The Diamond Island

Lately, as I’ve walked around the loch with the honeycomb hideout bunch, there’s been a most unusual sight. The days were getting shorter so basically it’s night by the time we get around to our grand excursion of the day.

I’ve been seeing a lot of homes that have replaced their lights with ultraviolet-blue colored bulbs. At first I thought it was a Halloween thing, but they’re all still up. Even though the holiday lights came out, still they persist.

The lights add an eerie, spectral quality to the portions of the walk where they exist. However, I also find them comforting and inspiring. You see, lights of these kinds always reach into the hidden crevices of my mind and draw forth feelings and imaginings of the strangest kind.

What causes the secret, hidden wonders of the night to glow? The sound of the vuvuzellas, of course. A quality in these lights is aware of the call and answers with it’s own light.

Or rather, perhaps the glow is perceived only by those who hear the call of that buzzing noise—noise—noise! We see reflected back at ourselves the glow within that dances with organic, firefly mystery in the concealed reaches of our inner haunts.

What comes out to play if we but listen? Our true natures, hearing the rousing dirge of ecstasy that inspires and illuminates what was shadowed and unknown.

If you hear, you will see.

No sooner have I witnessed the spectacular display of magnificent enlightenment that is smarter than the average bear then I’m drawn into watching videos of erupting lava. Unbelievably hot material charged by the heat of the earth and forced onto the surface. Lambent orange-yellow creation and destruction that is dangerous, hypnotic, and moving on a deep level.

The forces of our central being called forth to the range of our consciousness by the awakening sound of the noise—noise—noise!

It is an actual external event we behold with our senses and contemplate with our innermost thoughts. We are reminded of when it is an internal event, our vast panorama of experience widened and enriched by the forces inside ourselves.

Sometimes, forces we did not expect demolish towns we built for ourselves. At other times we are fortunate to be removed enough from the process to have a reasonable level of safety, but are close enough to allow the magnitude of the event to move us.

This eruption of energy from the deeper levels of our existence brings new land, full of delicious minerals for the plant life that inevitably follows. It is true we need the greatness inside to come out and renew our conscious life.

It occurs to me that while there is a certain impersonal fate to the catastrophe of an eruption in the external world, there may be a meaningful connection to the volcanic activity in our psyche. There is a story, a drama hidden in the seemingly inscrutable mystery of how we came to be experience this eruption, however we find ourselves participating in it.

The world hears the call and responds, dancing. There is movement and heat, and the flush of release and timeless joy.

And what is our part in that?

Pick out some movies that use eruptions to drive the situation such as Dante’s Peak, or resolve it: like One Million Years BC. We are forced to adapt and respond to what has come forth as a result of the call.

The vuvuzellas have been calling all this time. The difference is that someone heard it.

They look closer at what is happening, they are alert to the change in themselves. The journey to widen their small worldview has begun. Kaboom.

I admit, does one really want to be around when the ultimate volcano finishes off all the dinosaurs? At least in the psychic adventure, all that was no longer needed or had become a wasteland of inauthentic life gets destroyed. Blown away.

It’s time to know you live, so that the world may live and be renewed. Hear the call; accept the eruption that is the response.

I helped the bees.

The killer bees who came to rock me been wintering over and building strength.  As the spring rains of radioactive doom spill out over the land, they been buzzing slowly into hot activity, like a magma swarm of super-charged sparks under intense pressure.

All they needed was a shelter from the mindlessness of humans caught in their repeating basic mantra of bad brains programming. The killer bees grow stronger in my mind; can’t help but feel a little like a king bee, if only in a small way.

I helped more bees.

Since I decided on becoming a beekeeper, I figured I ought to start at Level 0 somewhere.  K ordered this hang-able bunch of cut bamboo wrapped and stapled together, and I put it outside for mason bees to find a home.

Those bees are rover bees, wanderers and nomads without a hive. Heh, pretty cool. They’re all over the place, but you never notice them because they come in so many shapes and sizes not always resembling the humble honey bee.

K had her doubts, but I stubbornly insisted on getting started. Next thing I know, bees! Gathering their pollen for their little larvae and mud to seal up the little nursery capsules.

She was so excited by my success that she gathered up some bamboo and created a makeshift home bunch herself.  Next, she took a block of wood and drilled holes in it.  All these things were hung in a place so as to avoid the rain and get regular sunshine (warmth and dryness being key).

Okay, so it’s like six or seven sealed nurseries now. Very small results, but still so exciting!

Started looking up YouTube videos of beekeepers, and K tuned me into the top bar method of raising hives. This looks awesome. In particular, the video of the dude installing a queen without gear and only a pipe for smoke while his kids watch strikes me as incredibly brass.

It’s a preview to get me excited about one day being capable enough to help the bees. Yes, the honey is a benefit—I am thinking of myself at least a little. The satisfaction of exploration and experience, however, is what draws me. I must know more about bees!

And I will. Muah-ha-haaa!

Spring, he approaches like a long lost friend. Life spreading out in an awakening dark whorl of crushed and frozen currents.

Blasts of frozen wind gusting through the streets and paths, numbing bones and finishing off stragglers. There’s a radiance behind their efforts, driving them out into the open spaces to escape what is coming to awareness.

Recognition and remembrance of Kore nature and Kali power loosening up the drawstrings holding eyes of elements closed in dreaming of balance. The Oroboros curls and twines inside the heads of survivors shambling through the echoes of winter beasts from the unknown.

Energy is shifting and transforming all around our cold-numbed ears.  Despite our sniffling noses dull with crisping, the hidden secrets buried like Easter eggs wait for us to catch their scent.  The blind and mindless turning inward of huddling over an electric current is passing on.  Soon, we’ll crack open like icy creeks and know we are streaming once more.

Can’t move or think much this last week. The rumbling hunger in the wild for the blossoms of winter’s close have seized hold of me.  I see it in the chatter of robins and finches; feel it in the easing of my blood.  All is noise and rattling rolling tumbling rushes of sparks bursting out of nothingness and calling the slumber back into the unknown.

Spring hears her call and comes running, fresh joy and unleavened sorrow both at the ready—as the year of the tiger sinks its claws into the ground and roars, “Here I am bitches!”

They called it the “barbeque that seats four“.  A vehicle with a propensity to burst into flames, due to a design flaw that allowed the gas tank to be ruptured during a rear end collision. I lived in it with my parents, on and off, from about age four up until the age of nine.  Talk about a five year mission!

We drove from location to location, looking for a place with a job where we could make our home.  Sometimes we’d stop at a motel, often we would sleep in the car at a rest stop.  The back seat came down, the luggage went into the front seats, and out came the sleeping bags and pillows.  Crowded, yes, but quite an adventure.

Money came from grandpa in the form of an allowance, which was enough to buy gas, eat at Howard Johnson’s, buy souvenirs from Stuckey’s, or go to the occasional local carnival.  My main form of entertainment was drawing and reading—comic books, TinTin, and any number of strange and unusual childrens’ books.

Our particular Pinto was named “Barney”.  He was red with black seats and upholstery.  What was most cool about him was he had “the three controls”, which were the fan on/off, the temperature hot/cold, and what I remember as being a defroster front/rear.  I was really into Speed Racer at the time, so I found it cool to imagine that Barney had special powers too (if only three).

One particular hilarious adventure happened when we were leaving California to go back to the east coast (having failed to find a job or a place to live in the Golden State).  Mom was driving Barney with myself in the back, while dad followed behind in a U-Haul Van.  We decided to drive through the Mojave Desert on the way to Las Vegas.

The temperature was over 110 degrees and the car had no air conditioning.  One of the things we always carried with us in Barney was a large red and white plastic cooler.  I got so hot sitting in the back that I opened the cooler and climbed inside (but couldn’t close the lid all the way.  I lay on the ice and bottled drinks, which gave up their cold in a cloud of steam that trickled out the lid.

My mom looked in the rear view mirror and stopped the car, fearing a fire had started.  She saw me hiding in the cooler and asked what I was doing in the cooler, of all places?  I said I was trying to stay cool by putting myself on ice.  Even then I was a smarty pants!

Barney was only a V4, so he didn’t have a lot of power.  He had a propensity to break down more and more as he went on.  For example, when we left Las Vegas the fuel pump busted and had to be repaired.  Because we had just gotten gasoline at a service station from an Asian attendant, I said we broke down because we bought Japanese gas.  Oh, kids.  Aye-yi-yi.

Repairs meant calling grandpa for repair money.  Then the adventure would continue.  AM seventies radio, three television networks in the hotel, and bookstores were my culture troughs.  Occasionally we would stop and stay with family or find a place we could live in for a few months, but always we would be back on the road on the quest for a home.

Eventually, we did find a place to live with a job.  Shortly afterward, Barney broke down for the last time on a major bridge during rush hour on a roasting hot day.  That day is vivid in my mind—the parental swear words, the finality of Barney’s last gasp of service, and the growing realization that we were putting down roots.

We had Barney towed to our home, but it was obvious he would never ride again—too expensive to repair.  Too many asteroid belts, hostile android encounters, and radioactive mountain terrain on a Volkswagen wannabe engine.  I watched the tow truck take him away for the last time, never to know the Three Controls again.

But there are times at night before I go to bed where I remember.  The awkward feel of the uneven backseat while being squeezed in with two grownups.  The timelessness of the road and the never-ending panoply of mud-bottom America.  The roaring sound of eighteen wheelers driving by lulls me to sleep, and Barney is there to remind me that freedom and adventure are eternally of our spirit and may strike at any time.

Any day a car may appear out of nowhere, you climb inside, and notice it has three controls.

Everyone decided to hike downriver that day.  I insisted on staying behind, claiming that I would stand guard over everyone’s gear.  They walked out of sight for a rendezvous with the confluence of two branches of the river.

As soon as they were gone, it was safe again for me to talk to the voices in my head.  Quiet enough once more to hear the immensity of nature careening into me from all sides.  Free from the distracting weight of human beings striving in their dark ignorance toward the dawn of understanding.

Out came the inner light and like a shadow I danced as it danced.  Canyon lands rising up about me in stony magnificence, unchangeably real and transient both at once.  Wide river water coursing past my ankles as cold toes taloned into the rocky, sandy gravel.

A huge grotto of boulders blocking the river draws me close and I talk to me myself and I, among the other people who live inside my brain.  We have these talks so we can decide what to do.  The muddy sand squelching under me, deep eddies passing under my tread, I douse myself in a waterfall of cascading fountain and am reminded of the living spirit that moves through us.

Everything comes off, slapped flat against a sunny boulder to dry.  The Walkman is left beside my shoes on a sandy beach.  No civilization star charts are needed where I’m going.  I step outside the circle and invite the universe to tell me stories.

See, I’ve got a big dude choice to make.  Love, knocking at the door and asking if anyone’s there.  I don’t know.  Never had anyone come to that door before.  The question isn’t whether or not I will answer (I already have), but how will I answer.  Trust in front or behind?

I start climbing the jagged cliff, up the side of the canyon.  The first twenty feet is fairly easy, and I stop to look back at my Walkman and shoes beneath me.  They seem so small, now.  Then I’m scrambling up and over, higher and higher until I reach a ledge just below the peak of the canyon rise.

I start walking along the ledge, rocks and gravel tumbling down the slope below me to disappear over a sheer drop to what I believe is an underscored rock face.  I reach the end of the rise and find myself on a round platform of stone looking over the confluence of the two river branches.

Giant rock formations surround me across the river chasms, higher even than the topside I am skirting now.  Titanic vistas of stone push into me with their awesome scope, beaming both the dread reality of an easy demise should I step two feet over and the soothing sensation of being opened up like a sealed geode to the wonder of being in love and knowing nothing.

All of us, ants before a grand and mighty universe unfolding beyond any reason or dreaming.  I understand this is as far as I go in human form, so I turn about and begin the long, difficult descent.  To come back to earth, even in a symbolic way, is harder.  Limbs grow tired, throats turn parched, and the mind loses clarity against the storm of outside struggle.

The last twenty feet are an agony of return.  In the grotto, I resume my trappings of civilization and walk the riverbed back to camp.  I sit down before a blackened ring of stones where a campfire will appear tonight.

I come to the conclusion it was too late to avoid this by several weeks.  I am only deciding how I will ride the lightning.  A door in me creaks open and a seething avalanche comes shooting out into my life, stunning me into a trance.

As coincidence would have it, the group returns shortly after I commit to diving face first into the love of no return.  Looking at the naked, muddy people approach me to tell their adventure, I see I’m not the only wild thing in the desert this day.

But that is a tale told another day, and then only to a few.

Technically, it was short of the 35 MPH needed for the designation of blizzard. Heard official reports mentioning 17 inches, even though I was standing in snow up to my knees, measuring 23 inches. The communications console reported similar anecdotes across the local galactics.

The northern adventurers might as well scoff at us amateurs just below the mason-dixon line. I understand; got a few stories of wandering around at the snowblind levels fighting yetigers with a ski pole up in them thar latitudes. Everybody’s got it worse off somewhere. At least the snow up there forces the Kling-ons to use chains on their disruptors.

Spent long hours in the dark watching the snow fall, with Frankie perched beside me.  For the beings in the chill depths of nothingness, it’s like the rains coming in spring on the wild plains of Africa. The neurotic adaptations of the mindless and the artificial satisfactions of the consumed are swept away by a blinding flood, and the dazzling elemental currents of the unknown may dance in mystery–safe from unclean eyes and shriveled thinking.

The drifts rise high enough for strange things to paddle by, in direct proportion to the amount of effort needed by snivelized coat-and-boot astronauts to tread the snowfall. If two inches of water is dangerous, what might traverse two feet of accumulation? One must listen carefully, between the breaths of snowy quiet and the biting snap of winter wolf’s breath across your unprotected face.

I plunge forward into a drift, the dry crystals sticking to my face and blazing white hot. Brushing off the stinging nettles as they burn my face raw, the cold invades my cheap spacesuit like an inviting alien force. I lay back and let the flakes crackle against me like hundreds of tiny asteroids. A moment’s intention and I’m beamed aboard the honeycomb hideout, safe behind life support systems and hot cocoa immunizations.

Play until you’re tired and cold and dragging. This state of exhausted euphoria is one children are familiar with; Mine’s tempered with the seasoning of adaptation patterns. We forget the previous state, still living because we have a manual override.

A whispering cuts through the quiet cold, telling me I must be like a crocodile.  Silent, prowling, unseen, existing in the winter monsoon where another life force dwells. I see pictures and diagrams as if watching the unrolling from a long papyrus–see, it is like this; use internal strength like so, leap across hidden crevices and through dark corners untraveled like this.

Winter is here. I return to my human existence, welcomed by Frankie who insists on making the biscuits on my cold but warming form swathed in blankets. I’ll tell her all about it during my nap.  I watch the snow on my hanging clothes melt in the light of consciousness as K makes some cocoa.

The last lantern-bearer gone and passing into slumber to the sound of purring, the wintery wonders surge like a noiseless wave in the darkness of falling snow. The rains have come, the drought is ended.

Had a little bit of that dragon’s blood on my slapstick where his nose got stamped Cat In The Hat pink.  The folks took it and mixed it into the rum punch, baking and mixing our healing feast.

I celebrate community and survival, those things we are thankful for as we recognize the blessings of our life.

I mourn those who suffered savage brutality at the hands of settler colonialism, on the backs of whom many of us enjoy our privileges.

We hear the song of nature, and guided by the spirit of Sister Piscotti whose vase we must fill, sinners that we are, and go into the deep old woodland chaparral which refuses to let human beings push it around.

The old path that is normally there is overgrown, for the first time I can ever remember.  The unseasonably warm weather and rain have caused an almost spring like growth to emerge, lichens growing on tree trunks and moss in full bloom!

Rabbit escapes our sight through the roots and tangles of the path that is no more.

We roll with it, nomads that we are.  Many paths through the forest, but you have to pay.  Human remains.  Scratches of sharp spines on flesh, I am bloodied, roots trip us up, wet pine branches swipe us.  The forest doesn’t move, yet it has motion.

Fog swathed ways that come and go, lightning struck trees out of a dream, and all manner of growths.  We clip and gather a harvest for the vase cussing and swearing but somehow swerving both ways to the way out.

Explosions, the Grand Turkey Lord shooting off a series of cracks and pops in the deep to scare our pants off and make us laugh as we trudge out of the mud and back to the places where kids play, the first step back to home where a sacrifice awaits to feed us.

Celebrate, and mourn.

Singing ELO’s “Don’t Bring Me Down”, we brush off the brambles and retie shoelaces.  Back home, having paid our respects to the ancestors and the within, we toast and serve, candles lit.

Godzilla isn’t the same for me anymore.  As a child I loved the destruction and the excitement.  But now, having been to Hiroshima, I also see the overwhelming, apocalyptic horror of the human experience crushed underfoot by the atomic unknown.

This is what is meant by the sublime.  The monstrous face we are seeing is humanity’s own hellish shadow, magnified many times over by enormous natural forces into a radioactive blast that annihilates the human completely.

I can’t know what it is like (I wasn’t there), or comprehend much of the significance—I’m just a tourist, a voyeur, a poser who caught a brief glimpse of an old claw-print.  But even having once seen evidence that Ancalagon is real, and we have the power to summon such enormous destruction against others, where can one hide?

I love the film deep and darkly, yet it is a heady draught I consume with caution and reserve.

This is the message the ghosts convey to me repeatedly for most of the night—that no one stands outside the shadow of humanity.  I lie in my bed, the other students fast asleep, and I hear the rumble of otherworldly clutches.  It might only be my conscience trying to open me up like a clam to the world, which I imagine to be the sounds of the dead.

I talk to them in my mind, twisting and turning hotly in bed unable to sleep.  I imagine myself helping them, being there with them (which is just fantasy guesswork), and suffering for them.  But these are all empty postures in the night.  I wear myself out wrestling with their noise and I finally sleep.

My dreams are of swimming in a vast underground ocean of red flame and muddy slime.  I am surrounded by people staring at me as they rot away into charred ooze.  Then I am struggling through the streets of a deserted, burning city that gives off a cloudy, shadowed heat.  I realize I’m asleep and I wake myself up, struggling to rouse my muscles and breathing out of the relaxation of slumber.  It’s daylight out.

The next stop for us is Itsukushima, which is known as Miyajima the Shrine Island.  One of the three holiest places in Japan.  No one is allowed to die here—you get shipped right off as soon as you start to croak.  People weren’t even allowed to live there until recently.  As a result, there is still a primordial virgin forest on the island.  Countless holy structures of all kinds shapes and sizes may be found throughout the island.  Plus lots of squeaking deer, and monkeys who are the messengers of the gods.

It feels good to escape the city for a while.  The sun is shining when we land, but the weather slowly changes as we meander through the streets.  A light rain begins, followed by a growing mist.  A few of us take the Miyajima Ropeway (a cable car system) to near the top of Mount Misen to snap some pictures, but by the time we get up there it’s useless.  The entire island and surrounding sea is shrouded in fog.

After a few minutes of taking things in, everyone decides to descend for some lunch, but I decline.  Taking my handy tourist map I figure I’m going to climb the summit and get some outdoor time to myself.  The map makes it look like a hop skip and a jump.  Scale, let me show you how not to use it.

I pass through a huge herd of monkeys and onto the fog-shrouded, forested mountain paths, which are well trod.  There’s no one about, and likely with good reason.  As I learned later, all tengu goblins in Japan gather in the forests of Mount Misen.  They scare away intruders by making loud noices like wooden blocks being banged together.

This is a scene only a crazy gaijin would find themselves in, ignorant of all the hazards of the spirit world.  Fools and little children protected by the purity of their motives, I suppose.

But I feel at peace, safe.  This a sacred place, whether or not I get the local meaning.  I know I’m an outsider, that I don’t belong, and yet I maintain a respectful thought at all times. I don’t hear anything but the wind and the rain.  Even the monkeys are quiet, and soon I don’t see them anymore (probably all hanging out close to the ropeway station for handouts).

I reach a small wayside shrine and make an offering of incense.  It takes considerable effort to light it in the light rain and wind, but I manage and place it in the proper place.  I struggle with my request of the gods, wanting very much to grant me some good fortune with my then-girlfriend at the time.  But all I can come up with is a request that my love for her be true, which seemed a cop-out, easy request to make in one’s prayers.

I ought to have prayed for the ghosts, or for an end to atomic weapons, yet all I can think of is my own needs at a time like this.  I spend a long time in the rain agonizing over whether I made the right request.  I tell myself that if the stick is still burning when I return this way, then I made the right decision.  I walk up the slope of the final approach to the top.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the shrine I visited is the Reikado (“Temple Which Protects Flame”).  There is a fire inside that is said to have been lit by a holy man and has been burning ever since.  This fire was used to light the Peace Flame in Hiroshima’s Peace Park, which will burn until all atomic weapons are destroyed and the world is free from their horror.

That holy man is Kobo Daishi, founder of one of the major branches of buddhism in Japan.  He’s one of the holiest holy men in Japanese culture, seriously big dude dinner stuff.  They say he’s still chilling out, hidden from our sight until the return of the biggest Buddha ever.  No messing around, seminal figure here.  Ka-boom.

I take the path where you have to bow down and walk under a stacked boulder to continue on the path.  It’s like a tunnel and a gateway at the same time.  The trees break away, the path twists one last time, and you find yourself with a 360 view of the surrounding area.  Boulders everywhere which the gods are said to rest upon and discuss/observe/contemplate the world.

Actually, I should mention that when I say “gods” I’m using it in the collectively neutral sense rather than say god/dess-s or divinities.  Shinto has a matriarchal pantheon, with all the major deities being female (for example, Amaterasu the sun goddess is no joke, takes care of her bizness, watch out).  The mother is everywhere in Japan, she’s what counts, but she’d insist harmony be maintained and everyone remain at the table, thus “gods”.

The actual summit holds an observation deck, which you climb a series of stairs to reach.  It’s a joke, actually.  You are standing on one of the most holy places you can in Japan, and there’s this ugly, cheeseball man-made structure to the side.  For some reason I didn’t mind though, it felt appropriate, like one last step into the heavens.  Taken on the stairway of ugliness, admitting our own human weakness.

This is the moment of enlightenment in the spiritual journey.  Hard climb, long travel, then revelation as the world opens up all around you.  At the top of the deck, I take in the four directions.  The spattering rain and crisp wind buffet my body, dousing my heat and strength.  Clouds and mist are rushing all around me.  The nearest shores and islands are hazy outlines.

I speak to the gods of Japan, ignorant of their names let alone their ranks and stations.  I tell them I don’t know what to say about what I’ve witnessed or how I feel.  I don’t know what to ask from them, or what to tell them.  I don’t even know if I should say anything at all.

It occurs to me I’m the only person up on this summit.  I am meant to be here, doused in the elements, shivering with the feeling of being alive.  A fragment of cultural relevance comes back to me from my studies, of how the Japanese consider themselves a “wet” people.  That is, they are a deeply feeling people who understand relatedness.  While outsiders, particularly westerners, are considered “dry”.  They have little awareness of the feelings of others.

I recognize how supremely purifying a moment this is.  Separated from the group and free to be myself, the gods are making me a “wet” outsider, if only for this moment.

Being blessed, I give thanks and take my leave, returning to the world of people with difficulty (harder to descend than ascend, and I’m low on energy).

The incense is still smoking as I shamble past the wayside shrine (if I can truly love, even after the mark of the ghosts, then the world grows). Marked, purified.  Departure, return.

At the bottom of the ropeway station, at a food stand, the group is waiting for me.  Waiting for the next ferry.  I have just enough time to scarf down a deep bowl of steamy hot udon noodle soup.

Slurp.

K and I loaded up the chuck wagon full of yummy organic burgers and buns, homemade pickles, and a slab of onions and lettuces.  She grabbed the lager medicine and I seized on the cider muscle relaxant.  Then we rode on over to the folk’s ranch and got a charcoal grill going.  Hek-yeah, it’s burgerin’ time!

The day was in the high sixties, sunny, and no snow.  Perfect weather for an outdoors shindig and rap session with the clan.  The weekend had been a huge quest of doom which had made us a little unavailable on main and auxiliary power to the rest of the world.  I’ll write about that later.  For now, tasty food, delicious frosty beverages, and good company gossiping and chitchatting like a bunch of crows.  And crow does like a tasty snack with a little jibber-jabber.

While doing the burger meditation I had a chance to think about the change in the weather.  I smell spring, I feel it in my bones.  It just wants to burst forward like a spring coiled giant squid tentacle and seize the morsel of the now.  I can hardly contain myself at the excitement.  Spring within, spring without, all in balance.