Over the Monastery Wall

So it hurts, so what?

So you have a secret, so what?

Over tea with Bergamot oil we talk about the Lord and Jung and what sex is like and what electrons are. 

How we hold ourselves in order to love women in the way we want to love women, and how our dead fathers watch and their fathers watch puzzled, and how our grandmothers and their grandmothers step forward in benediction and relief. 

For whom does the King of Swords kneel but a woman whose body was not so long ago the earth from which Mount Ascutney was created so that the ashes of his favorite dog might have a pretty home? 

I am the specific man I am becoming lighter and lovelier, and it's all happening right now, even in grocery stores, even driving slowly west on Route Nine, peering over the wheel at the road unfurling in snowy dark, alone and not alone, and beyond alone, too.

Pretty blue mushrooms, memories of bluets.

We wave a hand over what does not readily resolve itself in language and logic and go on together, which is okay, which is more than okay.

The blind horse calls me and I answer by moving quicker, arms full of hay. 

Sunlight on the horizon, knocking sounds over at the post office as Carl and Marie unload the delivery from Springfield, frosty snow crunching underfoot, all of us in it as one.

Stuff happens, other stuff doesn't, which is also a kind of happening.

Games one can play a long time before realizing that what matters isn't what you play but who you are playing with.

Tearing apart cardboard boxes for recycling, fingers going numb in early December cold, but a neat barn is better than a not-neat barn, and we are still beholden to that kind of order, so yeah, we yield to the requisite law and tear the cardboard up for recycling, cold fingers be damned. 

Women I've gone down on, and how I remember them all, and love them still for their beauty and grace, the light they shared, the salt and the wetness, teaching me one of the many gifts we can only be given on our knees.

The bridge over the Connecticut River on the Northampton Hadley line where I have been scared all my life. 

The thin gold band of her wedding ring and that which it signifies and that which it will never signify again and the world she insisted on bringing forth in which the distinction mattered.

Arguing for an approach to psychedelics that's closer to cutting one's hand off and flinging it over the monastery wall than anything McKenna advocated.

So I am lonely, so what.

Remembering last winter driving outside Providence Rhode Island and seeing swans on black ponds and feeling comforted in a way that would not clarify until nearly a year later when she settled for me the relevant symbolism. 

So I am broken, so I keep going, so what.