appalling arrogance, it seemed, anyhow, for me.  I wanted only Love’s curious words and contradictions, and none of Paul’s blacks and whites.  Then, suddenly, like Forrest Gump, one day I just stopped.  Whatever it was I sought to be saturated with had reached that point, and I was finished, not with Love, but with those particular episodes of Love I read and reread literally hundreds of times.  Then I started reading other Gospels.  People might quarrel with the word, but the Gospels I read now I consider to be as accurate an accounting of Love’s voice as the ones I spent more than half my life and all my heart studying.

So in one such Gospel, that is, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, there is this passage that speaks exactly the truth I heard on my walk the other morning:  “There come seasons, meditative, sweet, yet awful hours, when in wonder and fear you ask yourself that unanswerable question:  Who am I; the thing that can say 'I'?  The world, with its loud trafficking, retires into the distance; and, through the paper-hangings, and stonewalls, and thick-plied tissues of Commerce and Polity, and all the living and lifeless integuments (of Society and a Body), wherewith your Existence sits surrounded,—the sight reaches forth into the void Deep, and you are alone with the Universe, and silently commune with it, as one mysterious Presence with another. "Who am I; what is this ME?  A Voice, a Motion, an Appearance;—some embodied, visualized Idea in the Eternal Mind?  “Cogito, ergo sum”.  Alas, poor Cogitator, this takes us but a little way.  Sure enough, I am; and lately was not:  but Whence?  How?  Whereto?  The answer lies around, written in all colors and motions, uttered in all tones of jubilee and wail, in thousand-figured, thousand-voiced, harmonious Nature:  but where is the cunning eye and ear to whom that God-written Apocalypse will yield articulate meaning?  We sit as in a boundless Phantasmagoria and Dream-grotto; boundless, for the faintest star, the remotest century, lies not even nearer the verge thereof:  sounds and many-colored visions flit round our sense; but Him, the Unslumbering, whose work both Dream and Dreamer are, we see not; except in rare half-waking moments, suspect not. Creation, says one, lies before us, like a glorious Rainbow; but the Sun that made it lies behind us, hidden from us.  Then, in that strange Dream, how we clutch at shadows as if they were substances; and sleep deepest while fancying ourselves most awake!  Which of your Philosophical Systems is other than a dream-theorem; a net quotient, confidently given out, where divisor and dividend are both unknown?  What are all your national Wars, with their Moscow Retreats, and sanguinary hate-filled Revolutions, but the Somnambulism of uneasy Sleepers?  This Dreaming, this Somnambulism is what we on Earth call Life; wherein the most indeed undoubtingly wander, as if they knew right hand from left; yet they only are wise who know that they know nothing.”

As I begin this blog, I have worried about sounding like someone who knows something when I am sure I am not such a one.  I was profoundly comforted to finally understand the freedom I really have in knowing nothing.  Since I do not claim to originate any of what I know, and since I cannot perpetuate what I know with any real consistency, I am, absolutely, positively, out of control.  Thank God.  I can’t tell you why I can walk 8 miles a day 7 days a week or why I lost 85 pounds.  I can’t say why I can eat two McDonald’s ice creams in a row. But I can tell you this:  I am in love with Victor Hugo, Toni Morrison, David Foster Wallace, and Leo Tolstoy, and Franz Wright, and TS Eliot, and Andre Dubois, and most especially, most especially Jose Saramago, but a lot of others.  I chase after them like a disciple and they shed their wisdom in their own wake and I consume it ravenously, in an uncivilized, carnivorous manner, my mouth dripping, my face and hands filthy with desperate consumption.  When I locate a new Gospel I am enraptured.  Nothing can tear me from it.  I am rereading one now.  But soon I will discover one I do not yet know and once again I will find myself nearly faint with the thrill of the truth, and how the truth has this ability to do the one thing I cannot do for myself, lift me from the perpetual back and forth motions of a horizontal life, and crucify me with the truth that allows me once again to head north, deeper in, further into the arms of Love where, instead of light I find blindness, instead of clarity I find only cuddling.

It was in Thomas Carlyle that I found a correlating passage:  “Considering our present advanced state of culture, and how the Torch of Science has now been brandished and borne about, with more or less effect, for five thousand years and upwards; how, in these times especially, not only the Torch still burns, and perhaps more fiercely than ever, but innumerable Rushlights, and Sulphur-matches, kindled thereat, are also glancing in every direction, so that not the smallest cranny or dog-hole in Nature or Art can remain unilluminated,—it might strike the reflective mind with some surprise that hitherto little or nothing of a fundamental character, whether in the way of Philosophy or History, has been written on the subject of Clothes.

Our Theory of Gravitation is as good as perfect:  Lagrange, it is well known, has proved that the Planetary System, on this scheme, will endure forever; Laplace, still more cunningly, even guesses that it could not have been made on any other scheme.  Whereby, at least, our nautical Logbooks can be better kept; and water-transport of all kinds has grown more commodious.  Of Geology and Geognosy we know enough:  what with the labors of our Werners and Huttons, what with the ardent genius of their disciples, it has come about that now, to many a Royal Society, the Creation of a World is little more mysterious than the cooking of a dumpling; concerning which last, indeed, there have been minds to whom the question, _How the apples were got in_, presented difficulties.  Why mention our disquisitions on the Social Contract, on the Standard of Taste, on the Migrations of the Herring?  Then, have we not a Doctrine of Rent, a Theory of Value; Philosophies of Language, of History, of Pottery, of Apparitions, of Intoxicating Liquors?  Man's whole life and environment have been laid open and elucidated; scarcely a fragment or fibre of his Soul, Body, and Possessions, but has been probed, dissected, distilled, desiccated, and scientifically decomposed:  our spiritual Faculties, of which it appears there are not a few, have their Stewarts, Cousins, Royer Collards:  every cellular, vascular, muscular Tissue glories in its Lawrences, Majendies, Bichats.

How, then, comes it, may the reflective mind repeat, that the grand Tissue of all Tissues, the only real Tissue, should have been quite overlooked by Science,—the vestural Tissue, namely, of woollen or other cloth; which Man's Soul wears as its outmost wrappage and overall; wherein his whole other Tissues are included and screened, his whole Faculties work, his whole Self lives, moves, and has its being?  For if, now and then, some straggling broken-winged thinker has cast an owl's glance into this obscure region, the most have soared over it altogether heedless; regarding Clothes as a property, not an accident, as quite natural and spontaneous, like the leaves of trees, like the plumage of birds.  In all speculations they have tacitly figured man as _a Clothed Animal_; whereas he is by nature a _Naked Animal_; and only in certain circumstances, by purpose and device, masks himself in Clothes.  Shakespeare says, we are creatures that look before and after:  the more surprising that we do not look round a little, and see what is passing under our very eyes.”

We have been straddling two worlds for a long time and have only recently come to the decision to forfeit one in place of the other.  It’s a costly choice for us.  On the one hand we have our blood family and the US and all that is easy and comfortable about that world, including our gorgeous handmade house and its hoard of antiques.  On the other we have this wildly difficult place to live, an apartment full of crappy furniture in a building we can never own, a place where typhoons sweep through, power outages are regular occurrences, it’s impossible to get gasoline if the boat doesn’t show up due to weather, and we are all basically hooked up to an aging generator that could at any moment decide to drop dead.  But there is the white peacock that lives next door.  And the smell of warm seas.  And the expanse of sky-blue water so clean it looks faked.

None of that would be compelling if it were accompanied by the glamour that usually accompanies places like these.  Our island is simply too small, too remote, for real tourism to flourish.  People come here to research World War 2, to engage in ridiculous tests of physical prowess, or to spear fish in shark infested water.  Our downtown looks like Beirut.  Houses of concrete are rarely pretty.  Cats and dogs wander loosely through downtown.  The cars are all rusted out from salt.  A few bars serve a few customers.  It’s hot as hell in summer, but the cool breezes at night are extremely seductive.

So why stay?  Why when it’s just impossible to buy almost anything?  Why when the roads are unpaved and often so full of hulicity that navigation is challenging?  Why when the word “economy” doesn’t apply to us.  We have one dollar here, fifty cents there, we do not have what one might actually deem an economy – we’re more like a child’s lemonade stand.  The whole question draws me back to the final scene of the Matrix, when the machine man is fighting Neo, and he’s hit Neo hard in the face, punched him down to his knees countless times, and yet Neo keeps getting back up.  Finally the unbeatable machine, the devil incarnate known as Agent Smith, becomes exasperated and asks Neo (Mr. Anderson) why?

Agent Smith: Why, Mr. Anderson? Why do you do it? Why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you're fighting for something? For more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom? Or truth? Perhaps peace? Yes? No? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception. The temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself, although only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now. You can't win. It's pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson? Why? Why do you persist?
Neo: Because I choose to.

What does it mean to choose life without glamour?  No Starbucks.  No McDonalds.  No hobby stores filled with things like rhinestones and beads, things I love.  No funky little shops full of folk art that give me great joy to uncover.  None of it is here.  I have, instead, Walden Pond.  My son learning to screw a metal top onto a glass bottle.  The sound of the waves perpetually waltzing along the cliffs.  These things I have chosen I cannot hold in my hand, not really.  I have chosen to be in a place where I cannot own things.  The life of such a fragile place as this is fragile is quite temporary.  It’s only a matter of time before something irreplaceable breaks or rusts or just simply gets lost.

Here’s the answer to the machine man’s question.  Because in a place where you cannot own things you cannot be owned.  Because in a place without glamour you automatically acquire a place without slavery.  But the choice is very, very hard.  It requires discipline to live without television and processed food.  It requires discipline to live in a place where there is nowhere to go and absolutely nothing to do.

Suddenly the spirit soars.  Art can be made.  Time stops.  You catch up to yourself and the process is exquisitely unbearable because joy is an exquisite feeling.  It’s like shards of crystal penetrating your soul and then spontaneously erupting into loose limbs of fire that purify and clarify everything.  You can barely survive the experience of that fifth dimension of living Love.

Here’s what I know.  My profound and nearly complete woundedness finds redemption.  The wounds I received, when I was punched and too small to get up, when I did stop fighting, all those wounds I carried here, to this place.  Only in a place like this one is it possible for something to enter into every facet of that holocaust and carry in redemption.  A life that has been despairingly horizontal becomes vertical.  You find yourself moving upward and outward.  You find yourself expanding exponentially.

This is one of the last bastions.  This is the promised land of every smart commercial that makes a bid to steal your money and rent your mind.  They lie.  You can’t buy this place.  You can’t make it into anything.  So the animal called freedom can survive here, and give the gift it has to give, permanent healing that stops you from the perpetual revolving circular life of the chase and the capture and the sadness that more is needed, and instead plants you into a barren expanse that leaves you face to face with Love, the only reality composed of freedom.  That’s why I choose to be here.  I think therefore I am.  I reserve that right.

Descartes wrote: “Archimedes used to demand just one firm and immovable point in order to shift the entire earth; so I too can hope for great things if I manage to find just one thing, however slight, that is certain and unshakable… But there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something.” 

Every single morning, I get up at 4am and go out for an 8 mile walk in the jungle.  Four miles into the jungle I reach Ephraim’s farm where he grows pineapple, bananas, and coconuts.  His farm has a hand hewn stone wall that goes on for acres, and a smooth flowing stream with handmade bridges.  Hundreds of coconut shells house huge purple orchids that are in perpetual bloom right above a hedge.  By the time I reach the platform that overlooks the ocean, the sun is just about to rise; the whole ocean shimmers and blushes crimson.  And I am completely happy.  It’s hard to imagine a moment more beautiful.

I do not carry a flashlight, only an umbrella and water.  In my hour of blindness, I watch the sky as much as I can to thread my way along the precarious dirt road that hugs the ocean up to the cliffs.  On moonless nights it’s utterly dark.  Moss-covered escarpments rise thousands of feet into the air above me.  White birds with long plumed forked tails fly in tandem, low, across the ocean.  The ocean itself thrashes against the rocks and doubles back on itself.  Long legged white and brown cranes crash out of the underbrush, and bright green doves fly through forests of flowers.  Giant green lizards waddle out of my way their little elbows punching the air as they go.  We have bougainvillea in peach, purple, red, white, pink, and orange; dusky, heavily scented plumeria blooms in pink and white line the gravel path, hibiscus in peach, yellow, and red, and wild roses that have dense petals like a peonies show up in some places.  There is also a local gardenia that is intoxicating.  I’m not even including the wild flowers that are shaped like purple horns, or the little pink pansy-type flowers staying low to the earth, or the dark purple rough flowers that grow on long, green stems.

I feel ravenous for beauty.  I must be surrounded by beautiful objects.  My despair when I am in an ugly place pushes me towards the very edge of my life.  I keep a house of beautiful things because I need beauty.  I see beautiful objects all day – old glass buoys, silver dishes, a terribly old pair of Buddhas, license plates from trucks in the 1940’s, an elephant from India, a tile from a Chinese bed, thousands of strung beads line the ceilings, antique incense burners made of metal with violent dragons appliquéd on the sides burn nag champa.  At least one candle is always lit.  Antique Asian cold cream containers hold dozens of glass stoppers we’ve found on the beach.  A medicine jar I found by the shipwreck holds most of the glass marbles we’ve recovered.  I use an old Japanese glass ink bottle from the beach to hold my oils on my dressing table. 

Then there is the china.  When we arrived we walked the beach daily for years.  On our hemerine walks we began to take up the broken china pieces littering the beaches.  I have sixteen or so boxes of it.  I use it to make wall murals.  I intermingle sea urchin spines, rhinestones, shells, and fine blue glass into my work.  I am now making a few benches for our bookstore. 

Beauty is perfect, but perfect is not beautiful.  The beauty I worship is ripped, torn.  Immaculate environments are not beautiful; they’re dead.  Real beauty can’t be kept like a domesticated animal.  You can’t force it when you write any more than you can force it when you make art.  It comes only when you hold on loosely.  If I push, even for a moment, beauty turns its face from me and I am left with hideousness.

New cars – awful; old trucks – gorgeous.  Thin, perfect women – sexless; woman with some flesh – sensual, exotic.  Immaculate houses – crypts; tumbling houses – wombs.  Beauty is like an egg in a shell, a living creature caged in a fragile box.  You can’t have it until you break it, but you have to break it just right.  Untouchable women, untouchable living rooms, untouchable antiques are never beautiful.  I eat on my Tiffany silver every day because silver feels a certain way on the tongue.  I drink from crystal.  Beauty cannot be precious.  It has to be left unguarded; part of its allure is its vulnerability.  If someone takes it, they take it, if it breaks, it breaks.  It’s what Ian McEwan wrote about in Atonement.

Beauty is not duplicatable; it can’t be mass produced because its essential quality is its utter uniqueness and its fugacious nature.  It can’t be mass produced.  It happens.  Somehow beauty has been concatenated with perfection.  Beauty does not need perfection because it is perfection.  On exactly the other hand, perfection is only beautiful when it happens at random.

God is the artist of random beauty.  The way my pink sheer curtains with their handmade beaded fringe clatter in the slight afternoon breeze – breathtaking.  Forever I will remember a moment when I had placed a single daisy in a broken antique jar on the wooden windowsill of our home in Georgia.  The sun haloed it for an instant and I was transfixed.

But this need I have to capture, to dominate, to have control, it must be crucified in me if I want a beautiful life.  To live beautifully is to hold on very, very loosely to the reins, and when you are not sure, the answer is never to grasp more tightly, but rather to let go completely.

My boy does this to me a lot.  I put him to bed.  He is almost asleep.  I am singing to him.  Suddenly he lunges up, seems to wake.  If I try to force him down, I ruin his sleep.  But if I embrace his head at the edge of the crib and keep singing, he falls back down of his own accord and is soon sleeping deeply.  That’s beauty, not to grab and take, but to receive and to caress.  I touch my things all the time; I do not grab them, box them, hide or insure them.  I don’t even lock my doors. 

38 Special got it right:

“You see it all around you
Good lovin' gone bad
And usually it's too late when you, realize what you had
And my mind goes back to a girl I left some years ago,
Who told me,
Just Hold On Loosely, but don't let go
If you cling to tightly,
you're gonna lose control
Your baby needs someone to believe in
And a whole lot of space to breathe in

It's so damn easy, when your feelings are such
To overprotect her, to love her too much
And my mind goes back to a girl I left some years ago
Who told me,
Just Hold On Loosely, but don't let go
If you cling too tight babe,
you're gonna lose control
Your baby needs someone to believe in
And a whole lot of space to breathe in

Don't let her slip away
Sentimental fool
Don't let your heart get in her way
yeah, yeah, yeah,

You see it all around you
Good lovin' gone bad
And usually it's too late when you, realize what you had
And my mind goes back to a girl I left some years ago,
Who told me,
Just Hold On Loosely, but don't let go
If you cling to tightly,
you're gonna lose control
Your baby needs someone to believe in
And a whole lot of space to breathe in

So Hold On Loosely, but don't let go
If you cling too tight babe,
you're gonna lose it
You're gonna — lose control
yeah, yeah, yeah Just Hold On Loosely but don't let go
If you cling too tight babe,
you're gonna lose control

Hold on Loosely, but don't let go
If you cling too tight babe,
you're gonna lose control
yeah, yeah, yeah’

In a small boat one summer, on our way back from Guam, our family saw huge sprays of water erupting from the ocean.  We were confused and then everyone on the boat gleaned the same thing at the same time.  Whales.  In our tiny boat we were surrounded by a large pod of whales.  Tails flew out of the water, huge black glossy backs rose heaving from the sea.  We stood there speechless.  What can one say, in the face of a flotilla of whales?  You understand that beauty lives only when it isn’t caged, and the urge itself to cage anything is a dark one to be avoided at all costs, avoided with absolute consistency.  To catch is to kill, to own is to die.  To liberate is to live; to borrow is to become winged.  GypsyFaith – faith that if I let go, something will catch me.  Faith that if I stop taking, something will give to me.  Faith that God doesn’t have a name.  Faith that freedom, truth, and love are, as Victor Hugo asserts in Les Miserables, the only Real things. 

This weekend we went out to many parties, which is normal.  There are parties for everything and at all times.  You cannot possibly keep all of your engagements; people here joke about it – such a small place and yet so busy.  I found myself among relative strangers twice due to excessive party invitations I could not reasonably ignore, and in two cases my experience was disturbing.  As I entertained the two persons out of obligation it occurred to me that neither one respects Love.  I have known one of the two people for a number of years, and have kept my distance as I do with almost everyone except our immediate Chamorro family.  As I watched him talk, from five in the afternoon until midnight, I knew he was about to break a woman’s heart.  I suspect I know his reasons for the choices he makes, but as I will remain essentially a stranger to him, I shall never know for sure, and I endeavor, anyway, to put his memory aside after this blog, because to do otherwise would be wrong for me.  Additionally, I love him, so I can’t judge him.  At that same party was another person for whom I am in many ways responsible.  As I watched her smoke and drink until three am, I was seized with how desperate she is, and how self-dangerous this makes her.  Love is a game for her, and she is a very good Playa because she has mastered the two most important elements of being a Playa.  She is very smart, very beautiful (I mean this verbatim) and very broken.

Recently at one of those casual moments at work where a number of colleagues have gathered at random, and, finding ourselves equally exhausted or just plain lazy, begin to chat.  I enjoy those instances because they do not happen at a job until you’ve been there a long time.  Newcomers miss out on those conversations because the old staff members are wary.  My colleague asked me point blank if I knew what it was to be in love.  I have never thought about that question because when I love I know so instantly, and this knowledge of my love for someone never dissipates once it begins.  Having been asked the question, however, I knew the answer.  I immediately thought of the one I love most, and then I answered her query.  I am in love with my husband and I know this because I am always a little thrilled to see him.  It’s not the kind of swept away feeling you have in the beginning of a romance, but rather a perennial, hourly excitement – every few minutes or hours my very favorite person on the planet will have just entered my realm!  “Wow!” is what I say when I see him, no matter how long it has been since I saw him last; he’s so exciting.

Love makes one aware of one’s true state: helpless.  If you are not helpless with and in front of someone then you do not love them.  This is what I mean by respecting Love.  Because I love all of my students I must bare myself to them at every opportunity.  I can’t help it.  I respect what we share and I obey Love.  Obviously there are types of love.  What I have with my husband is different than what I have with my students, and what I have with my best friend since birth is different from what I feel about teachers I am supposed to mentor.  However, the core element is the same: in order to love, to obey Love, to allow Love to be realized, one must choose helplessness over perfection at every opportunity, and God knows there are plenty of those.  The wider my love, the more helpless I am.  I love my boss, so I can’t pretend to her that I could leave at any time for a better job.  The truth is that I need her for many reasons: this place and my position in it are the only perfect ones for me.  My boss holds my whole life in the palm of her hand.  Helpless – that’s what I am.

I am helpless every time I see anyone I love and I find that I love almost everyone I know.  When I give my love I offer my heart and as a result I am helpless; anyone can break me.  It has never happened in the course of my career that a student has hurt me.  But this winter something happened that broke my heart and I knew I must beg these two boys to stop doing something they were doing that was hurting another completely innocent person.  I was trembling so badly I could not stand, and crying also.  Both boys looked away.  The process of becoming heartbroken is always the same.  I am never the one who leaves, but the one who is left.  I am the one begging for the relationship to go on, as Love can’t die.  If one of the two parties to Love’s contract chooses to leave, his or her choice in no way dissolves the eternal, infinite thing called Love.

There are two essential components to Love: the first is earmarked as I have said, by helplessness.  The second piece, which needs no explanation, is that Love is never a choice.  Love chooses.  I am not free.  Love is in control and as an absolute dictator, Love is terribly dangerous.  I can pretend not to love but my pretension in no manner negates Love.  It is patently absurd to see Love as a choice; Love is absolutely a prison of light.

To be Real as the Velveteen Rabbit is Real in the children’s book by that name is to be naked.  But what that man and woman I entertained this weekend do yet understand is that mutual nakedness is no less dangerous than individual nakedness is dangerous: either way nakedness is the only pathway to dignity.  There is this great dialogue in the film Almost Famous when Philip Seymour Hoffman is speaking over the telephone to the young student he mentors in the film:

“See, friendship is the booze they feed you 'cause they want you to get drunk and feel like you belong.

Well, it was fun.

Because they make you feel cool. - And, hey, I met you. You are not cool. –

I know.  Even when I thought I was, I knew I wasn't.

Because we are uncool.  While women will always be a problem for guys like us most of the great art in the world is about that very problem.  Good-looking people— they got no spine.  Their art never lasts.  They get the girls, but we're smarter.

Yeah, I can really see that now. –

Yeah, 'cause great art is about, you know, guilt and longing and, you know, love disguised as sex and sex disguised as love.  Hey, let's face it. You got a big head start.

I'm glad you were home.

I'm always home. I'm uncool.

Me too. –

You're doing great, you know?  The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool.”

Love is the current between us; It is our destiny, prison, heartbreaker and fate.  And Love is, of course, in the end, the aurora borealis of human emotion – exotic, unpredictable, traveling incognito in the dark.

This blog will be about two things: life on a remote tropical island and life as a receiver, that is, the life of one who expects and therefore finds miracles.

Thomas Carlyle wrote about the center of indifference, the terrible eye of the inevitable typhoon of the soul.  Over a period of years that occur one moment at a time, the present folding into the past, you discover that you are not, in fact, Buddha, Gandhi, Jesus Christ, the Dali Lama, John Lennon, Martin Luther King, or even Mozart, Michelangelo, Shakespeare –yet perhaps you have reached a level of success, and then the agony is even more exquisite.  As a member of the faceless, fettered, mind-forg'd manacled millions, you discover that you are not the one-in-a-trillion One.  The horror of this revelation is astonishing.  It assaults you like a rogue wave in dreams, creeps in slowly like greed in waking hours, steals from you what might otherwise be brave, true moments of raw joy.  There are an infinite number of responses to this overwhelming agony.  You can turn it into art like Franz Wright, TS Eliot, Larry McMurtry, the Wachowski brothers, Oprah, or David Milch, and then you have made your redemption articulate and available for human consumption.  Surely such artistic acts of appalling humility and grace save your soul and build for you a small oasis of inner peace. 

Or, on the other hand, you might succumb, as I have, to lesser, more ordinary self-hatred for which you try desperately to atone by ruthless self-examination and critique, and which gives way to an endless array of ever more serious efforts at satisfying the tantamount, profoundly compelling need for joy and liberty, both of which remain, nearly all the time, tantalizingly out of reach.  What crucifixion is enough, is the question that drives you?  You are not unwilling, no, it’s far worse, you are unable to discover the way out.  This spiritually inverted vortex, which seems horrifyingly to have its feet placed firmly in the bedrock of hell, leads you finally to what seems the only proper decision: suicide.  My sister did it, as other brave souls before her and since.  I cannot condemn that act, however childishly selfish it might seem; I must find within it a dignity and bravery that I do not understand, that I am incapable of understanding.  I will not judge.  But I find myself fearful enough of hell to veer wildly away from suicide even as I am within a hair’s width of the act itself.

Several years ago, when I was in my late thirties and truly frightened by reality and I devoted myself to an ever more strenuous life of prayer.  Then, reading about gratitude I began to keep an exhaustive list of my daily blessings.  It was during that period of my life that my mind became fixed on the idea that my aim to give was the problem.  Perhaps, after all, I was not meant to be a hero.  Perhaps, in the end, I was meant to be happy and beloved.  The idea dawned one morning, early.  It has taken almost five years to understand its meaning: that my role in life wasn’t to be a giver, but instead to be a receiver.

It’s scary to commit to being a receiver, to be someone who expects love, miracles, and blessings.  The process, as I have come to understand it, is one that is composed of two elements: gratitude and prayer.  I began praying when I was 13.  Over the years my postures changed, but my expectations did not.  I did not really believe in miracles, and my belief was substantiated.

But one day I decided I absolutely needed a miracle – it was an absolute necessity to experience one.  I began stopping at an outdoor chapel on my eight mile walk up to the fishing cliffs.  I sought God not as one scorned, but as one treasured.  It was an experiment of the last resort.  My prayers at that chapel were all the same: that my own dearness be acknowledged by some random miracle.  By practicing gratitude and prayer as a discipline I became someone who expected to receive a miracle every day.  And very soon afterwards I understood that that for which one truly asks, one does in fact always, absolutely, receive.  At once I saw that God’s reckless heart is indeed left naked and unguarded.  I started to ask for ever bolder miracles.  They came.  They came!

Miracle: The other day my boy learned to wave hello.  He has been working his way into comprehension of communication, and then, suddenly, he seized it and we waved at one another for twenty minutes.  Rapturous joy flooded through me, this indeed was a grand miracle.  I know from whence this miracle came.  It emanated to the day I decided that God loves me, expects nothing more of me than to accept that love.  So over time I taught myself to receive, and then I went looking endlessly for the mother I never had.  In search of her, my missing mother, I traveled across oceans and datelines, in blind desperate neediness to this stunning, tiny island.  Here I met Mom.

Mom gave me my newly-waving son.  She was not the first infinitely exponential miracle I received, but she is the one of which I am the most conscious.  Mom.  Mom is the matriarch I met because I love to play poker.  She is the mother-in-law of our local poker king, Melvin Finona.  One night just days after we moved to this tropical island Mel invited us for a card game at his house, a house that, like all Chamorros, he shares with his extended family.  I found myself surrounded by brown men and women who spoke a language I did not understand, and who, purely for my own comfort, dropped their local tongue and spoke English for me.  I was startled to meet men and women who knew how to play, really play.  I was in fact encircled in a web of love I felt immediately and found too compelling to ignore.  Soon, under the pretext of poker, I was spending hours and hours among Mel’s family, a family that revolves around two sisters who have lived next door to one another, sharing an outdoor kitchen, for all of their long, impeccably successful lives. 

I gravitated to Mom so entirely that I sat beside her as much as I could.  Then, later, I grew bolder, kissing her cheek hello and good bye.  All along I had been doing something I myself did not notice, something so oddly awry, how was it that I did not notice it?  I was addressing Melvin’s family in Melvin’s manner.  He calls his mother-in-law “Mom” at the poker table.  I adopted this as her name without thinking (I did not know her real name.).  He calls Mom’s sister, “Auntie Nita”.  I did the same.  Soon I had accumulated a dragon’s hoard of relatives: sisters, brothers, old aunties, young uncles because I was unconsciously copying my new friend.  And the web of love into which I landed continued to expand, address, and accommodate my abysmal emotional neediness. 

The effects were astounding.  Soon I’d lost all the weight I had never been able to lose; 85 pounds.  I became able to read and understand complex novels I never had the discipline or ability to read previously.  I got the perfect job.  I started a very successful EBay company.  I began to work to build a bookstore and have begun to succeed at doing so.  I designed and am about to build my dream house.  I became acknowledged in the community as a guerilla advocate for literacy that gave me a measure of public recognition – culminating in a televised moment as the keynote speaker at our local high school graduation.  These were miracles that came because I stopped trying to give or take.  I sat still and expected Love.

Most importantly, the grandest receiving miracle of all - I learned from Mom and Mom’s daughters what it meant to be a lady and a woman, and, in so doing, I fell passionately in love with my husband.  My heart fluttered whenever I saw him, this had always been true, but when I learned to be a woman, I learned to accept that fluttering instead of hiding from it.  Soon after my re-romance I began urgently to desire a child.  But I couldn’t.  We tried for 12 years.  We tried again.  We went to the doctor. 

Then I sought Mom; people said she knew a way.  Could she help me?  She is one of perhaps three still-extant medicine women on this island.  She can walk into the jungle on her skinny little legs and squinting eyes and find from among the infinite greenness a formidable, vast array of various healing plants which she then rolls in her holy hands, tears into little pieces, and either makes into compounds and liquids, or, in my case, into a very unusual thing, a small, gauze wrapped ball of Chamorro secretness that I found the courage to place inside of me, as she instructed.  Suddenly I was blooming.  Within two weeks I was pregnant.  And then, surviving the terrifying odds that my old-age first pregnancy might end in some sad or catastrophic consequence, I gave birth to my son. 

The family threw me two huge surprise baby showers.  Dad, Mom’s husband, very publicly adopted me as his white daughter.  Mom came with me to stay off-island for the final weeks of what had been a heartbreakingly difficult pregnancy.  I insisted the child would be a boy born in February when the doctors laughed and said March.  During a dream, on Leap Day Eve, I found myself floating with Mom.  In the dream she was teaching me to fly.  Then the dream, which was quite vividly joyous, was interrupted as my water broke at five am on February 29^th.  Mom and my whole Chamorro family paraded extravagantly into the emergency room in Guam.  Surrounded by the radiant, unbearably generous love of my family during hours of agony, fits of desperate howling from pain, I triumphantly held my baby boy and kissed him, kissed him, kissed him.  I had finally received something directly from God.  

I have since become a more and more passionate evangelist for the choice to receive.  Greater things are possible than are dreamt of in my philosophy.  My romantic marriage, huge, NON-dysfunctional family, and beautiful boy are undeniable proof that Love is quite Real, Alive, Personal, and Infinitely Charitable.  The blogs you will read here will center on the charitable culture of our tiny island and the discipline of reception.