"Make me one with everything."
If the mystics are right, there is a place you can (not being) be where all things are one and there is no opposition. Where we live, however, existence depends upon polarity.
Here-there, this-that, on-off, us-them, light-dark, I-thou, up-down, pleasure-pain, angel-demon, yin-yang, pretty-ugly, true-false, zero-one, every form of duality. Without contrast, without comparison, there is no consciousness and without awareness there is no existence.
So what? Got me there. It doesn't matter, because no matter what you do, it will all turn out that way anyway. Or so the Acid God informed me on my Alan Watts trip in '68. But thrashing through the underbrush of everyday life, figuring out what's at the other end of every stick we're pulling or pushing is how we get things done.
My life has generated its own particular opposite: freedom and love.
The conventional utterance goes, "the opposite of love isn't hate, it is indifference." Maybe. I'm indifferent to that; in fact, I'd say overall that love's antipode is fear. To me, it's being free.
I started a post under this title a while back, but abandoned it because, A, it didn't really bother me at the time, and B, it struck me that it might not be true. For me, as I go, yes, but intrinsically? Isn't the world full of people for whom this conflict doesn't exist because all they want is to love and be loved? For whom love is freedom from all the dark and chill lurking outside the fire circle of their intimacy? So I let it go.
Okay. Then things happen. First, I get free. And it feels good. God almighty, free at last. No one to answer to, nothing to stop me, I've got the gas and the cash, places to go and plans I can change on a whim.
Then...here's a 90-second love story.
1967, New York City, I see a Canadian girl coming across Washington Square. This is love. A few years on, she gets distracted by shiny things - like a career - and drifts off. I remain constant, in my center, thinking that some day we will die in each other's arms. A life goes by. At last, I give up. I accept that it will never be. I make plans to leave it all behind and ramble. I go north one last time to say goodbye. With the pressure gone, we are at peace. Then, on the last hour of the last day, she discovers she loves me. She has always loved me. I carry her to bed. Just a slight twinge in my lower back, thanks.
Is that 90 seconds?
Now there is a dilemma. On one end of the stick, my plans to go free. On the other, my life's love.
Can't I have both? I want both. Maybe I can have both.
I go for a road trip with Tom, one of my three friends, to camp on the beach at Point Reyes, and he has a sharp eye for the essence. His questions bring me up short, wipe the Vaseline off the lens.
Can't have both. Sorry. If you leave her behind, you lose her. She knows what she's costing you, what she's done to you, and she won't lay down any ultimatums. Go ahead, South America, adios, I'll be here when you come back.
But free means you don't have to come back. Free means there's no one left behind. Free means there's only you and whoever you meet on the trail. Free means love is left behind.
It feels fine to feel free. But you know what? I'll take the love. I've stood on high ground stunned by the radiance of the world around, feet on the earth head in the sky and all open before me, and only one worm in the apple. No one there to share. No one to say, "look at that."
The message from the black planet: I don't want to be alone. Given a choice, I choose communion.
Maybe it won't work. Of course. Given my history, and for that matter, hers - neither of us ever married - that's understood. Sunt lacrimae rerum, old son.
So I checked out of Hotel California, set up a household in northern Washington - the World's Longest Unguarded Border rations me six months out of a year in Canada - according to my criteria: in the wild, by living water, with stars, dark, silence - on Beaver Pond Trail - and then came north to this homestead up Vancouver Island to see what we can do.
As for the validity of that dichotomy, love v. freedom, well yeah, you're always free if what you want is what they give you. Arbeit macht frei. So if all you want is to snuggle with your honey bunny you won't feel the shackles. But if you wake up one morning with an urge to step out onto the road and never come back, you will understand.
I have that urge. Always have, always will. But I know how to choose. And sometimes we can step out onto that road kinda together.
Is that 90 seconds?
Now there is a dilemma. On one end of the stick, my plans to go free. On the other, my life's love.
Can't I have both? I want both. Maybe I can have both.
I go for a road trip with Tom, one of my three friends, to camp on the beach at Point Reyes, and he has a sharp eye for the essence. His questions bring me up short, wipe the Vaseline off the lens.
Can't have both. Sorry. If you leave her behind, you lose her. She knows what she's costing you, what she's done to you, and she won't lay down any ultimatums. Go ahead, South America, adios, I'll be here when you come back.
But free means you don't have to come back. Free means there's no one left behind. Free means there's only you and whoever you meet on the trail. Free means love is left behind.
It feels fine to feel free. But you know what? I'll take the love. I've stood on high ground stunned by the radiance of the world around, feet on the earth head in the sky and all open before me, and only one worm in the apple. No one there to share. No one to say, "look at that."
The message from the black planet: I don't want to be alone. Given a choice, I choose communion.
Maybe it won't work. Of course. Given my history, and for that matter, hers - neither of us ever married - that's understood. Sunt lacrimae rerum, old son.
So I checked out of Hotel California, set up a household in northern Washington - the World's Longest Unguarded Border rations me six months out of a year in Canada - according to my criteria: in the wild, by living water, with stars, dark, silence - on Beaver Pond Trail - and then came north to this homestead up Vancouver Island to see what we can do.
I have that urge. Always have, always will. But I know how to choose. And sometimes we can step out onto that road kinda together.
