Billy Goat Jesus

Sansaku: Billy Goat Jesus

4/30/24

Rilke wrote: “Sometimes a man stands up during supper and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking, because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.  And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.  And another man, who remains inside his own house, stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses, so that his children have to go far out into the world toward that same church, which he forgot.”

Robert Bly translated the poem and wrote: “He doesn’t mean any orthodox church, but says that if man walks toward that inner space, he will free his children.  It is not too late.”

John O’Donohue said: “The act of knowing is a function of the imagination.  We can’t see the world as it is, we must co-create.” My history rewrote on the day I hitched into Prescott and re-met my dad.

I was glad when Irma divorced him.  He caused too much turmoil and I could feel the maelstrom in his mind.  I didn’t understand him.  I wasn’t yet grown.  A bohemian artist needs to live a much different life than a high-priced criminal lawyer.  He used alcohol to escape.

When I met him, he looked like a has-been.  He bought his clothes at Goodwill and when the sports coat needed cleaning, he dropped it off and bought another.  During his glory years, which lasted from college to around the time I was born, he was dapper.

But being a hippie at the time, I liked the way he dressed.  Unconventional and cool.  And despite the fall from grace, he never lost that voice.  It’s how I remember him.

Born on the same night as the savior, he called himself Billy Goat Jesus.  I know what that means.

The Medicine I Needed

Sansaku: The Medicine I Needed

4/29/24

Driving into town we hit a wall of water in the dream.  I thought the car would stall.  And then we tried to fly the river.  We didn’t make it.  But the car didn’t sink.  We pushed it toward the shore.  What the hell?

The feeling tone was casual, like this happens all the time.  “Oh well, got to deal and go on.”  Where this occurred is where I walk, the river trail.  The person I walked with yesterday is stressed to the core.  I questioned his health.  It’s not good.  My cancer is better.

All that water makes emotional sense.  I wasn’t drowning, but can only handle so much drama.  Caught in a whirlpool, he’s over his head and won’t get out.  We swam a spell together.  I wished him luck.

After that, Chyako and I drove to the college. Crabapple blossoms.  The trees are on the rim.  A storm blowing in.  The mountains fantastic.  And despite the wind, the petals held tight.  Only a few on the ground.

For years, I wouldn’t talk about Corder and talked too much when I did.  A classic lack of integration.  I don’t find it strange I’m still working it through.  If something in the dark bothers you, turn on the light.

The Sixties were a revolutionary time for a kid like me growing up in Boulder.  My tolerance for deviance was high.  Corder questioned authority and that made him okay in my eyes.

Why would I care for an alcoholic, bipolar, sociopathic dead-beat dad who let everyone down and took off?  I wanted to understand.  I didn’t judge.  He felt this and responded with his true self.

I was and wasn’t prepared to be loved by him.  This is not a cognitive matter, but something I felt and accepted.  I was shocked to find him relatively whole, congruent, real, authentic.  The medicine I needed.

I Watched

Sansaku: I Watched

4/28/24

Back in touch with dreams.  What’s on my mind.  I’m a week away from a blood draw.  My first since stopping treatment.  And the garden is lush with the rain.  I’m hoping it goes wild.  And there’s a notebook to purge.

I woke from a dream about Corder.  A song or poem I’d written and couldn’t remember.  It had to do with being free.  And another dream about a property in the valley by Hermosa.  Up for sale.  Friends had lived there and built a wonderful garden.  We were going to buy it.

It’s not a waste of time and effort to write for intrinsic reasons.  It’s a pleasure.  And the joy and beauty of having a garden is similar.  It’s not for profit.  Chuang Chou calls this the use of the useless.

Mark and I took a slow walk along the river trail.  We mosey, stopping often.  The river’s running close to a thousand, soon to double.  We listened to the birds.  I told him about the ruby-crowned kinglet we met near House on Fire.  He’d heard, but never seen one.  A first for me.

Corder saw himself as a free man and somewhat above the law.  Maybe his high-powered intellect and years as a criminal attorney.  He didn’t hold himself to the same rules and taboos that constrained me.  Questions I have now and didn’t ask.  Throwing out another page.

Irma had me read The Mask of Sanity by Hervey Cleckley.  It’s an early study of the psychopathic personality and moral insanity.  Another writer stressed the need to recognize and deal with psychopaths.  I’m still not sure with Corder.  Psychopaths don’t change.  He did.

He had regret and tried to atone.  His empathy circuit functioned and the man could tell the truth.  He admitted and confessed.  He went through a metamorphosis like Darth Vadar.  I was there and watched.    

A Need to Process

Sansaku: A Need to Process

4/27/24

We delayed packing.  It still went too fast.  They were headed for the badlands of New Mexico, where they planned to camp with friends.  The weather horrific.  I’m hoping they didn’t get too wet, too cold.

Although I drove slowly and stopped to eat a sandwich, it didn’t take long.  Unpacked by the time Chyako came home for lunch.  I took my walk alone.  The river much higher than when I left.  It started to rain a block from home.  This morning, raindrops glisten on the juniper bush.

A theme in my dream last night:  You can have too much of a good thing.  There comes a point when more is less.  Not this time.  Still going strong at the end.  Doesn’t get any better.

I’ve got some typos I want to correct.  I didn’t get a chance to proof what I wrote on the road.  There’s some weird underlining.  Ideal and idea are not quite the same; and I left out a chunk of a sentence.

According to dream economics, inner wealth functions in reverse.  If you want to save and accumulate, give it away best you can.  Only then is it yours.  We have a need to share the good stuff.

Marcus Aurelius wrote: “When a flame is young it must be carefully guarded, and fed with things that help it to grow.  But when the flame has reached a certain height and vigor, everything which comes its way is food.  Everything will help it to grow.  The soul is like that.”

I wrote fourteen pages in my journal last year.  Grinding on something I couldn’t remember until I read it.  A far-away-friend in marital distress.  It’s been years since we talked.  An ocean of emotion in between.

Our culture in not well designed to support family and community.  Courts traumatize the victims.  No wonder I needed to process.

Coming Home

Sansaku: Coming Home

4/26/24

We knew House on Fire was going to be crowded.  A totally different hike.  A dozen cars.  I found a hiking stick with beetle carvings.  The trail was lush and lovely.  A huge ponderosa greeted us.

By now the sky was darkening and the temp began to drop.  A few raindrops, and people started leaving.  We stopped to enjoy the weather under an overhang.  First lunch.

A couple on the trail.  They didn’t see us.  She said: “I need to pee.”  Jane and I looked at each other.  Hard not to laugh.  That’s when her husband turned and saw us.  “Honey, that isn’t a good spot.”  Too late.  She’d already started.  Even they found it funny.

We slowly ascended the gulch.  The occasional pool.  We had our raincoats on, but the rain was beginning to mix with big flat flakes of snow.  We found another alcove.  Second lunch.  A friend had given me a buffalo tongue.  We were raised on such stuff.  Exquisite.

Just around the corner and up a trail, which was turning into a rivulet, the House on Fire ruin.  The photos didn’t lie.  Easy to see how the place got its name.  The roof was patterned with flames, sandstone colored.  Time for lunch and a sit.  No one there.  Another perfect day.

Watching my brother at seventy-seven, I remember hiking behind him when he was seventeen.  Strong and graceful.  We’re both unsteady now.  We took great and awkward care climbing the wet slickrock.  I decided against a steep stone stair that led to the rim.  Limitation.

This morning, there’s early activity.  I’ll be cutting this short.  We need to tidy up the Airbnb and pack.  I’ll make a last buffalo tongue sandwich for the road.  I much prefer coming to going.  Coming home today.

We Took the Trip

Sansaku: We Took the Trip

4/25/24

I dreamed of sea captains and good food.  Each of them cooked a special meal.  The dream was a series.  Garon and Jane the two captains.  I felt more like a mate.  On a voyage to find the Big Crane petroglyph, we took the long way, two times.  I slept well last night.

We missed the turn to Butler Wash and stopped at the cut on Comb Ridge.  A view to die for.  Then back-tracked to the unmarked road.  A long drive over slickrock and sand.  Also unmarked, the turn to the trail.

The floor of the wash is smooth, sculpted sandstone.  Deep furls and waves of slippery rock.  Hard to walk on.  We climbed a sandy bank and began a long ascent.  Chunks of jasper and polished stones.  Bands of slickrock.  Ancient juniper, flowering cactus and blood red paintbrush.

Not more than a mile for crows, the trip took four hours and nine-thousand steps.  We ascended and descended.  Knew we were close, but couldn’t find the panel.  Then Jane with her eye for pattern pointed.

Higher on the ridge than we expected.  The approach a long slope of slickrock and scree.  We stayed for a timeless time.  The design the artist pecked in the cliff was simple and profound.  Next to the crane a globe that was circled.  Maybe the sun, maybe an egg, who knows.

With satisfied souls we stumbled down the slope and found the car.  Someone was there.  Almost immediately he said: “I’ve recently been diagnosed with prostate cancer, but treatment hasn’t begun.”  I wasn’t surprised and let him know, me too.  He wanted to talk.

The drive down the wash into Bluff didn’t take very long.  Soon we were back to our home in the cedars. Garon documented the trip with photos that he crafted into a slide show. We took the trip repeatedly. (I don’t know why it underlined or how to correct.)

Holy Land

Sansaku: Holy Land

4/24/24

An easy drive to Blanding and I found our home in the Cedars without any trouble.  Maps, what a wonderful idea.  And right out the window where I’m doing trance-dancing, Abajo Peak.  Now bathed in sun.

I stopped for a half hour or more at the Canyon of the Ancients visitor center.  A special exhibit of Stanton Englehart paintings.  The twenty-minute video did me in.  Besides Stanton’s familiar face and voice, good friends, now dead, were praising him.  Red Bird, Joel Jones, Will Coe.

When I was teaching, I invited Stanton to be a guest speaker.  No need to give him a topic.  He said: “If you’re uncomfortable with tears, you’d better leave.  I don’t apologize for emotion, only when it’s lacking.”

Garon and Jane are such good people.  They stopped in Idaho Falls and had dinner with an old friend from Glacier.  She gave them a letter for me.  Her writing, signature and sound all sound and look the same.  Those summers in Glacier were landmark times for us.  Garon met Jane.

I didn’t sleep well and had a slightly frustrating dream.  I wasn’t all that good at what I was trying to do.  Probably trying too hard to sleep.

I learned how to be a human and a man from Garon.  How lucky was that.  I need to tell him it’s palindrome week.  Today is 42424. I’m guessing he already knows.  My life looks like it does because of him.  And yet we’re very different.  More on that later.  It’s time I go downstairs.

We’re headed for canyon country, maybe Butler Wash.  There are panels of petroglyphs to find.  One of cranes.  They used to fly through here.  This is holy land for me.

Off to Utah

Sansaku: Off to Utah

4/23/24

I changed a word from yesterday’s Sansaku.  It’s not that problems vanish; that’s too simple.  I changed the word to transmute.  The idea comes from Jung’s commentary to The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life.  Here’s the context to the thought.

“I have often seen individuals who simply outgrew a problem which had destroyed others.  This outgrowing revealed itself on further experience to be the raising of the level of consciousness.  Some higher or wider interest arose and the insoluble problem lost its urgency… What on a lower level had led to the wildest conflicts and emotions full of panic, viewed from the higher level of the personality, now seemed like a storm in the valley seen from a mountain top…”

These ideas have been growing fifty years.  That’s when I bought the book.  Ideas belong to everyone.  There’s an incredible number of ideas in the first fifteen pages of that essay.  Can’t help but quote some more.

“If the wrong man uses the right means, the right means works in the wrong way… This stands in sharp contrast to our belief in the right method irrespective of who applies it… When it comes to things like these, everything depends on the person and little on the method.”

“What then did these people do in order to achieve the progress that freed them?  As far as I could see they did nothing (wu wei), but let things happen… The art of letting things happen became a key with which I was able to open the door to the Way… Consciousness is forever interfering, helping, correcting and negating, and never leaving the simple growth of the psychic processes in peace.  It would be simple enough, if only simplicity were not the most difficult of all things…”

Can you tell I didn’t have much time to write today?  Off to Utah.

Almost Coming

Sansaku: Almost Coming

4/22/24

I asked set questions at the interview for internship.   For example: How do you deal with critical feedback?  Toward the end I’d tell them: You’re going to work hard for no pay.  What’s wrong with you?

I copied their answers verbatim and said: “I’ll pull these notes in a year and bring them into session.  Any predictions?”  I’ve been asking myself the same question: How will you deal?  A blood draw in two weeks, one never knows, and I leave tomorrow for a rendezvous in Utah.

Interns learned they didn’t need to solve the client’s problem.  The goal of therapy: To work together and learn from the problem.  When we get to where we need to be, problems aren’t solved, they transmute.

A transparent dream last night.  At a conference and looking for the lodging.  I ask an employee to open the door, then go and get my bag.  In the interval, beds were claimed.  I unclaimed one.  Ready to defend.

A similar dream on this day last year.  I had a small load of clothes to wash, but a dude with five huge bags beat me to the machine.  He hadn’t started and wouldn’t budge.  But I didn’t fight.  I let it go.

I’m slightly anxious about the Airbnb where we’ll be staying in Blanding.  Practicing self-soothing.  No need to arrive early or claim a bed.  I predict I’m going to be fine.  Down the river, I’ll be reading this to see.

I’m listening to Girl with a Dragon Tattoo and Lisbeth got into my dreams.  We were fighting for a cause.  In the book, when Mikael learns she’s hacked his life, he chooses to pair up with her.  It was like that.

I just missed a sneeze.  Almost coming, almost coming, then not.  I put this in a song and found myself laughing.  On holiday from treatment, testosterone is beginning to return.  I can feel it.  Almost coming.

Spring Green

Sansaku: Spring Green

4/21/24

A traveling round Durango dream.  Not dissimilar to what I do.  Into the mountain park yesterday with a friend who injured his brain in a crash.  He woke days later, no idea where he was or what had happened.  And now his way of perceiving is fresh.  A treat to walk with him.

I pointed to a willow.  Spring green, a touch of yellow.  I told him my eyes were drinking in the color.  He took me at my word and sipped.  Ordinary magic transforms discipline into devotion, routine into ritual.

I’ve been charting wants and don’t wants across decades.  I like to go at my own speed, get angry when hurried, and dislike forced decisions.   The Word program lets me know there’s something’s wrong with the don’t wants.  We argue.  I do this all the time.

Algorithms channel choices by charting what we click on, how long we stay, and most of all, do we buy.  It doesn’t take many iterations to map our preferences for good or profit.  I like to surprise myself.

Because I’m engaged in solitary work and live a quiet life, I’m slow to respond.  Credit cancer.  I’ve limited my contacts and budget my energy.  I’ll be leaving for Utah in a couple of days.  Already saving up.

A scene in last night’s dream caught my attention.  Driving through the campus, I saw a friend and wanted to give him a ride, but I couldn’t stop the car.  I knew I’d get stuck.  I kept driving and hoped he understood.

Even though I mostly walk, cars symbolize my body and let me know what’s up.  Too often, I’m a fix-it-when-it’s-broke type.  With age and cancer, this has had to change.  Learning to love the maintenance.

Today I’m stiff and sore.  It doesn’t matter why.  I know what I need to do.  I’m going outside to feast on color.  Spring green.