Language of Healing

1/10/19

Fear rushes headlong toward blame

When what you want is not going your way

Whether this be a five thousand dollar AC system

Or a truck with headlights that have gone missing

You seek not to accept, for this might break you

So you think, and in the shower you

Step, waking with thoughts of what positives you might write

This is where the experience of the experiment is most known

The worry is off in some corner, still here, but you do

Not acknowledge, do not invite him in, do not call his name

And the worry will sit in his place, away from you

This is a beginning. This is only the discipline of 11 days.

In this shower, the jets shoot toward the door

So you recreate bath house experience in Korea

You step in said door, and beg

(This is true prayer, true supplication)

Turn the water on and the cold hits and shocks

And the AC system that has supposed to heated the house

Seems nothing, for all that can be is the present, all that can be

Is the cold hair dripping, and you turn, braver than yesterday

Pray, let the spray hit your back and legs, pray and beg

And stay under that cold water for twenty seconds

A beginning, a way to shock the system into waking

An age old process that mimics the ways of Korean bathhouses:

Jim jill bang and mog yoke tang--hot pool to cold pool

To sauna, to charcoal bath, to rock paths, to eucalyptus rooms

And as you consider this, the morning begins, the thoughts come in

Presence drifts as you switch to hot water, a thought of

What is broken, what is blame, what is the beginning of the day

And maybe, in an old house with cracks and drafts

This is the way the heat should be, so you think

To turn the nozzle again to freezing before exiting the shower

This time the body is ready, and how strange the way skin works

For when the cold water hits hot skin, there is an immediate

Sensation of hotter heat, as if this hot somehow causes a quick reaction;

The same holds true when going from cold to hot

The hot water shocks the body cold in the first instant

Before gradually drifting into heat

To look at the skin, the so called biggest organ

To do research and to learn, to have faith in what Ta-Nehisi said

That his first blog was read by two people: him and his father

Your father is dead, yet his presence is what you carry, this

Air, this sense that is within and without, this breathing

This hot tea that takes the phlegm in the throat and washes it away

The Japanese that drink something like 12 cups a day

On average, here and there, the words will rise from the page

Without your doing, with you only as a vessel, but

This cannot happen if you do not sit, so write and read

And in this activity you will figure out who you are

Each day a new thought will come, a new spot, a way of connecting

And who knows what this will be, and you know

It will not be found without presence, without doing, without

You using the word it, knowing the first rule is specificity

Clarity, brevity, and meaning: the words of Frank Conroy

You err on a ship that drifts along the same ocean as brevity

Meaning is not always known until after the flow takes place

And sometimes what is constructed is constricted meaning

That what has been put up is forced, to take and make meaning

When there is none, or to twist the words of an author

The way countless professors and pundits have done, when

Asked what a story meant, I believe the old man said,

“Papa, writes with his heart. Not his head.”

Something along those lines. To be clear one must know what he is saying

Who his audience is and how he wants to affect them

At the moment, the temperature must be forty-seven, though this will not be known for sure until after this typing takes place and this, an example of when spirit cannot break through ego, most of this morning so far, save the shower’s freezing waters, the brushing of teeth, the praying and hugging of a dog, and the way the coffee tastes.

After:

Inside is different, the warmth of a blanket, cover of a couch

Sounds of the garage trucks far away

The pain in the shoulders seems to have subsided

Positive thoughts caring for the body

Years ago, twenty or more, there was a yoga class in Iowa City

Where the instructor said, “IF YOU have pain, breathe love to that part of the body.”

Thoughts stay somewhere inside the mind forever, without being categorized

The blood flows through the unfolded legs and some days are more literal than others

Maybe the elements, the sitting outside, the wind and cold

Maybe the forces of the universe are what drive spirit

And maybe when inside this cocoon that man has constructed

There is less room for expression, less room for spirit to speak through.

In that, there is the notion that ego knows how body should feel

With this there is the connection of how mind should feel

And this cannot but affect spirit. Though how far might you go?

This certainly cannot mean that one should brave the cold of Alaska

Or the heat of parts of Africa without trying to find shelter

Is there a balance in all of the ways we commune with nature?

Certainly there is a connection between white supremacy and

The control of our environment, the forcing of nature to suit our whims.

This is where language becomes important, where editing is necessary because there is a point to be made here, in that the way that the white man has always taken, look at the words taught to children: natural resources. The entire world is a resource rather than a field of communion, so the white man takes all that he wants for generation after generaTION AND THIS BECOMES THE NORM, THIS BECOMES THE SEPARATION, NOT THAT EVERYTHING WAS IN PERFECT ORDER OR MAN FROLICKED IN HARMONY WITH NATURE before this, but that there was a sense of working with rather than against, so how much more exacerbated does the control need to be before some might start to look and realize that in this there need to be change. This is the need for control. This is a great part of what has made and what is keeping us sick. Waste. The setting sun world. Here is the tricky part: the very sick are the ones that are glorified as being successes. The rich are the ones that create the messes in the name of prosperity. This is for what people strive, to be able to eat individually wrapped packets of hummus and have somebody else take their garbage somewhere else. I’m here to say that there is no somebody else and there is no somewhere else, yet in a setting sun world there are people who create waste and people who take it way.

This is an essay that must be considered. Take a look at the way Europeans came to take over the world, by plunder and destruction, by murder and enslavement, and one cannot help but connect this to the modern day thinking, to what is in the DNA. Then take a closer look at the United States and how in order to live with the cognitive dissonace of slavery the people had to put the slaves in a lower class and this continued into a way of looking at all black people. This exists in the minds of all colors, all people that live here. This is the poison that needs to be released. This is the fight and the way and the reason for why we are where we are. There is more than this, and it is not only this, of course, but this is a good beginning.

If people cannot respect the earth, they cannot respect themselves, and if you do not respect and love yourself, you must find others to be better than, ways to think that at least I’m not like him, and so on. It is this very separation that causes a snowball of pain and results in more separation, and those separate connect with others that are separate in order to feed off the egos and push their pain bodies against the pain bodies of those that they judge. The judged in turn try to connect with each other and use their egos to attack and they they run up against the same trap that those that have enforced white supremacy. There is the need to be right on both sides because this is where the ego thrives. The ego thrives in finding the wrong of others. The ego thrives in fighting. Yet there is a necessary fight. So how to do this without being attached to the anger and vitriol that can come with fighting. Language must be considered in all of this. It is the gift that separates us from the non cognitive animal kingdom, and the language must be one of healing