Murder

In the woods, the boy finds a fallen branch. Holds it up. A little later, I watch while he lies across a wide circular swing on his soft belly, pointing the stick at the other wide circular swing, where three three-year-olds, one born of me, sit, smiling and swinging. He looks like a mass shooter in a custodian's closet, machine gun on shoulder, mouth ruffling his tongue and lips to sound like the rounds of rapid-fire bullets burning through air and bone. He is probably between 12 and 14 years old.

I stare at him. He doesn't notice. I look to the women talking over him, the women with him, but they do not notice. I then move to stand between the boy and the girls, with the center of my back blocking his ignorant play. I sense him adjusting, stretching around me. The girls notice. They make the machine gun sounds with their own mouths, while still smiling and swinging. They do not understand. Bless them.

Inside my body and brain, judgment, anger and sadness rise.
Columbine.
Newtown.
The Boston Marathon.
Parkland.
The Pulse Nightclub.
Santa Fe High School.
Las Vegas.
Virginia Tech.
Mass shootings to list and list and list.
And all of this just makes me wonder. Why do we entertain ourselves with murder?

I have seen the video game where the player murders monsters. The player is then given gold and the glory of victory. Then there are the movies where the heroes murder monsters with explosives, fire, swords, and bullets. King Kong. Stormtroopers. Orcs. Death Eaters. Dinosaurs. There are the television shows where the accused are shot in the back by the good guys, the vigilante judges, juries and executioners. There are the television shows where the unkind kings are killed by poisonous wine. Then there are the films where zombies and great white sharks and enemy armies are cut to pieces.

This is our entertainment, watching bad guys bleed, choke, wheeze, fall, and die.

What do the good guys do to the bad guys? The good guys (with confidence, fast cars, muscles, sexy wardrobes and weapons, epic soundtracks, and impossibly impressive targeting) chauffeur the seamless endings again and again and again. Yet, when we walk out into the bright light of real life, people are complicated, flawed as they fumble and bumble and stumble through time.

We see it in the news. Someone makes someone else into a monster, a monster to be murdered.

We entertain ourselves with the over-simplified hate of separateness. Good and Evil. And then we walk around the world of grays and rainbows, of dirt, sea, sky, skin, and egos, of weapons, of kitchen knives, chemicals, cars, machine guns, and sticks, and blind to our oneness, we do harm.

I do not believe that these isolated screens where insanity screams for violence is quenching some deep human instinct or need inside of us. Inside of us, we are lit like the sun. We are one, one piece of all peace. We just need the space and silence and stillness to sit with it, see it and believe it. We need a flood of love to cool and wet the planting of lit matches throughout the dry forests of us. A flood of love to grow us up, and not burn us (and the whole good world) down to soot and ash. A flood followed by seed and sun. Give us boats, GOD. Let us float among flowers as they grow from the fire-fallow earth. Let us abandon this poison, this pain, and be young again.

Monsters

Silence is underfoot - too many thoughts trampling parades of cacophonous monsters and trash into every moment. I wish I could watch it all pass and laugh, but instead, I see everything. I don't believe everything, but I see everything. Then I am angry, and then I am angry because I am angry, which is simply, a big stupid circle of stupidity.

I have been away at this charade for most of the day, and now I am ready to go home.

"BE STILL!" I shout to all of my imagined monsters like the child from WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE by Maurice Sendak.

I want this mind to be a bare mirror, reflecting earth, soul, object, light, and color. I want to wait and watch while ideas appear like hot air balloons, breathing fire and blowing in the wind.

I sit and place a white page under pencil. Then I scribble, hoping the sight will write some of the noise away.

I will not be eaten up by my wild things.

Clatter happens, and when it does, I can always climb into my paper sailboat and float for home.

Gusts

Laughter moves through me in gusts, belly, and mouth, sudden and deep. This is bliss, I believe.

We are the same. You are there on your journey. I am here on mine. We are separated, but only by skin and air and time.

I am a cloud floating inside the container of an animal, and I am expanding, seeping into the soil and sky. I want to be the laughter that moves through me in gusts. I want to be the wind, the leaf, the sea, the swallows, the sky.

Worry

I am allowing the worry to abandon me now, letting it leave me like sweat and tears.

Why, I ask myself, revive old rancid regret? Why write out old ugly worry into word and story? Why drag up nets of jagged metal, splintered junk, and wreckage onto the deck of my being?  Why, when I can just release it? I release it now. And when it rises again, I look at it, then I release it like fish, like flies, like flocks of caged birds. For worry is tight and heavy and fierce. I don't want this wild thing. It clots and rots my body. Severs me from soul.

I only ever want to be here. And I only ever want to be a life that is light and clean. I want to sweep out the dirt, guts, and dust of unwanted thoughts. I want to seek and settle into silence, float within stillness.

I once wore worry like a gold medal. Look at me! Look at all the worry I have! - worry for others, worry for the world, worry for myself! Goodness, I must be good for I feel so horrible about so many things! I would write congested paragraphs of the stuff, scribbled page after scribbled page, then I would open my mouth and spew my fury and fear. I thought worry made me a better person. That it was proof of my awareness of all the suffering, - my suffering, your suffering, the suffering of every suffering stranger.  I believed that worry made me and the world better. But what has my worry ever really made (aside from a false means of activity)? I'm not sure it has done much of anything. For my worry rarely dissolved and evolved into action, which certainly would have been worth my attention.  Instead, my worry formed a wind storm inside me.

Now I let it blow through me.

I once had a water wheel for a heart, a thrashing thump thump THUMP of wood against water. Now, inside me, there is a leaf on a stream, gliding gently gently gently, paper between water and air.

I am allowing the worry to abandon me now,

and good GOD it feels good.