Warriors, Superheroes, Hope

So many thoughts running through my mind, running, racing, rumbling by: I’d planned on writing a memorial day piece, but spent little time on the train writing such things; I’d meant to write a piece on friendship, a piece on where I’m going, and why. But not tonight.
I’m thankful for the men and women who have died fighting for our freedom, for our peace, for our security and country. I’m thankful for the men and women who continue to fight for these values. Recently I read Iron John by Robert Bly, and a passage I’ve been thinking about is his passage on warriors. Our culture does its best to remove the warrior from boy-children as soon as possible. We medically diagnose rowdiness and antsy behavior with calming medications to stifle the warrior, the hero, the fighter in the child. If you’ve never seen a boy pretending he has a gun, shooting baddies, or wearing a mask and cape made of ribbon and a ratty blanket, or counting down the timer at a basketball court, making the shot that will win the greatest title in history, then you aren’t paying attention.  Boys gobble these heroics up.
In addition, until proven wrong, little boys often think their dads are superheroes, capable of astounding feats of strength and mechanical aptitude. Did my dad just chop down that tree? Did my dad just DUNK that basketball? The warrior mentality is strong in the younger children, but we lose it. Schooling squeezes us dry, proving we’re being trained for desks and computer screens, not battlefields, horses, sweat, victory, and flight. Never is gravity so profound as that holding a boy to an elementary school desk, teaching him he can’t fly and will never do so.
And it’s not like we’re doing things any better for women and girls in our culture.
So I respect those warriors, those people out there fighting for something. Sometimes they are fighting for something internal as much as external.
But tonight, no more on that.
I had a rough week, but the end struggled to rectify the pains. I’ve had friends praying for me, with me, and I know the Spirit intercedes on my behalf. Yet now and then, life is just tough. At least the skies are on my side, alternating between sunny blue and dark, brooding clouds to simulate my emotions on a heavenly canvas. The firmament understands, and the seas reflect the skies reflecting me, and even I’m reflected in the waters, so the circle goes.
And my week ended so spectacularly, I’ve nothing to complain about, I think: pickup soccer, beautiful sunsets, mountain driving, family coming to town, a hilarious DnD adventure, and hope. Only two weeks until my best friend in the world gets married. Only three until my best friend gets married. Last week was the one year anniversary of my good friends. I don’t think I got the memo – I just want to explore the world, read, write, play soccer, run, hike, find secret rivers and splash and play, and pick my way up mountains.
Oh hey, I love you. Don’t forget it. Rest well this night.


(Did I ever write about my superhero dream? It's my favorite dream. I'm a superhero, and my power is I can turn into an oil slick)


http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/05/warriors/ ‎

Tread Softly

I hate confrontation, even comprehending the necessity of it. There is a difference between a healthy argument and fighting, in the tones taken, the stances, the body language, the raising of voices, the use of ad hominem. My stomach churns contemplating this sort of debate. But there are times for actively fighting for your beliefs.

I recently finished Iron John, by Robert Bly, and he constructs an elaborate analogy of masculinity based off an ancient fable or folk story. In the story, at the beginning, a Wild Man is freed by the prince, a man hairy and primal. This is the opening step in the path of masculinity, according to Robert Bly: freeing the wild man within from the parental clutches. With this sort of confrontation, a wall is erected, an enmity, and I feel like the serpent biting the woman’s heel, with which she crushes my head.

I like competition, and enjoy the concept of debate and argument within healthy bounds. I just cringe whenever considering fighting those I cherish. And if I must, I don’t even want to win such a fight, not at the expense of those I love dearly.

Today, I knew such a debate was coming, a time where I must plant my feet and lose no ground. Even though the confrontation would not take place until evening, I considered it all day. I ate no breakfast, only a couple of crackers for lunch, and nothing for dinner. I’m still not hungry. Even now, the debate over and a reasonable agreement reached, my adrenaline beats in my blood like a bass, thrumming and humming with a particular distaste – my body is in fight and flight mode.

I’ve comforted myself with lines of poetry, and selections from Bly’s book on masculinity, though the analogy falters regarding my confrontation, the who and the what. But these lines of Yeats have always meant much to me in situations similar:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.       

(William Butler Yeats - Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven)

It’s the idea that I’m asking for little, but have no desire to budge on the particulars. I’m enjoying Robert Bly’s poetry more and more as late:

It is not our job to remain whole.

We came to lose our leaves

Like the trees, and be born again,

Drawing up from the great roots.

(Robert Bly)

I don’t want to fight; I’d rather love. 

Trains

The train: now I understand the buckling, the swaying beast of it; the whole train judders as the uncertain serpent. My legs are ocean forests beneath me, roiling at the whim of the railway waves. My hands, free, free though some force propels this dumb inertia through the forests whose hands are raised in praise, the eggheads, the fox-face pines staring up at the sky enduringly.

And now the pines whisper their slow, long goodbyes, a farewell a hundred miles wide, as green shifts into grey.

Not yet; I must not yet.

stolen, I know not when

jailbroken, as it were, from behind

bleached bars torn apart

though what they found, I know

I dream it even now, haunting;

a wooden circuit board, sundered

from its circuitry and liquid wiring

chisel and knife, carving into me

such beautiful things, whittling down

a face in ecstasy,

a bramble crown

the whole of sea echoing.

but enough is not found

they sandblast the image down

until nothing remains but memory

and less of me, a sawdust trail

remembering

The silhouettes of mountains approach as sleeping giants. Are we the snake beneath their heels? I cannot ignore their gravity. Hoodwinked, the tunnel, the wool drawn over my eyes and I am blind for moments before the curtain draws back and soaring over everything – nothing exists but – the snowcapped peak.

I’ve swallowed the heart of darkness, walked in the valley of shadows, and I’m through – a crooked path though the shepherd’s staff crooked my neck into greener pastures. I scarcely imagined such still waters.

Train trip to San Francisco was a success. There is a peace aboard trains, and a community that isn’t present in aircraft trips. People walked to other tables to participate in games with strangers, and as we played bananagrams, our neighbors leaned over and offered helpful definitions of words we didn’t know (had made up, Matthew), or asked us about the game.

Now, I’m sunburned (I’m actually rather shocked I got sunburned. I almost never get sunburned), exhausted, and pleased. Mostly, I think I’m a bit resurrected and ready for everything. Life’s a train, and at every stop, things are exchanged – but not everything. And the views are magnificent if you are willing to look out and see.

Spinning on a Dime; Tea Time

Spinning on a dime, friends, our tiny-toothed edges augmenting our rotation with wobbles. Love used to be a function of chemistry, a mingling of elementary romance; now it’s interdisciplinary, a little messy geometry mixed with theatre. Oh, such a masquerade, with such interesting shapes, distinctions made on circles and squares. Sit back, mon ami, soon drama and entertainment will ensue, and an interlude before the comic end, or tragic, depending on your view.

Today, I went on a long walk. The sun was out and the weather sat perfectly at eighty. Is it sad that only as I went outside I put shorts on? I’m always cold: how is that? The orchards smelled of newness and spring, and I walked past roses, hydrangeas, poppies, daisies, geraniums, nasturtiums, and dozens of flowers whose names I don’t know. Will someone tell me the names of flowers, please? I want to know the names of all of the flowers, and their stories, but I have no one to tell me.

I wrote this as a bit of silly poetry, and though it’s a tad lousy, it was fun. Someday, I’ll even edit things like this and they won’t be so completely ugly. I actually cringed a bit re-reading it, but figured any changes I made tonight would only be undone tomorrow if I look at it again. For now, here it is: Tea Time.

The Mad Hatter another tea party holds:

Psyche arrives in formal attire,

Bacchus, bearing a barrel of beer,

Pan appears in a flourish, theatrical,

piping a tune; a boy shuffles in tow.

Ah, tea time, as always, the Hatter sighs,

but Bacchus pays no mind, and starts

on wine, while Pan guffaws.

Psyche’s eyes are lost with love,

beautiful, sad, and demure.

The boy, however, with thoughtful eyes

asks what is the matter with tea time?

Nothing’s wrong, but it is ever the matter,

the Mad Hatter brusquely replies,

and never time for love or wine -

Bacchus, though, begged to differ.

What, my boy, begins the Hatter,

have a faun, a madman, a god,

woman and boy in common?

Drunkenness, remarks Bacchus.

Why yes, mused the faun, it is

what a tea party is for.

Love, mumbles Psyche.

Everything else, as this god, is a boor.

Bacchus, asinine, paid her no mind.

Only he is here, the rest are who

here is for, said the faun.

Ah, things have come to a tee,

The Hatter clapped with glee.

What may we do you for?

I don’t know, what do you mean?

Asks the boy, sipping his tea.
Mean? Mad, perhaps, not mean.

Psyche answered: a gift each

will bring, to guide you

to wherever it is you dream.

Bacchus began with a blessing:

be not an ass, revel and sing,

who knows what tomorrow may bring?

Psyche gave the boy a golden apple.

Choose what your heart desires

and pay dearly the cost for love.

Pan piped a ditty and passed over

a song and flower; remember

my boy, the earth and the water,

and the path the moon takes over sea.

The Mad Hatter, last, asked:

Why is a raven like a writing desk?

The boy, for this, had no answer.

And so it is with love, boy,

The impossible is possible if

You believe impossible things.

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/05/spinning-on-a-dime-tea-time/

Floral Arrangements: My Compost Bin is Full

I met my new neighbors last night, as the sun set over the orchards and I returned from my walk past the hazelnuts. They were planting new flowers in the hopes of beautifying their front-yard landscaping, though they admitted to little knowledge in the horticulture or floral department. As I walked past my neighbor’s house, they were lamenting that they’d done a good amount of work, but could not finish because their compost bin was filled to the brim, and they couldn’t just leave the extras lying in their yard for two weeks.

I offered them my compost bin, seeing as we’d failed to fill it in our recent two weeks, and found the opportunity to discuss lives with my neighbors, learning about their church, their gardening naiveté, and their excitement about trying something new with flowers. I sensed, too, their relief at the opportunity to finish what they’d begun, and I understood their sentiment.

For me, this is how life is in everything. I’m terrible with endings and embrace them too soon, and understand the necessity of beginnings, and rush towards them the moment I see an ending in sight. I also struggle starting projects without knowing I’ll have time for finishing.

My entire childhood, and mostly in high school, I focused my entire night around dinner time. This wasn’t because I was constantly starving, but because I didn’t want to begin projects or homework before dinner unless I had enough time for finishing it before dinner as well. So I’d often find myself meandering around the kitchen, munching on chips or cookies, waiting for dinner so that I could get on with my life. Often, by dinner I wasn’t even hungry anymore due to all the snacking I’d done (this still happens).

But this is how I am. I want to devote myself fully, to grasp the horns of problems and wrestle them to the ground without any time-outs or ‘hold on, Mr. Bull, while I wipe the dust out of my eyes and take a short siesta’. I never understood the intuitive individuals who tackled so many projects simultaneously, and often finished few of them. I focused like a laser and picked off projects with precision and planning.

The problem is, I never liked transitions. If I knew that a project in school was worth nothing, there wasn’t a reason for me to lose blood and tears over it; knowing high school was ending and I was already accepted into college, what did it matter if I got a few A- grades or even B+’s perhaps? These are tame examples, and the real problem is that I carry these over into matters with greater gravity: social interactions, friendships, dreams, loves.

I remember that as I neared my end in high school, I stopped hanging out with some of my friends, knowing I’d never see them again. And I haven’t, but perhaps I might have maintained closer connections if I hadn’t severed contact with them so neatly, even when we still saw each other daily?  I see the endings drawing closer, and I think to myself: “this will be painful, won’t it? Maybe I’ll embrace the pain now so it ends sooner. That way, I can begin the next phase of life without having to wait for it.” And with this attitude, I truncate the ending and swallow the pain immediately, while floundering for the nearest beginning, any beginning really, as long as it has something tenable to latch onto.

I remember thinking once, in my last days of college, why make new friends now, or interact with people now, knowing we’re about to split off in a thousand directions?

This has definitely brought me trouble in the recent past, as I’m writing and forging paths for different projects, wondering whether I’ll finish them properly or hurry on to the next beginning; or in friendships, and in the phase of my life where everyone is getting married and starting new paths while I pursue different dreams that those espoused seem not to understand (for reasonable reasons, I suspect, but I’ve never had occasion to find out).

So I’m truncating strings right and left, chopping off the yarn before the sweater’s done, and I’ll be showing midriff all winter long, with a mighty cold belly, I suspect, and only because I didn’t have the heart to finish what was begun.

By dawn’s first light, it’s already night

to my eyes, and to my eyes

your every hello echoes goodbye

goodbye as the fawn born begins to die

as the summer arrives, the days shorten

as the birds rise, gravity reminds them

how soon everything must fall;

the universe expands, Alvie,

so don’t hold onto it all

the apple ripens the moment

it’s time on the branch is no more

and the core dreams already rotten things

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/05/floral-arrangements-my-compost-bin-is-full/

Sidereal Stories

You’re hurting, Olwen, I know, and the glass is empty though it’s full. You’ll find little hope there; at the barrel bottom only dregs reside. And you might cower under the bed, shirking in shadows whose shapes you know; you shiver, under blankets piled high though the night is warm, and the wind stumbles against the shutters with drunken abandon, a sound you know and yet it frightens. This is it, you know this fear, this comfortable sickness whose poisons slyly sit near, known since the drugs of depression took hold.

I see it in your eyes, and remember mine as distant things.

It’s not only in dreams you can fly; it’s only in flight you may dream.

So leap with me, out the window into the night, past the breeze blowing across the waters where the lady waits, garbed in silver stars and moonlight, her fingers reaching through the ripples whose grasp we’ll evade like a whisper.

Trapped in the mirror of the waters, look down, we’re dancing on reflected stars.

Beneath the shadow of the mountain where the dragon sleeps, tiptoeing over his hoard of melted gold, our fleet figures bent in gilt reflections – linger not here, dear, roads await.

Into a thick and grasping wood, whose long-limbed mysteries and webs do collect uncertain travelers, we are not caught. Two roads, and no return, a cottage, a hovel, candle-lit faces in a bog – choose, Olwen, with love not fear.

Tell me you still yearn, you still burn with pain; tell me you must return beneath the covers, to Harold before the world, and I’ll let you go. Or follow me beneath the sea, where kelp forests wiggle like green worms, and orcas sing of the ocean’s melancholy weight and depth of being, and everything hears and agrees.

Little lasts forever; most worries are tomorrow – let’s glide across stars lupus and orion tonight, the bear lumbering over the pre-dawn sky whose tail is not yet lost to fear’s unknown, and leo and the little old lady whose rocking chair groans with eternity. I’ll tell you their stories, if you’ve lost yours in the struggle for hope, and Olwen, you’ll find the universe is not always whole, but it’s ready. Let it be, and let your heart soar, string-less as the bird over the storm, for there’s a time for rain and a time to be reborn, in red, in white, in black.

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/05/sidereal-stories/

The King, the Warrior

the warrior survives, hides,

between the pillars

of low and high tides.

the sea rages denial

inside an empty shell –

iron red-hot courses

in martian veins,

with quicksilver wings

its mercurial elements

shift, love, engage;

and who, eros, are thee?

to force atlas over

my shoulders

the wolf father hearkens

the ocean mother beckons

howling in waves the earth

my warrior’s garden,

and prays his king’s alive

Everything is words now. I see them scrolling down the walls like the matrix. Every flower efflorescing; every bird swooping into the eaves and chirping before sunrise; every smile and touch; each fragile-as-glass moment, mercurial as the Oregon spring, translates into a babel-spring of kaleidoscope diction that twists as I shift the scene.

And nothing is plain, the world sings a chorus of curious words, like the opening scene of the Silmarillion. I understand little of this logos. Brent Weeks, a bestselling author wrote (tweeted):

If, while puking, you consider what words would properly describe what you're feeling... you're a writer.

Sometime this is me, though my skill can leave the descriptions wanting. I still want to write all the words, and fill my journal with meaningless swaths of them. While washing my hands just now, I contemplating how rubbing a bar of soap was like rubbing a religious icon, hoping the relic will impart its healing through its, and our, touch. I also contemplated the ill-advised pun using the word “lye” and dredging up some iconography wit, but decided against it.

Listening to the sermon this morning, I’m balancing each sentence spoken, tasting it as a delicacy – does it have the right sauces, spices, panache? The message was moving, and well spoken, this morning, and also of great importance. EM is an acupuncturist of words, needling the nerves with wisdom, wit, and an eagle’s eye for uncomfortable Biblical passages worth disassembling and putting back together.

Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. (1 John 4:8)

We tackled 1 John 4, and among the verses of love, so customary we blithely read them now, there is this barb, like glass in the cake. And hearing this, we scramble for a way out, as a mouse hearing the shrieking owl, knowing our falling short.

We’ve all been hurt, at some point or another. Some numb the darkness down, tying it like Loki into our guts where it rumbles with hurt as our growing shame drips acid on the face of our fears and pains. Some explode – it’s fight or flight – and erupt in the face of offense, ever prepared for a fight. Internalize or externalize, at the end, we must still love.

I’m still reading Iron John, a book about the masculine and the mythical journey of masculine holistic life through the fable called, unsurprisingly, Iron John. Today, the passage was on the warrior, and I’m trying to bind everything I discover into a coherent whole, but as with the words, sometimes it seems like shattered stained-glass windows scattered across the hole of night.

Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashipn the theme of Iluvatar to a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of Iluvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void.

(Tolkien : Silmarillion)

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/05/the-king-the-warrior/