Sorry

I’m sorry.
We hear these words often, whenever someone asks us about their father. I am so sorry.
And we never know how to respond. We can’t say yes, you should be, even if it’s possible that you should.
How could we face that? The fact that we are people whom others feel sorry for? How could we walk tall, smile, laugh, be intelligent or strong or cheerful knowing  that everyone feels sorry for us? We would have to fit in with their expectations and be lost, heartbroken, and hopeless if we agreed that we should be the subjects of sympathy. 
We don’t ever say, yes, you should be. What we say is: “It’s ok.”

But it is not ok. It makes us feel very uncomfortable saying that it is. As if we are cold and uncaring, as if we never miss him, as if remembering his death does nothing to impair our high spirits.
Sometimes I laugh when I say it. Not always. It doesn’t even matter that laughter is the worst answer, nothing that I have ever said in response to “I’m so sorry” erases the strangeness that enters the other person's eyes when I say it‘s ok.
What is it? That they actually feel sorry? That they are afraid? That they don’t believe that I’m ok? That they think it’s horrible that I am ok? Maybe they’re just uncomfortable like me?

Inevitably, the next question is: how did he die?
My oldest daughter answers enigmatically. Her top responses are as follows:
“From a head wound.”
“From a gun wound.”
“A bullet.”
I believe that this works for her because she is young and quiet. Though they don’t know what they really wanted to know they dare not press the issue. Those brief and incomplete explanations send people scurrying as if a grenade has just landed at their feet. The wideness of their eyes parallels the unblinking roundness of a full moon.

I tend to half whisper:
“It was a suicide.”
I feel ashamed every time I am forced to admit this. After the first answer there is just a certain amount of darkness hovering around us, the general gloom of death. We might have been a nice happy family that suffered a tragedy. People might picture him as a war veteran, or the victim of a sudden car accident, or  as someone that succumbed to a terminal illness.
Then they learn that he wanted to die. Another question springs to their minds of course, but it is not the kind of question one asks.
Why? Why? Why? It is a much greater darkness, a sin, this particular death. And it implies that we were never a nice happy family, there was always something about us which could have commanded sympathy.

Frequently I wish that I would have thought of something else to say. A complete fabrication. A lie, Huckleberry style.

“He was a lion tamer, like his father before him. It was their final act, the famous 'jaws of death', a real crowd pleaser, but sadly, Cuddles, the lion, sneezed at a most inopportune moment claiming my darling husband's life. Cuddles also  had to be put down. Once a man eater, even if by accident, always a man eater.”
“He was walking down California St. and somebody dropped a piano on his head.”
“He was a stunt aviator. A seagull hit his windshield during a loop de loop and he spun wildly out of control.”
“He was a Sherpa. Just before retiring he led one last group into the Himalayas but none of them were ever seen again.”
“He and his party were eaten by cannibals during an anthropological study of indigenous Amazonian peoples.”
“We were at the zoo. An escaped elephant trampled him to death near the penguin exhibit. He ran in front of it actually. To push a baby stroller out of the way.”

I wish I would have chosen one of these and stuck with it until it was as good as true. But I forget that we are shrouded in great darkness and only remember it once the line of questioning brings me back to a half whisper.
We would prefer to be casual acquaintances forever, people you recognize by the way we smile and laugh. People you know who are good at crocheting and singing and giving hugs. People that read a lot and wear funny hats and talk too loudly.
But never people you are sorry for. Never  people who lost someone. That is really never ok.
We say these words often, whenever someone asks us about their father. It’s ok. We say them just as often as we hear these words:  I’m sorry. 
And despite the fact that it never really is, whenever we are asked,  it is always ok.
It’s Ok.

Vibration Incorporate

What are they doing with my mind?
You ask as they reach in with silky fingers to comb through the cobwebs behind your cranium. You recognize them from a long time ago, from when you were not even you but rather one of your ancestors, from when The Black Forrest was a place and not a prefix to the word “ham”.
Blue and white and fine as mists but strong like magnets. They have always made these sounds, or rather these sounds occur in synchronicity with their presence. These are sounds that you forget when you aren’t hearing them. Sounds that you can’t make with your throat, sounds that make your whole body vibrate, or perhaps make your whole vibration incorporate or discorporate depending on the situation and the point of view.
They do things with your mind.
You remember them from the distant future in which you as you previously thought of yourself do not exist but rather are a thing of the past. This you is the descendant of that you, having inherited some portion of the same genetic data that once ordered the structure of your matter. But this you is something else too, something more related to the smart phone you used to carry in your pocket when you were that you, and perhaps something else too.
What are they doing with my mind?
You ask as they reach in with silky fingers to comb through the cobwebs behind your cranium. But at this point you can’t recall that you ever had a cranium. Were you really once something monkey, walking, laughing, man, jabber? Smile, twitch, sticky, hot, death maker.
What were you? You don’t even want to remember. You are busy now, stretching out like gossamer streamers of blue cotton candy, like a cloud of dust, a nebula, soft and light, reaching your silky fingers into…what?
Into….what?
Into…what?

Pink Satin Roses Unraveling

Pink satin roses unraveling and round moon white belly out running tiny breasts. The great hallowed halls of my makers and their room of mirrors, that is the place where I go to wait. The wall of windows lies exposed and I can see the fields all gold and brown and the dusty green olive trees and a far away lake of dark blue. The sun shines eternally in that place and there is someone to take my hand and the memories shift like the beads at the end of a kaleidoscope, always changing the view. I am young and strong and brave again with the stars of wonder restored to my heart. I can run with long legs and bare feet into all of the days that come with lungs pumping and heart pounding, aching in my chest. The pleasure of letting the spirit fly through life outweighs the pain of moving the body so that there is no desire to stop. They make themselves old in that world far from the room of mirrors in the halls of the makers, stooped over desks and hunched over steering wheels. They die bit by bit each time that a bell is rung and they begin to practice this little death while they are children. Poison in silver wrappers, poison filled with sweet cream and stowed away in neat plastic boxes adorned with our favorite blue skinned heroes sets the mind racing when it finds its way into the blood stream. That is how we grow old, loosing our bodies to false gods and cramped spaces and sweet toxic substances that give us a moment of pleasure. That is how I grow old and come to sag, that and by giving myself away to all comers. Anyone who asks gets my attention. My parents start stealing it away when I am small. I come to believe it is what I must do in all cases, and only when it is too late, I realize that it must be stopped. I must keep a kernel for myself so that it can grow and flower again and again. Never ever give it all away. Keep it so that spring can come again. There is a way that leads to life and a way that leads to death. Not for the body alone, but for something else as well. We must live for the shimmering sliding something that passes through this world. It passes through what we think we are, it passes through the whole thing. Later we will read these words and we will think that they make no sense, but that is all a mater of perspective. You must be much bigger to see, you must be bleeding through the paper thin world of the temporary. I draw a cross in the little world and in the room of mirrors a door opens and I find a tiny sword in the darkness beneath a fur coat. It fills me with fear, because I never imagined I would find such a thing in this place. It came from somewhere that I am blind to, it has come from the Other. Now I have the tiny sword in my hands. I knew of the place outside of places when I found the sword. I knew it when I met the terrible yellow unicorn with its red eyes and it dared to defy the laws of the world that I inhabited. I knew it best of all when I stacked the brightly colored boxes, little ones on top of big ones or inside of big ones and there was a special square way that they fit. That was what taught me to understand space and it reminded me keenly of the place outside of places. Soft and sweet with little bits of pink satin roses coming unraveled, and a hard sidewalk on a pleasantly warm night and the infinite open above me. Another right there beside me and we are amazed that we are here, amazed that we are alive, amazed that there is another amazed one here, right now with the one I call “me”. The great hallowed halls of my makers and their room of mirrors, that is the place where I go to wait. That is where I am. A kernel kept for myself so that spring will come again.

Liar Liar

What is that confusion creeping in, distorting the signal that I rode in on earlier? Can I actually talk about earlier with a straight face, as if it really happened?
The past is what we create to justify the present, or it is what propels us, but it is not real. Time is not real. How can there be even a moment? It passes instantly. You can divide it into infinitesimal smithereens, into fractions of the moments just past or fractions of the moment approaching, but never will you touch an actual now. Even the moment is unreal, making the past a most definitely slippery fish.
Of the past it is wise to use what you can and disregard what might hinder you. History is a story which can be told, and what can be told is never what actually is or was, if there could be such thing as a past or present. It may be told or remembered in a variety of ways. It is not that I suggest denying anything. I suggest accepting everything, but taking it all with a grain of salt and doing what you can with what you seem to be seeming.
Play and work with shadow and light, as objectively as you can. I was told recently in a dream that the Coyote was a liar and that as such he is an excellent teacher because all he does is feed his disciples an endless stream of lies and by so doing helps them avoid the trap of falling head over heels for one lie. This made perfect sense to me, and it should, because it was my dream, (and I am Wiley).
You must treat the past as the set up for the play or dream that you are seemingly in at the so called present. You will find that this is an improvised theater piece, there is no script. Improv is best enjoyed when it takes unexpected directions. There is no right or wrong line or action in an improvised piece of dream theater. The only thing that doesn’t go over well is to freeze up and stop, and just let the circumstances and other players push you about like a piece of moldy bread.
It will be difficult to be creative if you are strongly identified with the thoughts, feelings, desires, and woes of the character you seem to be in this moment. If you are to attached to the background story and your characters motivations, you will miss out on the strange opportunity to awaken within the character prancing about inside of the anxiety dream theater.
To enable you to awaken, it is useful to stop viewing the world set from inside your character and instead put your attention on the setting around the character.
Examine your surroundings now. See them as a dream, that is what they are after all. (You would not be reading this unless you were dreaming.) What might the objects in your surroundings suggest? Read the set the way you would interpret a dream. Let it speak to you symbolically. Begin to feel yourself as your surroundings. From this perspective you can then begin to choose how to move your character through your dream.
The confusion, the distortion, is derived from a state of forgetfulness, a state of consciousness that you have cycled into, which is not conducive to lucid dreaming. In such a state it is difficult to perceive your character and its surroundings as a dream. In that state you cannot make a choice. Things seem to be happening to you, and they seem real. You seem to be unquestionably and inescapably you.
If you have ever dreamed within this dream, you may recall that in that scenario you have at times been other people, other creatures, and at times no one at all, only an observer of events as they unfold. At the "time" you may have seemed convinced that you were a dog, or a pirate, or a princess, or a black and white cartoon. If you can remember that you were once a black and white cartoon, but at present find that you are something else, then rest assured that whatever you are now will be something remembered by another you which you may seem to be later.
No single dream, no one I, is more real than another. Remember that you will think that you have lived a lifetime. Of course you haven’t. That recollection comes standard with this particular dream.
I will tell you one last little lie:
You do not dream sequentially (or at least I do not, and I am you), rather the dreams ARE, and you may choose to, or not to, sequence them in any way that appeals to your sequencer. Your sequencer is probably sequencing without you noticing, which is how you came to accept the con of time and gained the ability to read this text.
Before I leave you, if it pleases you, know that I did keep a straight face earlier. If it does not please you, rest assured, there was no earlier.