Sunday, June 7, 2009

Meditation Mount

It is my fifth month back from the journey. I still don't know what it was about, and if it served. All I know is that while I was there, in the other winds and streets of other countries with a camera in my hand I feel alive, I feel vital, I feel the swift hand of my own personal history writing itself into my own memory.
I drive up through orange fields to a spot up int the hills of Ojai that overlook the entire valley. How can I walk in this spiritual place with shoes? So I quit them in the grass, and walk barefoot beyond the grass and gardens, past the silently grazing rabbits through a portal of shrubs into an open hillside. I plant my feet in the ground and dance-- I move. It is not a dance from the outside, it is still, it is internal, it is my sundance. I dance and ask my questions and slowly the mountains and sounds and air around me vibrate and expand. I can see my life, this living, these questions and these forms that are my charges-- orphans from the spirit world that I must bring to form with my hands, my body, to give them life and feel their form alive in this world, on this earth, a part of the ongoing story of myself, of man.
My vision shifts to gold. It all comes through, simple, discreet, inevitable. Here I am. What more is there? My mantra must be, "there is enough time, there is enough time..." and with it there will be. There will be and nothing made outside of the stillness of inevitability will hold it's form against the inertia of this world anyway.
I step away, back into my steel carriage, this wonderful machine that separates me from the truth of my own walking. I know this sensation, this uderstanding, will pass. And I know even if I return here everyday I have missed the point. I must walk easily with this, once I hold it is gone. And inevitably it is about trust, and surrender, and action. Perhaps I must issue the challenge to myself--if I am not meant to survive walking in spirit, then I choose death. That if I cannot live in this world according to the vision of my spirit, why should I live here? If I cannot live true to the calings of spirit, if spirit must be snuffed, allocated, moderated, why play this game? To see a lover, to live with a lover I am never permitted to love, only to wish for the accidental glance or brush of the skin.