Minds, Hearts and Sores

Santa Monica, March 2014

The mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it.
Sri Nisargadatta

I'm sorry, I could never keep my fingers off a sore.
Maggie the Cat, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof


That quote by an Indian wiseman/swami came to me over the last couple of days as I drove about the shitty, and I couldn't remember why until I realized that I had posted it along with some meandering prose prompted by the last time I'd seen a Confederate flag flying. That was March of 2014, in Santa Monica, and here's the post that went with it. Go back and read it, and be sure not to miss the comments.

I don't know what else to think about, to tell you the truth. Both my boys have asked me what I think of the whole thing that happened in Charleston. They have the swagger of the teenager, the rebellious I hate this country, don't you? need for affirmation, and I just don't know what to say.

Tear Down That Wall

Even a peacenik like me is riled up by what's happened in South Carolina. When is that state going to tear down that fucking Confederate Flag? Or when are WE going to tear down that flag?

I am, uncharacteristically, finding solace in rap.

Weekend Wrap-up

Despite being vaguely sick with a sore throat, a tingly head and weary heart, the show must go on. I traveled with Henry and Sophie out to Thousand Oaks in the Simi -- or was it Conejo -- Valley so that Henry could try out for a summer lacrosse league. I think it was Ronald Reagan country. After dropping him off at an enormous high school, I drove up and down long stretches of road, looking for a place to eat, and finally had to succumb to a McDonald's that was camouflaged like every other building in Thousand Oaks to look beige and at-one-with-the-environment even though the environment was vast tracts of stucco mansions and neighborhoods with names like Windsor Circle and Heather on the Moor with nary a flower out of place or even an iota of the urban grime that we're generally subject to in the city.  However, there was a truck in the parking lot of Mickey D's with a Confederate flag flying on the back, and while I don't want a repeat of the last time I noted a Confederate Flag flying from the back of a truck, I wondered if the same people who'd been to the beach at Santa Monica last month flying their rebellion were actually sitting inside on this Sunday, eating their Big Macs and being all American as you please. Because, you know, I want to pretend that it was a grand coincidence that I've seen this truck and this flag twice now in less than a month -- that People Who Love the Confederate Flag Yet Live in California are a rare breed and hopefully dying out. Yes, I'm perfectly aware that California is home to far worse types than those who fly Confederate flags on the back of their pick-ups, but humor me. How does the song go? From the mountains, to the prairies, to the oceans, white with foam... God bless America, land that I love? 

To tell you the truth, I'm not sure which is more American -- the flying of the flag in the anesthetized burbs or the growing legion of homeless people camping out around the corner from my home in the middle of the city.

Anyhoo.

I am, as I told you, sick with a sore throat, a tingly head and a weary heart.

What have ya'll been up to?

Incongruity

I hate to sully the pages of the blog with the photo above, but it struck me today that it's the perfect adornment for the mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it. Those words are Sri Nisargadatta's -- an Indian philosopher, spiritual teacher and guru, and they appeared in my inbox this morning. When the giant pick-up truck pulled into the parking space a couple spaces over from mine yesterday, I was sitting in the back seat of the car, reading. It was a glorious day in Santa Monica, a quintessential southern California day, and the beach was packed. I had sat in the sun too long the weekend before and gotten a nasty sunburn on my neck and shoulders, so I dropped Sophie and Mirtha off to walk and stretched out in the back seat with my book, the first of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City. When I looked up to muse about my life -- all its incongruities -- the Confederate flag fluttered into view, and I thought at first it was part of a movie shoot. I grew up in the south, and it's not an unfamiliar sight there -- flying stubbornly off of houses and trucks on the backroads of the country with all its menacing history, but on the shimmery coast of southern California, it's virtually unknown. You'll have to forgive my pious intake of breath. The beaches here are public -- the entire coastline is public -- and on a sunny winter day in Santa Monica, the variety of people out enjoying themselves is staggering. There are Latino families and aging surfers, middle-aged women in bikinis on roller-blades, RVs parked in handicapped spaces with stuffed animals hanging off of bumpers and old men in lawn chairs sitting on the roofs of cars. There are families of gods and goddesses, and eighty year old muscle men in tiny bikini shorts. There are tourists who stumble through the light, uncomprehending that this is where people actually live. I have never seen a Confederate flag flying, though, so I got out of the car, curious, and took a picture when I realized it was not a shoot but a real group of people. I confess to wondering what the two dark guys sitting on the concrete barrier where pavement turns to sand thought about it. Someone asked me later whether anyone had said anything, had been anything but passive. I told her that having grown up in the south, I wouldn't mess with those people, the type that fly Confederate flags, that they're mean, mean in the sense of stupidity, obdurate. There's something unfathomable about the obdurate, incongruous.

The mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it.

There's no but between abyss and heart, only a comma, a pause. I have much that is incongruous in my life right now, some of it unfolding here, much of it unbloggable.  I am at once holding the match, looking over my shoulder -- pause -- and a pile of ashes, smoldering. The Confederate flag -- pause --  blue skies and a rainbow of people, beating hearts, thump. Thump -- pause -- thump.