I leave the tracks and will follow the highway home instead. From Moab we go to Salt Lake City via the freeway. The first half of the drive is breathtaking as we skate along in the rising morning and see the silhouetted monuments of rock carve their precariously balanced shapes into the sea of the sky. We drive though plains of rock and brush where antelope and coyote scavenge, which slowly gives way to vegetation and hilly meadows. The oak paints autumn up and down the hills. That beauty and wholeness exist.

We take a sharp turn and begin weaving out of the valley. Up ahead, between the peace and stillness of the water-color slopes, is something enormous and fast-moving. I knew the road was a string leading to something big. I felt that as I watched it fall beneath the hood of the car.

I look up to see the god-white blades of turbines cutting through the land's blending serenity. Cutting a hole in the wholeness. Kaki notes that they have such an otherworldly quality. And we enter...

I become curious about this world. It disgusts me instantly, but I want to know where we are. What is this town powered by mountain coal and wind, that seems quaint at first until you realize that it is made of only housing developments? Kaki doesn't know. It seems important to know the name of the town right on the new side of the mountain, but soon I understand--this is not a town. The nameless place is also lifeless. It feels uncohesive and incomplete with no churches or schools or little shops, and no people to be seen. Only identical houses that eventually give way to large commercial buildings.

The lifelessness begins to flood, and there is no resurfacing. No air bubble even. Now, I sit here at the greyhound station trying to breathe deep and meditate, but I am drowning in memories and miles of development, of watching billboards spilling their toxic sludge into the diseased sea of suburbia.
 
When we broke through those hills, we broke though a dam and torpedoed ourselves out into the vast dead ocean of industrial everything; stark, vast civilization where linearity rules and meandering is poverty, slowness condemning.

"The faster, the better," proclaims the billboard for Lakeview Hospital around an LED number screen informing the highway that there is an 11 minute wait for the ER (as if that is useful in an emergency). The highway sign flashes "6 Minutes" to downtown Salt Lake, the entire way lined with bigbox, botox, and parking lots.

What is a desert?
There is more vitality in the sprawl of sand than suburb. This place is fracturing, deadening, dehumanizing, empty. The people are different--angry, confused, drowning. Drowning in themselves because all the signs inundate them with a message for "YOU" and try to convince YOU that YOU can have everything, be everything, and need everything, and that they are talking to YOU (whoever that is). 

Really, YOU are an industrial worker ant--a slave to the steel and concrete. Serving no queen, except that you are the queen and you serve yourself and grow fat in your chambers alone. That's what the billboards want.

As I sit on a wirey seat at the station writing, a woman on that phone yells and curses at someone on the other end. A man gestates to his invisible friend in the air, and has an argument with the emptiness. A couple fights, take a break outside for a cigarette, and comes back in fighting again. They stand together silent in a doorway. They stand together at every stop til Boise, angry and confused, wondering why it is so painful.
 
I remember that as we approached the station having left the freeway and the heart of downtown, we began to pass homeless people on the street by the dozen; factory-farmed and corralled into the carton labelled Salvation Army, and shipped to the "run-down" part of the city. Chloe says it first, but she quickly take it back--"Not 'run-down' but..." "Older" Kaki says. "Yea."

Visualize abundance. Embody positive vision. How you see the world outside is how you are inside. Right? But does that change the outside?

I put my feet on the floor next to the wire seats. The yelling and gesticulating angrily and argument continue. My mind is swimming in the depths.

I close my eyes. I try to sink into a personal quiet. I slowly begin to imagine roots growing from the bottom of my feet, down and through the concrete floor, cracking it open, finding the earth, drawing down into the earth, down through the layers of sediment and stone and water and lava, down into the core, connecting me to the center.

Everything falls away except my roots, and the earth-made things, and the wish that I can hold this center and help heal the scars. That I can dive deep into the ocean, see it honestly, understand it, and not drown. That I can emerge and know the wholeness that is possible, the wholeness that exists. That I can hold it in myself.

I open my eyes. Everything's the same as before.

I feel better, but the woman and the man and the couple don't. What do I allow myself to feel? What do I allow myself to think? I feel deep confusion about the rift between the wholeness of my imaginings, and the wounded reality of the world. All around me is the consequence of exploitation, mass production, industrial manufacture of material, animals, people, everything. We are treated as though we are soulless. We treat the world as though it is soulless. It doesn't have to be that way.

I am getting better at seeing each person as a soul; imagining their heartbeat; imagining them broken down in tears; imagining what they love and why they live. It is helpful, but painful to look at sometimes. The man sweeping the greyhound floors day after day, the people at the ticket counter stressing over missing slips, the woman bossing her son around, telling him "No!" at every curious step to examine something new. His compliance. I want to put my hands on the shoulders of this child and tell him how much he is loved, his mom is just in pain too. I almost do as he walks passed me at one of the stops. The impulse nearly reaches my muscle-mind before he walks out of my reach. What would he think, anyway?

I remember we passed a prison on the highway. I knew we were passing a prison before I even saw it. It was all around me and I sensed it--the pain, the waste, the flat, empty colorlessness of the yard. When my eyes moved from one side of the barbed-wired, razor-wired fence to the other I saw really no difference. The people in the prison yard and the people in the parking lots all seemed equally incarcerated to me.

10/3/12

How do we free ourselves? How do we breathe?
The air bubble exists. You have to find it at the center and hold it at your center, and breathe into it and make it bigger. It is in compassion. It is in wonder. It is in turning pain into poetry. It is in seeing things wholly and honestly. It is in community. It is in forgiveness. It is in empathy. It is in you. It is in me.

It is ancient alchemy that created you--the fire we burns to remind ourselves.

My hand glides along your contours. We pretend that solid things are only that. But even the soft wind that kisses your cheek has a say in what the rocks say; even the trickle of water falling gently in your toes gets to decide the shape of the world. Call it erosion or the art of sculpture, these elements have something to say. And the fire churns out new earth from the earth that has always been, and the wind draws the heat away from the deep center of Earth's desire, into the center of our own. We pretend our hearts have coalesced into unchangeable shapes, but the fire always burns, and churns out new territory, and the breeze and the steam always have something to say about it.

In the moon light, dance, and let the shapes beneath you guide your movement. Place you clay hand firmly on the stone and find where it fits. The world offers itself to your imagination, to your body, to your truth. Trip and grip and wedge yourself into it, because the earth has messages that we can read, and we can write.


Me,
Fiery Furnace, Moab
9/30/12