words

The more time we spend in reflection, the more we refine our sensibilities. Reflect on friendship and you keep those with tangible bonds, let wispier ones drift away. Reflect on your children and control begins to slip as you watch. Reflect on money and you let go that flimsy definition of worth. Reflect on importance and you begin to develop this impression of…special. A kind of exquisite goofiness: laughing and crying at the same time. Reflect on music and you demand resonance or silence.

Reflect on beauty and pretty will never hold you in its grip, nor will ugly repel you. In fact, both concepts disappear. Reflect on cars and you drive less. Reflect on time and being becomes opportunity – bumps, bruises and broken bones included – without the grasping panic of lack. Your ego is an ass because everybody’s ego is an ass and that’s…well, it’s hard. And embarrassing. But in our real hearts, I know we’re quiet Robin Hoods, noisy Buddhas, driven Florence Nightingales, wandering Johnny Appleseeds. Earthbound, valuable and offering.

“If you keep doing yard work naked, the neighbors’re never gonna introduce themselves.” My littlest boy smirked at me as I held a garden hose in one hand and a fistful of leaves in the other.

“I dunno,” I answered. “Depends who the neighbors are.”

Bo sighed. “I don’t think we’re gonna find out.”

It was New Orleans. It was hot. I added a bathing suit and he decided that that was as much as he could expect from a hippie chick raised by another hippie chick.

I lived in a bathing suit throughout the New England summer, too, on the island where I grew up. You can pretty much walk around in your underwear there, as long as you wear flip-flops, like you can in most beach towns, so my son’s modesty wasn’t offended. November beaches are chilly, though. Breezy has become windy, hazy sunshine comes clear and cutting. Bo’s winter wetsuit has long sleeves and booties, but surfing makes him touch his cold cheeks gingerly and call them “meat…human meat.” I stand on the sand, watching him ride green, foamy waves and jam my hands into the pockets of my sweatshirt, listen to the seagulls.

Some seagulls sound like an amp left on all night: burned out tubes, warm and fuzzy but kinda damaged. And some sound like bells: thin, no texture. All seagulls have blank, shiny eyes, so it’s hard to tell what makes them screech in such different ways. Time? I measure that by seasons and by four boys blowing out birthday candles. They get one wish a year…doesn’t seem like enough, but I guess it makes them choose their dreams carefully. Wishes are so revealing, so naked, we aren’t even allowed to share them or they won’t come true. Apparently.

My wishes are seeming a little fuzzy lately, burned out like a damaged seagull. I’m sure the boys’ wishes are clear as bells: too hopeful for texture. Good for them. Hope is good, boys. Hope is very, very good.

Happy birthday, Bo.

Summer in a beach town is sacred meets sordid, like God going to Burger King. Or the other way around, I guess, Burger King coming to God. It’s weird. Also? I can’t stop running. I mean, I can and do, but I don’t want to. I’ve noticed that I don’t have to stop to smell the roses; roseness is everywhere. Inertia hits me in a fast place. Someone once told me that we don’t like to start crying because we’re afraid we’ll never stop. I don’t think I’d ever stop running unless the trail ended.

Plus, I run in heaven. A heaven. On the ocean, with deer and rabbits and mink and goldfinches. The roseness in this place is beach roses – rosehips – and rosehips are so wonderful, they may be the only thing that really matters. Thorny and fragrant, with papery petals, rosier than roses, and tiny, sour fruit, redder than redness.

Anyway, this morning, a shrew ran across my path, so I stopped running and suddenly I knew what hell was. Right there in a heaven, when I certainly wasn’t looking for hell, thought I’d been there, knew to avoid it. But I’d only ever been to pain: a raging restlessness, a hole in your humanity.

Hell is a question, I think. That’s what the little shrew whispered. But first, it’s a pit we stumble into, full of prizes. I won’t start listing shallow rewards; that’s been done before and it’s preachy. I’ll just say that ego’s Vegas is 2-D. Can spread all over your life, take you to your death bed, but it’s still: flat. Like eating someone else’s birthday cake, you could call it “selfish,” but really, it’s just dumb. Gross. Boring. Lonely cuz it’s a perversion of love, and it makes you sick.

Hell’s question is this: how do you breathe/love/live? Weak and shallow or with strength and depth? Sounds simple. Don’t answer yet. Heaven is not your reward for climbing out of hell. There is no reward for climbing out of hell. There might not even be a heaven; just some real nice places we like. We can’t judge all the people down there in the pit, either, as they seem so suited to it. I do kinda wanna shout down into it, I guess: “You’re life’s up here! And you’re missing it!”

But nobody’s gonna cheer if you claw your way through ego’s Vegas and end up right where you started. All the cheering is down there in the pit. That’s where the prizes are, and it’s noisy there.

All that’s up here is two fists of rosehips, red eyes from crying and another birthday cake. But this cake has your name on it and you get one piece. All the other pieces go to the people who love you. And they love you so much.

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Listen to Red Eyes:

“It’s been unfolding for so long, it’s inside-out.”

“What…life? This story?”

“Probly, but I meant that flower. The rose. Don’t touch it, they really do have thorns. Pointy ones.”

“It’s all brown and dead.”

“Not if you look closely. The petals are on-fire pink in the center and the stem is battleship.”

“Battleships and thorns and pointy.”

“And unfolding.”

“I got the vegan beef and cheese breakfast burrito, which was, like…a tortilla.” My friend Kevin is one of those guys who not only has his shit together but everyone else’s, too. Or so it would seem from his expression, which glows with the kind of goofiness you only see in the inbred and the enlightened.

I saw him in Seattle a couple weeks ago, at his radio station – KEXP – arguably one of the best in the world. I see KEXP stickers on cars in Australia, for christ sake. People like good music to fly around in the air. Smart people do, anyway. Standing next to Kevin, I couldn’t stop holding onto him, couldn’t stop holding onto Seattle itself, really. When I’m there, I suck in its glittery air, hoping I can hold glittery in my lungs long enough to infuse other places I go with it. I don’t blink, trying to paste its maniacal yet soothing colors onto my eyeballs. And I hold onto my smart, glittery, maniacal yet soothing friends like they’re lifelines to the good life.

Burrito-wise, Kevin was actually talking about Austin, though. We once spent a limbo morning together in Austin, TX, during South by Southwest. An odd, transitional, crossroads-y kinda morning. Where maybe we could’ve sold our souls? But probly not, knowing where we were at, burdened and burned by integrity. Robert Johnson somehow gained integrity at his crossroads, buying into the devil’s demands. Our music business had reversed that equation…and I was wondering if I’d be keeping songs to myself from now on. If Kevin’d be programming Billie Holiday into The Minutemen into Bach in his living room.

“Music is music is music,” is what he said over his vegan tortilla, over the napkin holder, ramekins of salsa and half empty cups of coffee.

I stared at him. “And?”

His inbred, enlightened grin. “And it’s gonna be ok.”

In Seattle, I hugged him tighter and begged him to say it again. “Music is music is music,” he sing-songed, his smile growing until it stretched out his rubbery features. “And it’s gonna be ok.”