a dream

i have just had a dream. not of my usual sort by any means. i do not have dreams like this one. i rarely dream, and when i do the nits that remain with me upon waking are hazy. foggy. indeterminate. on the rare occasions when i remember anything with any clarity it is usually of the brain dump sort - like when a computer's hard drive that has become overfull and various unrelated files must be purged. these clear dreams are like that recycle bin: a twisted and jumbled nonsensical mess. but not tonight. tonight there was connection. and tonight i was not fully asleep. tonight i had a waking dream which i can remember as though it were happening to me now.

i am alone, on a pilgrimage of a sort. i do not know exactly why, beyond that i have dreamed for years of coming here, but i am come to lumbini in nepal. birthplace of siddhartha gautama, he would become the buddha. i am not here religiously, at least not in the strictest meaning. i am not here to find myself. i am not here for enlightenment, i am not here to worship. yet i am here all the same.

i have come at a good time. the hills are full, the bodhi tree connected fully to surrounding landscape with cords that bear countless prayer flags. their colors are myriad, their shapes shift and play like the dancers i left in the clubs of kathmandu. there is a difference, and yet a sameness - while their reason for being here is so separate from those dancers, their nature is so very much the same: dissolution, oneness, connection, celebration, impermanence. i feel the colors physically, shocking me against a sky as blue as any i have ever seen, lush grasses and tree-lines hills thrusting their greens up into the blues almost as if to make the reds and yellows and oranges of the flags all the more wondrous.

this is a holy place, someplace i can touch without touching. there is something special here. moreso than just another simple place of worship. i am a white face here, a kind that is not seen terribly infrequently but seemingly greeted with some understandable measure of doubt as to the honesty of the visit. the faces i see are brown, lovely reddish and yellows and weathered to a point not often experienced in our cities. i am of little concern to the faces, white face or no. i am but another part of the landscape, another warp or weft in reality's fabric for this moment. this is an altogether novel experience for me; i am not being viewed with indifference, but with recognition and a lack of concern. i am not being overlooked, i am being seen with eyes that understand that my presence has little bearing on their experience but must be honored all the same.

i come to the tree. not a tree, but *the* tree. this is the focal point, the reason they are here. i can feel this too. the colors come rushing to me suddenly, the songs and breaths and breezes and prayers descending as i descend to my knees to pay some respect to this place. i have no plans nor expectations of anything momentous, not even of anything special at all. but as i come to my knees i can feel something crack inside of me, moses rock smacked with his staff and flowing blood and water in the depths of whatever it is that is me. this is a beautiful sound to me, and peaceful and quietly thunderous roar, and a new softness grows wildly from a strange spot in the middle of me.

and then it comes. a single, beautiful tear. there is no outpouring, no deluge. one small tear, which wends its way to my eye and finds itself balanced at the base of my nose. and it falls. i see it drop, each inch traveled toward the ground a lifetime. and when it finds the soil, it simply disappears into it with no apparent effect.

but i hear another drop hit. it is not my tear. i hear another. others have joined me in my small outpouring. the tears begin to come together in a pattering, quietly enough to be unmistakable for what they are but still loud enough to be heard. and then comes a larger drop. and another. these are not tears of the congregants. this is rain, the cool and bracing kind. the kind that is mostly unseen here.

our tears gather together with the coming rain and soon the skies have opened in a torrent to join with our own crying, and i rear back on my knees, fingers buried in the soil at my knees and i wail. for the first time in years i wail, and the whole of nature wails alongside me. the ground around smells of life and ashes, the winds of beginnings and ends, and i am with them and of them.

we wait, and we cry. and the clouds open apart and there comes a sunshine the warming likes of which i have never seen. from the spot where my first tear touched grows a shoot of purest green. i raise myself to my feet, gather my senses and turn to leave. i do not need to see this flower. it is enough to know that it grows.

words

i likely will never tire of words and what they can mean, what they can do to change everything. the same words, used in a slightly different manner, some slight change in context, can make all the difference in the world.

yesterday morning we visited a unitarian universalist church. it's an idea with which we had been toying for a long, long time, and we felt that maybe, jut maybe, the time had come for a change. no conclusions have been drawn as yet, no cause for alarm among the faithful who will read this, thought those who know me personally will be aware already that i don't exactly tow the party line of my methodist faith these days anyway. regardless, i came away from this visit angry. not 'rage against the world' angry, but just somewhat...pissy. grumpy. unsettled and cranky, like some old man who saw something in the world that he didn't like. it was odd. i'm frequently that cranky old bastard, but i couldn't remember coming away from church like that, not from what was essentially a positive experience, even in a minor way. but i think i eventually figured out why.

there are a couple of components to it. one is what B pointed out, and that is that i usually come away pissy from situations where i am confronted by large groups of people i don't know, especially if i feel that i might be required by social convention to carry on a conversation with them, shake a lot of hands and generally be 'friendly' with people whom i feel no connection to other than that they want something from me - but that will wait for another day. the thing that struck me is pure, unadulterated disenchantment.

i realized yesterday morning that i was spoiled for a long time in our little newborn church. there was a service that excited me and of which i felt i could be an integral part, but in an environment and with a leadership that i felt was coming from a place of inclusion and acceptance, and that made me comfortable with this particular corporate worship. but the leadership was changed out, and things have changed along with it. and i realized yesterday that it may be very difficult for me to find corporate worship that has that same level of excitement to which i am accustomed that also carries with it the level of acceptance and universality i require. the service we attended was, frankly, boring, and that will not do. but with the changes in my home church, there is seems to be a change in the level of universality that is disquieting to me. i hope i don't portray things here too strongly, for i believe wholeheartedly that our new pastor is coming from a good place and is trying to do good in the way he understands. but it's the words. the words are changing things.

there is a language that goes with traditional christianity that reinforces its traditionalism. part of that traditionalism is the exclusivity of the religion itself. it's the idea that christians, in spite of tens of thousands of years of history prior to the existence of their beliefs, have the only tickets that are punched through st. peters pearly gates that rubs me the wrong way. it makes little sense to me, no matter how one slices it, that any god who would create a universe solely out of being lonesome would also set up a system of morality in which those created to keep him company are doomed to eternal separateness from him unless they believe in one man's sacrifice - and then wait for 20,000 years before sending that man to save them. even if we should take the wingnut version of history and accept that the earth is only 6000 years old (!), that 's still 4000 years years worth of misery accomplished before god acceded to allow christ to come to sacrifice himself for us. seems too long a gap for my taste, but i digress. WAY too big a discussion for this morning. that exclusivity is what makes me uncomfortable when there are relatively modern religions (meaning not those involving a pantheon of gods painted on cave walls, but i'm not likely to invalidate even those) that are thousands of years older even than the judaism from which christianity was born, and there are phrases that reinforce that exclusivity through their connotation and context that i am hearing, and those phrases do not make me feel welcome.

the amazing thing is that all in a single breath one can speak of god's love, the beautiful acceptance and forgiveness that is the almighty divine, the oneness that is all of humanity when united together with god, and then destroy all that with one simple turn of phrase. the second coming. the return of the king. the kingdom will come. born again. Believer (you know what i mean when i use the capital b). The Faithful. our god reigns. these are all phrases that carry with them the weight of 2000 years of misapplication of a peaceful man's words and meanings. i don't pretend to know that i am right about what christ said. but i am certain that my experience of the almighty doesn't jibe with the crusades, with the idea of god hating fags, with satisfied grins at the idea of conflict in the middle east, with those who do not accept jesus as the messiah burning eternally in an unquenchable fire. but there is no avoiding the notion that phrases like the ones above carry with them those very same motivations and meanings, and those who speak them have a tendency to see the world as colored by the same sentiments that produced that list of atrocities above.

and what blows me away about it all is how just one of those little collections of words can undo an entire battery of beautiful words of acceptance and tolerance. all it takes is one 'the kingdom is at hand' to undo all the 'we are all welcome at the father's table'. the words can create the context, the context can create the words. my great and wonderful friend who used to pastor us could say 'the kingdom is at hand' and simple mean and end to the suffering of the human experience. he is a great human being, and his heart is large enough to allow for even those who do not believe the same thing he believes. that saves those phrases. and he uses such phrases sparingly, whether consciously or unconsciously, i believe because of the weight they carry. he is wise a and loving, and i am beginning to see, i think, that he is rare even in his own denomination. a shame, i submit, but then i'm not running that show, and probably for damn good reason.

suffice it to say in the end that i grew pissy because i fear now that my window has closed, and that i'll not be able to find again that peaceful acceptance i require without a druidian blandness required by a paucity of specific religious language, and i'll not be able to find again a worship that is charged with the fire of divinity that does not come attached to what i see as an arrogant requirement of admission into a special fraternity.

this post is a disaster. i hope no one else's head hurts. if this has created any migraines in trying to keep up, i apologize!

a moment

i may have done it again. i may have tapped into that thing i used to be able to find once upon a time. when i lived in colorado, i could do it. that's where i figured it out. i guess she taught it to me in a way, if i am honest. it's difficult to describe, but i'll give it a shot.

there was a point where i could take solace in my insignificance. that sounds very depressing, but i do not at all mean it that way. there are those who speak of enlightenment as an expansion into the everything, growing until you feel like you connect to it all, all of creation humming together as the great om inside of you. i believe this to be my version of that. it is more subtle than i would have expected, less of a powerful realization and a choir of angels than a tickling at the base of the soul, but one that fills that soul up from the bottom in a way that you may not realize is happening until you have emptied out again.

i played in snow. for anyone who lives with snow, this is a meaningless experience, i suppose, but i was born where it snows and spent much time in a place where it does not. boxing day was magnificent. great, huge flakes fell slowly and softly, the ground was already covered with enough snow to keep my feet from meeting the grass beneath no matter how hard i stepped. the air was crisp, cold and clean. the world as white, and there were snow angels to be made and king of the mountain to be played. i watched the cheeks of my children turn to apples, watched their breath turn to fog, watched them wiggle with delighted discomfort as the snow found the weak spots in their clothing.

i took 5 minutes for myself while they were winding down, and i left them with my aunt. i needed a few moments to be alone with my childhood in a way, to be the kid i was once and had forgotten, or let go, or had taken, or whatever. i needed a moment to enjoy this, to be happy. i went around to the front and stood in the front yard in which i had played often as a young boy, let the wind whip me and let the snow fall on my face, and it happened. every flake hitting my face said 'you are here. you are here. you are here.', and i understood what those flakes were telling me. i felt the world all around me, the whole of creation all around me, felt so small and noticed, truly noticed where i was in it all. i felt my own smallness, my own part of the wholeness, saw myself as part of it.

i felt those flakes tell me their brothers and sisters were landing all around and covering so many other parts of the same world, that their cousins the raindrops were coming down somewhere warmer, that their further relatives, the rays of the sun and the moon, were touching those places not being coated with precipitation, and that those i loved everywhere were being touched by them at the same moment, and that i was no different than the rocks and the trees and the grasses and, yes, the very snowflakes themselves, as i was being covered with no less and no more than they. i was small, i was a part. i was tiny and felt the hugeness of it all. it was magnificent.

i have no idea how long it lasted, and as quickly as it came upon me it was gone. i did not mourn its passing, strangely, like i have mourned the passing of so many of my moments of opening up. i was simply glad for its having visited me, happy i could have been part of everything for that brief span, thankful for the time playing in the snow with the kids preparing me for it. later in the day we would go sledding, and it would not be the same. it was to be just joy, just fun, just worldly good time, but even then i did not belittle it for its lack of grandiosity, but was simply happy to be there for that time, wind whipping me as i raced down the hills and snow fighting me as i dragged my exhausted crew back up them. life would intrude again as it always does, but for a time i had it again. i understood the beauty.