Soul resides in place
October 12, 2010
“So, what is ~birch doing in San Francisco?” Carin, friend, roomie and food Priestess, asks me late Monday morning. I’ve just crawled out of her Harry Potter room, the closet beneath the stairs. It’s a weekend hangover of dancing and flirting with sharply defined, twenty-something queer men and a posse of worn and wildly dressed Burning Man decompressionists, laying myself across the laps of twelve party apostles scrunched into the after club homo-van service, heading to some unknown after hours house revelry, supporting my friend on E (I had but a taste) and walking home through Delores park only to smoke on the steps till five in the morning kind a’ morning.
What am I doing here? All I can answer is, is… that I finally have a gnostic feel for Alice in Wonderland.
Actually, the question irritates my inability to articulate the depth of what it means for me to be here. Here: inside the maelstrom of what I’m discovering is unquestionably one of the planet’s most vibrant of cities.
For most of the past month I’ve chosen the country mouse metaphor to euphemistically suggest what’s going on. “Visiting city cousins” wears thin. Truly, I live with and am surrounded by outstanding, extraordinary people deep in the offering of their every day. Most of the time, so far, I collapse into silence and observation. Not a bad place to be. Eventually, soon, I’ll need to cough up the goods.
So what am I doing here? How do I justify this dilettante demeanor, this Fool’s inquiry? Awkwardly, I answer with an “I’m writing, doing performance research, exploring the culture of health and healing within the HIV community.” Not sure how much of this I’m believing myself I have once again thrown my soul forward by saying what I’m going to do, hoping the rest of me will quickly catch up.
On a visit last year, Ed, my “You can rest when your dead” SF friend, stooped in a doorsill and pushed with all the might in his arms against its edges. “THIS IS YOU ON SALTSPRING!” he rasped, constipated-blue in the face. “THIS IS YOU IN SAN FRANCISCO!” As he stepped out into the room his arms effortlessly spread to the ceiling: “Your huge!”
I flashback to the memory of my mid-term Grade 2 report card: “While Robbie gets his work done quickly and done well enough, he is prone to day dreaming.” While my diligent young classmates finished their multiplication times tables, I regularly stared out the window of a non-descript, second floor mid-century schoolhouse and quietly quivered with excitement. Disappearing into a set of early 70’s headphones I placed the needle on a crackling 45” and was swept ‘away’ with Simon and Garfunkel crooning in my ear:
And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson
Jesus loves you more than you will know (Wo, wo, wo)
God bless you please, Mrs. Robinson
Heaven holds a place for those who pray
(Hey, hey, hey...hey, hey, hey)
Watching chem.-trails and swaying to childhood visions of treasured islands and mythic landscapes where the impossible becomes necessary, I dreamt of freedom.
Thriving in love, and untested skills withering, the decision arrived to step beyond the known privileges and comforts of Saltspring Island (SSI). Daily I eat out of our year long garden, walk country lanes with Raven our dog and my dog like loyal husband, Mark or swap harvest jams or last night’s potluck recipe with neighbors. Despite many everyday blessings I needed out and away. Not atypical of post-M.A. doldrums, I spent last year deliberating my life, smoking up and romancing Death as lover. The time had arrived to end the attempt to stare up my own ass.
Islanders call one another by their thing (ex. Dave the Blaster, Heather, the Bread Lady). I don’t have a named label there. Like my in-laws, few people know what I do. I’m pressed to describe my post-modernity. “Hi, I’m Robert, the more of a process-than-function kinda guy.” One day early August Chicken David shows me the new, illegally and beautifully built stone steps leading to the Fulford Harbor beach. “Did you know that after the big fire the San Francisco Opera House was built with SSI quarry?” Dazed, I stop and listen. Witches say that where two eco-systems meet magic occurs. David doesn’t know me and the little I know and appreciate about him is that he is a wonderful single father and for fun he gets stoned once a week and gyrates alone in front of a speaker. So, it was an on-alert moment when, while walking away from these large beautiful waterside steps he says, “Robert, sometimes you gotta go where you resonate, you know, find your frequency. Are you happy here?”
Done with pretending to be a 21 year old stoner, the decision making muscle finally went to rehab. I booked my ticket south. What would Mark, his parents, our neighbors think of me leaving? Using other people’s opinions of me as an excuse to not step up and out is futile. As one teacher often said, “It’s none of your business what people think of you.” I let that one in. I got out.
Just this week, a month after my departure and more adventures than I’ve made time to write about, I saw the movie HOWL. Set in a 1957 SF courtroom, the film depicts the life of Allen Ginsberg, his poem of the same name and the drama to overturn obscenity charges against the publisher. Two years earlier he had to decide to write his gritty gay poem/drama despite what his father would think. I wept. Only now do I realize that what I have mistaken as indifference from my in-laws was their own secret way of saying, “Do what you must. We won’t like it but we still want to like/love you. So just don’t tell us about it. OK?” Twelve years later I get it, I’m grateful, I’m here.
Wherever one lives is where one unfolds their personal mythos. Saltspring Island is a soulful, fantasy-like, future-now world. There, with my husband and two deliriously close witchy friends I feel deeply nourished by love, nature and high quality living. But like any Avalon, the beauty must get shared lest the magic fall deeper behind the mists. San Francisco is also a land of mist and mystery where, as Ed says, the Oracle greets us on every street corner. My inner myth needs a transfusion of city-stimuli.
I’m on a quest to mix these rural-urban magics. A month into the spell I feel naïve as audience, saturated in adventure, culturally immature and event daring; regressive and inspired; frightened and upset by joy alive as I weave my friend’s up-right bike, Mary Poppins-like, through city traffic.
Soul resides in place. Someone said that to me recently. Or I made it up. What it might mean is that in the spaces we fully occupy, when we sense ourselves as place, when the who and the where connects with the what of our offering, our vocatio, our soul’s calling, wakes up. Imagination activates the path of vision. That key, when in hand, finds the portal. Soul and desire vibrate with homing device accuracy. What we enjoy, no matter how challenging or complicated, somewhere has intrinsic value for others as well. Here’s my theory: when the confluence of identity, belonging and purpose merges with like-minded others and a deep sense of place soul reveals itself to the worlds. Many call it community.
We'd like to know a little bit about you for our files
We'd like to help you learn to help yourself
Look around you, all you see are sympathetic eyes
Stroll around the grounds until you feel at home
San Francisco is filled with intensity junkies. I feel at home and foreign. On Saltspring I also feel home and foreign. This paradox casts me deeper into the ritual. I am in my own rite of passage.
When Ed picked me up at the airport within minutes of arriving he reminded me that all new life begins with separation.
~fin~
………………………………………………………..
Howl
BY ALLEN GINSBERG
For Carl Solomon
I
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
for the full poem see: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=179381
