Wounded World

The son I never had is walking the hallways of high school.  Sweat smell of locker room wafts down the corridor.  Meat smell of the cafeteria seems soaked into walls.  This weighs him down.  More than the books full of words whose meaning eludes him.  More than afternoon detentions in an empty classroom, breathing the dust of old ideas.

The child I never gave birth to has a Nintendo in his brain.  Life unfolds before him drenched in color.  Lights too bright flicker and explode. Scene shifts snap snap.  Movement jerky and speeded up.  Hurled words lack roundness, inflection.

When this motherless boy stares up at the sky at night, he sees no miracles.  He sees airplanes and satellites, space debris, inert gasses, and light long dead, too remote to warm him.

The son I never held feels like he’s on fire.  He’s burning up but I can’t reach to rest my hand on his forehead.  Still he feels so alone, like a star separated from its galaxy.  Blazing alone in space.

This boy whose nightmares I never soothed is wrapped in a trench coat.  His heartbeat so loud beneath black canvas he’s sure it will give him away.  His breath like a great machine.  Boots click on linoleum.

The son I never had is stalking the hallways of high school, weapon cocked.  He’s opening fire, spraying the walls with his revenge fantasy.  Perfume of gunpowder soothes him.  Metallic clang of the lockers.  And the rifle’s report as it drowns the screaming, but he can’t tell if the screams come from inside or out.

Then people are lying on the ground, red running from holes that gape from foreheads, from chests.  There is another odor now, old as earth, and it feels like it will drown him.  This young man who never called me mother calls to me now.

He calls to me from the front page of the newspaper.  From the blue light of the television.  And people will ask, “Who mothered him?” and search for someone to blame.  They will not ask, who did not give him life, catch his snot, dry his tears.

The son I never had sinks to his knees, stares up at me.  The video game is almost over.  Just one more shot before all enemies are vanquished.  He wonders if I am finally proud.

###

Text, © Terry Wolverton, 2012

Photograph, © Yvonne M. Estrada, 2012

“…You will leave everything you love most: this is the arrow that the bow of exile  shoots first. You will know how salty  another's bread tastes and how hard it  is to ascend and descend  another's stairs…” — Dante, Divine Comedy, Paradiso XVII: 55-60

When did you first leave your home?

I tried to escape my mother’s womb; I wanted to break out early but the nurses made me wait, mother’s legs forced together, her body tied to the bed until the doctor was ready to do his work. Hours passed; she grew septic. I gave up trying to slip into the world through the red tunnel, thought instead to exit the same way I’d come in, as a stream of vapor, pure idea exiled to ether.

*

The word planet comes from the Greek planasthia—to wander. To wander derives from the Old English windan—to wind, to twist. In Middle Dutch, to twist also means to quarrel, and in Old English, twa means two.

*

I vacated my own body the first time my father’s fist came shuddering down on my cheek. I could not flee the crib, but could forsake inhabiting the cage of bone that held me breathless on the damp stretched sheet. I burrowed so deep inside the container of my skin that I escaped it. Once I’d tunneled deep enough, his blows could no longer reach me.

*

A state of division or separation may lead to strife, which can cause meaning to distort, to wrench and spin, until one’s body or mind begins to drift, to stray, to roam until one has ventured out so far that one cannot return. Thus does one become an exile.

*

I ran away from home when I was five, packing a straw basket with my hoarded treasures: a cheap porcelain figurine of Alice in Wonderland, a scarf the color of sky, a stone found by my grandfather on one of our walks, a fistful of saltines. I made my way to the schoolyard, sat at the concrete base of the flagpole, two blocks from my house, as far as I knew how to go alone.

*

One can become an exile from one’s country, forced to leave or choosing it. Or an exile from one’s family. From one’s cultural group. One can be exiled from oneself, so brutally split as to feel estranged in one’s own skin.

*

Then others left: Grandparents who moved to another city. Parents who’d nightly disappear into the dark environs of a bar. My stepfather moved in with his girlfriend. My mother went to California to ease her broken heart. Others came and went; I stayed, steadfast, unmoving, rooted to the spot.Still, pieces of the psyche began to drift.

*

Signs and symptoms of dissociative disorder include: feelings of detachment or estrangement from one’s self; inability to remember the past; confusion as to one’s own identity; feeling as though one is living in a dream; impulsive traveling or wandering away from home.

*

At twenty-one I tried to exit this world, swilling a bottle of stolen pills with cheap burgundy wine. I lay on my bed, waited for the nothing to take me. But God is a Trickster, closed the borders, would not let me go. I awoke in a place too small to contain my bloated hopes. Thus I moved to California to become an exile.

*

In one theory of the big bang, the universe is endlessly expanding. The floating galaxies with their masses of rock and fusions of gasses, those planets, whose very name means wanderer, drift forever, moving farther and farther from their source of heat and light.

*

On the streets of Los Angeles: unaccustomed heat. Blinding brightness. The swirl of indecipherable tongues. Desert winds that cleared the sky of industrial smog. Music rising up from car windows. I was different here: in my body, in my bones. In my brain. Exile in a city of exiles. I was born for a life of wandering. A planet fallen from its orbit. Spinning away from my origins, from the lexicon of my birth.

*

Not every exile is the same. Some have left their land of their own accord; others were forcibly removed. There are those who are motivated by a dream; there are those bent only on escape. One adopts the language of his new surroundings; another clings to her native tongue. Some never lose hope of returning from whence they came; others swear they will never go back.

*

To what are we connected now—those of us who have irretrievably left our homes? To whom or to what are we bound? Are we doomed to a lifelong nostalgia, to hunger for a taste we can no longer quite recall, a slant of light lost to us forever? There are so many of us now, untethered, drifting. Listening for a hint of music that has long since ceased to vibrate at its source.

###

Text, © Terry Wolverton, 2012

Photograph, © Yvonne M. Estrada, 2012

The core and the surface are essentially the same, Words making them seem different only to express appearance. If name be needed, wonder names them both: from wonder to wonder, existence opens. —Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

It begins with the nouns, their reification, which in the Latin means “thing-making.”  We make a thing by naming, by nouning it, pulling it out of the soup of the undifferentiated, setting it apart.  With nouns, we confer distinction.  Nouns ensure that the apple is discrete from the bowl in which it rests.

But what if this separateness is illusory?  Where is the word that can render the essential sameness of apple and bowl?

We grant ourselves the power to name. In naming myself I declare that I am not-you.  We huddle alone inside our names, as in dark houses on a moonless night.  Or seek out others who dwell in containers that look like ours, as if this signified connection.

Language was invented as a tool of discernment, evolving in increasing sophistication as discrimination becomes ever more refined.  Adjectives further enhance the specificity of nouns—a red apple is nothing like a green one, a Fuji is completely different than a Macintosh.  Adjectives particularize: My bowl holds an apple but your bowl is empty.

As a writer, my stock in trade is such discernment, sifting the lexicon with ever-greater precision, seeking the one word that could describe this and nothing else.  Perhaps this is why Harijiwan, my Kundalini Yoga teacher, prefers music to literature.  Notes do not cleave the ear; each sound opens one to the possibility of all sounds, carries us back to the origin of all sound, the cosmic tone.  The formless sound.  Music can evoke the state of wonder.  Whereas language is exclusionary—this and not that.  One could say the writer is in the business of separation.

The verbs are the aggressors, always doing, doing, doing.  There are so many words for doing.  I can wake or walk or work.  I can swim or swarm or simmer.  I can count, or crouch, or couple.  I can flutter or float, flounder or fishtail.  I can do something all the time.

But there is no smorgasbord of words for being.  I can only be or not be; without variety or precision.  Thus, language defines reality.  Where there is no vocabulary, we do not apprehend the possibilities.  What are the possibilities for being?

Verbs, in Indo-European languages, attempt to define our relationship to time.  Their tenses slice present from past, past from future, try to convince us there is such a thing as a linear pattern of events.  Causal, trackable, as if there were a logic to it.  If I tell you: tomorrow I simmered you will think I am confused, but I am not.   It is only that language is caught in the construct of time, and can’t imagine its way out of that paradigm.

Objects are nouns that are verbed upon by subjects.  The power imbalance is clear.  All over the world, people and things are made into objects so they can be verbed upon by others, predicated on the belief that some of us are born to be subjects, others objects.  One can be done to or acted upon.  One cannot be be’d upon.  We are all the subjects of our own sentences, but not everyone is given a voice.  And what is our role in the larger text?

Adverbs are said to answer questions: how, where, when?  How much, how often?  Was the object acted upon slowly or quickly?  Everywhere, or somewhere in particular?  Frequently, or only once in a while?  What do we know when these questions are finally answered?

It’s not only the structure of language.  There is the problem of different languages.  For example, the word chair in English refers to furniture, but in French it means “flesh”; mist is “water vapor” in English, but “manure” in German; sobre means “sober” in French, “above” in Portuguese and Spanish, but in Spanish it also means “envelope.” And there are words that seem to encode an entire cultural understanding: the Hawaiian ho’oponopono (a social gathering and healing process that combines the functions of a religious ceremony, group therapy, family counseling session, town hall meeting, and small-claims court.) Or the Thai sabsung (to slake an emotional or spiritual thirst, to be revitalized.) Or the Turkish sehirlilestiremediklerimizdensiniz (“You are one of those whom we couldn’t turn into a town-dweller.”) How can their contexts ever be translated?  How can we hope to communicate?

But we don’t have to travel to encounter lapses of comprehension.   There are plenty of misunderstandings closer to home.  One person says, “I love you,” and means, “I am here for you no matter what, throughout time and space; your well being is as important as my own.”  But another utters these same words, it might mean, “I am experiencing chemical sensations that make me want to touch you for a while, but I cannot say for how long.”

Even before birth, babies are prepared to communicate, to send and receive messages through movement and sensory response without the benefit of words.  Observation of twins in utero has uncovered body language including holding hands, kissing, playing, kicking and hitting each other.

Animals have a range of communication tools open to them, including vocalization and scent, along with body movement and gesture. Honeybees, for example, have a dance language.  It is theorized that certain body parts evolved in animals to enhance their ability to convey messages.  Moreover, such gestures are now understood to convey not a singular meaning, but a complex and subtle range of meanings depending on context.  A dog wagging its tail can mean playfulness or anxiety, relaxation or submissive placation.

Humans take great pride in the sophistication of our linguistic communication, but, increasingly, words are used not to build a bridge to meaning but to brew a storm of confusion.  The U.S. military in Vietnam had to “destroy the village in order to save it.”  Interrogators may use “physical persuasion” with terror suspects.  “Family values” are meant to enforce the morality of some families onto others.  Such obfuscation becomes so noxious one longs for a vast stretch of silence, an unending blankness to detoxify the ears and eyes.  Or to covet the ability of the bees to perform a tremble dance and thus signal that we’ve had enough.

Yet, the writer cannot be silent, cannot turn her back on these corrupted runes, their guttural soundings.  She must tool these broken signs, hone the twisted marks, tongue the blighted syllables, discern and particularize and separate for a lifetime of pages in the faint hope that if she cuts deep enough, she may make an opening, and through that opening something like wholeness may be perceived.

###

Text, © Terry Wolverton, 2012

Photograph, © Yvonne M. Estrada, 2012

Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others.   — Emma Goldman, “Patriotism: a Menace to Liberty,” Anarchism and Other Essays

After the events of September 11, 2001, after the planes dove from the sky like predatory birds and exploded two gleaming symbols of capitalism, after Lower Manhattan was blanketed in ash as from an unseasonable snow, after office workers plunged from high windows, and police and fireman were buried beneath collapsed towers, and sparrows were incinerated in flight, many people across this country began to display the American flag.  Hung from apartment windows, on front porches of suburban homes, sported on tee shirts and baseball caps and on the lapels of business suits, emblazoned on billboards and in newspaper ads for Ford dealers and stuffed crust pizza, the red, white and blue was everywhere.

Suddenly, patriotism was “what’s hot,” after being “what’s not” for decades.  Perhaps since the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Or the HUAC investigations of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s.  Since the televised images of civil rights marchers attacked by dogs and high pressure hoses.  Or the news photos of body bags shipped home from Vietnam.  But such disavowals were suddenly so yesterday.  The flag was once more in fashion.

Humans have been using flags for over 4000 years.  The earliest known flags were called vexilloids, constructed of metal or wooden poles with carvings on top.  Perhaps 2000 years ago, pieces of fabric were added to some vexilloids for decoration; eventually cloth became the preferred material.  Flags were borne into battle so that troops could distinguish friend from foe, enabling one to decide whom to shoot and whom to spare.  At one time flags were hand sewn from natural fibers—wool, linen, cotton, silk—but are now more likely to be mass produced, printed in bulk on synthetic, petroleum-based materials.  Away from the battlefield, the flag is a symbol of patriotism, asserting that the nation itself in some way embodies a moral standard or value.

***

I was in Spain with friends on that fateful Tuesday morning in September 2001, although in Barcelona it was already afternoon.  We’d arrived only the day before, and I’d been fussy and inconsolable all morning.  My friends and I were riding a city bus when a young man seated behind us tapped me on the shoulder and said, “You are Americans?”  I didn’t ask him how he’d guessed.  “Do you know what’s happened?”  He was listening to a Walkman, taking in the information as he almost simultaneously relayed it to us.  “A plane crashed into the World Trade Center.  Wait, they think another has gone into the Pentagon?  They’re not sure.”  The story was still unfolding; the news media were scrambling, knowing nothing for certain yet.  We hurried back to our hotel while another plane crashed into Tower 2.  We tuned to CNN; they were replaying the second New York attack by then, but we watched live feed as first the one tower, then the next began to crumble, as the cameraman wrestled with competing impulses to capture footage of the unimaginable disintegration or to run like hell to save his life.

The flag of Spain depicts three horizontal bands of red (top), yellow (double width), and red with the national coat of arms on the hoist side of the yellow band; the coat of arms includes the royal seal framed by the Pillars of Hercules.

I was touched by the sympathy my friends and I received from the Spaniards we encountered, from the clerk at our hotel who said, “I’m so sorry,” to the news vendor who sold me a copy of the Mirror when I was desperate to read an English-language account of the attacks.  Even the ticketing agent at Air France (we were stranded at the Paris airport due to cancelled flights) responded compassionately to our pleas that she find us a flight home.  It appeared that the people of many countries were united with us against the horror of these acts.  In the midst of this tragedy, I felt an opening, an opportunity, the possibility for something new, like the sudden awareness of a doorway one has never noticed before.

***

In the days that followed, the spin from our unelected President was that America had been attacked and “we” (whomever he believed he spoke for) would stop at nothing to defeat those who had declared war on us.  Listening to his dogged, stubborn cadences, I was heartsick.  Not only because of the television footage of two fiery crashes and the towers’ implosions that played over and over again.  Not only because I’d once had lunch with one of the women on American Airlines Flight 11, which had crashed into Tower 1.  Not only because my friends in Lower Manhattan were traumatized, displaced, and choking on toxic ash.  And not even only because I knew that life in the United States would never again be quite what it had been before.  I was heartsick because I saw that as a nation, in the declarations and actions of our leadership, we were refusing to walk through that just-opened portal into a new consciousness, were repudiating the opportunity to learn the lessons that might transform us and prevent a repetition of these events.

By the time my friends and I returned home to Los Angeles, a cultural shift had already been effected.  There was “us” and there was “them.”  We were good and they were evil.  To dispute this characterization was to risk being cast on the side of “them,” whose fate was avowed to be annihilation.  To suggest that—while no one would condone the act of hijacking a plane and its passengers and using it as a bomb to blow up an office building full of workers—people might have legitimate grievances against the United States that, too long ignored, might fester into acts of violent desperation was depicted as the height of apostasy.  To raise the possibility that making a serious commitment to redress their complaints would go further toward preventing another incident of this kind was depicted as nothing short of treason.

***

A publication by the U.S House of Representatives from 1977 explains the symbolism of our flag in this way: “The star is a symbol of the heavens and the divine goal to which man has aspired from time immemorial; the stripe is symbolic of the rays of light emanating from the sun.”  In the autumn of 2001, waving an American flag was meant to signal that one was on the side of righteousness.  As if those solar rays could dazzle us blind to our own part in this global drama.

A few progressives chose to display instead an earth flag, our planet spinning blue against a rainbow background, an assertion that we—all peoples, all nations—are in this together.  This unpopular sentiment was submersed in the tide of reflexive patriotism that swept the country.  I saw cars sporting multiple magnetic flags, as if quantity were the true measure of loyalty.  Stuck behind a slow-moving SUV with flags fluttering from every window, I quipped to a friend, “You just know he’s going to be a bad driver with that many flags on his car!”  I developed a special fondness for those wags who, months now after playoff season, had retrieved their gold and purple Lakers pennants and let them stream from their car windows.  “Go Lakers” made more sense to me in this circumstance than “Go America.”

***

The flag of Saudi Arabia is green, a traditional color in Islamic flags, with the Shahada or Muslim creed in large white Arabic script (translated as "There is no god but God; Muhammad is the Messenger of God") above a white horizontal saber (the tip points to the hoist side.)  It was learned that seventeen of the nineteen men involved in the hijackings on September 11 held Saudi passports.

Less than thirty days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the United States was bombing Afghanistan, backed by an alliance of primarily European states.  The current flag of Afghanistan has three equal vertical bands of black, red, and green, with a gold emblem centered on the red band; the emblem features a temple-like structure encircled by a wreath on the left and right.  Like the Saudi flag, it also contains the Shahada.  This flag was adopted in 2002 after the U.S. air war that toppled the Taliban, its ruling government.  Documented civilian casualties from the first six months of the air war was 3400.

***

As a child I was taught to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, standing straight beside my desk at school, one hand pressed tightly over my heart.  Morning after morning in my early elementary years, sheer repetition rendered just a blur of sound.  We memorized, declaimed the syllables, but never talked about the meaning.

The Pledge was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy for an event sponsored by National Education Association.  His original Pledge read: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” He’d wanted to include the word, 'equality,' but other members of his organization didn’t believe in equality for women and Negroes. In 1923 and 1924 the National Flag Conference, led by the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution, changed the words, “my Flag,” to “the Flag of the United States of America.” In 1954, the Knights of Columbus persuaded Congress to add the words, “under God.”  On June 25th, 2002, the 9th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals ruled that the Pledge of Allegiance is “unconstitutional” and cannot be recited in public schools because it contains the words “under God.”  Two years later, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the ruling based on an unrelated matter; the Court did not address the constitutionality of the Pledge.

At my high school graduation in 1972, the student body, all one thousand of us, refused to stand for the national anthem.  Children of the ‘50s and ‘60s, we’d come of age in a time of questioning.  We’d been taught that the right to question was an American value, one for which people had fought and died. We’d seen the red smears of then President Kennedy’s skull on the lap of Jackie’s tailored pink suit in Dallas, Martin Luther King’s brain matter seeping onto a balcony in Memphis.  We’d seen Bobby Kennedy crumpled in the hallway of a grand hotel in Los Angeles.  And the bodies of students shot by National Guardsmen on college campuses at Kent State and Jackson State.  We’d seen the naked girlchild, skin aflame with napalm, running down a road in Vietnam.  After such searing witness, had we not earned the right to question?

***

There are those in government who have seized upon the events of September 11, using this gruesome series of attacks as justification to detain and incarcerate hundreds or thousands of individuals—we do not know how many—in secret and without charge.  The United States Congress approved the Patriot Act, which gives the government expanded power to invade citizens’ privacy, imprison people without due process, and punish dissent.  In such times, we are told, one has no right to question.

On March 19, 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, despite the fact that there was no evidence of a link between the events of September 11 and that sovereign country. The flag of Iraq contains three equal horizontal bands of red, white, and black with three green five-pointed stars in a horizontal line centered in the white band. The phrase Allahu Akbar (God is Great) in green Arabic script—Allahu to the right of the middle star and Akbar to the left of the middle star—was added in January 1991 during the first Persian Gulf war.  As of June 6, 2008, 4,404 Americans have been killed in the conflict, with at least 30,143 wounded.  Estimates of Iraqi civilians killed since the 2003 invasion range from 92,000 to over 900,000.

***

What is my flag?  Red smears on a pink suit skirt.  Stretched blistered skin of a naked, running girl.  The blasted landscape of bombed out Afghanistan.  The ruined library of Baghdad.  Our blue planet wobbling in its fragile orbit.

And what is the flag of the silent dead of many nations who dwell beneath the dust and in the ash-laden air?  Fissured map of the globe, beneath which lies an unbroken field of shimmering light.

###

Text, © Terry Wolverton, 2012

Photograph, © Yvonne M. Estrada, 2012

The one who is not me.

Whose forebears journey from ghettos, through deserts, across oceans foreign to mine. Whose skin tone borrows different elements of rainbow. Whose nose is not shaped like mine. Whose tongue mouths syllables my own cannot form. Who dreams in another language. Who worships a false god.

One whose darkness falls as my light begins. Whose summer is my winter. Whose customs are inexplicable. Whose history is unknown to me. Whose eating habits I do not understand. Whose memories are not mine. Whose blood is not a match with mine. Whose family has moved into my neighborhood. Whose last name is unpronounceable.

One whose ancestors made war on mine. One with whom we are presently at war. One who looks like the one with whom we are presently at war. The one who cut me off on the freeway. The one I fear passing on the street. One who called me a name. One for whom I have names that etch the tongue like acid. One who has seen things I can scarcely imagine.

Whose political beliefs infuriate me. Whose values offend me. Whose influence is ruining this country. Whose way of life undermines all we stand for. Whose livelihood threatens mine. The one who took my job. Whose hunger might disrupt my comfort. Whose stench hangs in my nostrils all day. Whose face flashes on the TV screen. Whose eyes beseech and challenge mine. Whose sores I do not want to see.

The one whose wealth reduces me. Whose poverty indicts me. Whose beauty shames me. Whose ugliness disgusts me. Whose intelligence rebukes me. Whose stupidity astonishes me. Whose SUV I resent. One who drives on the wrong side of the road. Who drives too fast. Drives too slow. Who’s driving in front of me.

One who drinks too much. Whose abstention reproaches me. Whose gluttony sickens me. From whose gauntness I recoil. One who sticks a finger down the throat.

One who roots for the wrong team. Who has not read my favorite books. Whose music assaults my ears. Whose taste in fashion is ridiculous. Who shops at the wrong stores. Who pays too much for shoes. Who has no shoes. One who falls in with the wrong crowd. One who is friendless.

One who married too young. Who married too often. Who never got married. Who tried to marry the wrong gender. Whose sexual impulses scare me. Repulse me. Excite me. Whose morals appall me. The one upon whom decades have left their mark. The one as yet untouched by time.

Who has too many children. Who can’t have children. Who doesn’t like children. Who spoils the children terribly. Who neglects the children. Who overprotects the children. Who abuses children.

The one who is a nonbeliever. The one who begins the day with a cold shower. Who wears orange robes and chants in the streets. Who kisses the Torah. Who kneels on stone. Who faces east five times a day. Who lights a candle. Who prostrates before a statue. Who burns incense. Who sacrifices a chicken. Whose beads are cold and smooth beneath the fingertips. Who reads from the Bible. Who rises in darkness to pray. Whose prayers are answered, while mine fall on deaf ears:

God, drive the Other from the face of the earth.

The Other.

The one who mocks me in the silver mirror.

###

Text, © Terry Wolverton, 2012

Photograph, © Yvonne M. Estrada, 2012

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.  The earth was without form and void, and darkness was  upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving  over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.” —    The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version, Genesis 1-6

What if there is no beginning?  What if there is only energy, billions of infinitesimal sparks?  One vibratory field, one shared shimmering essence.  Undifferentiated, without borders or boundaries.  Timeless.  Eternal.  Ever and always.

But while there may be no beginning, there is change.  From this glittering field, consciousness arises, and with consciousness dawns perception. The once unbroken frequency now appears variably as “light” and “not light,” as brightness and dark.  Perception is itself an act of separation, implying the seer stands apart from the seen.

From perception is born a sensitivity to pattern, the repetition of variations.  This grasp of pattern leads to an apprehension of form, such as when one gazes into the night sky and imagines stars assembled into shapes.  These shapes we call constellations.  The Lion.  The Hunter.  The Bear.  We name them after things we know, and believe them real.  It is perception that imposes form, and with form comes the hunger for meaning.  Which in turn gives rise to definition.

Suddenly consciousness is preoccupied with what we are and what we are not, and the division between these states: being and not being.  Light is no longer the same as darkness. The mind learns classification and discernment.  We take these assessments to be real.  With the mind of separation, we construct our reality.

***

“And before him shall be gathered all the nations:  and he shall separate them one from another,  as a shepherd divideth his sheep from his goats.” —The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version, Matthew 25:32

Once land was whole.  The world was one continent and we all came from there.  Then skin stretched until it split and oceans oozed to fill the gaps, balm the bleeding edges.  Now who can tell me the distance between China and Uruguay?

Not a distance of miles but of perception.  We are we.  They are Other, a mystery we cannot penetrate and thus must fear.  Each of us our own continent, set adrift in a vast ocean.  Each our own solitary light, bobbing in unfathomable darkness.  How many times have I observed, Those people are from another planet!

***

“Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you shall be divided…” — The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version, Genesis 25: 23

The units are ever reducing.  Continents split into countries, riven by states and provinces, counties and cities, parcels and acreage, stay off my property.  Tribes splintered into clans, broken into nuclear families.  Family members now estranged, they never call.  Interest groups.  Identity politics.  Market niches.  And the walled territory of the individual.

And even within our Selves: Who among us hasn’t felt there was a piece missing?  A chink, a missing link.  Even the atom can be broken down: electrons and nucleus, in which nest protons and neutrons.  Is it the id or the ego gone awry?  The split-off personalities, the echoes of past lives?  We seek unity through performing dissection, a perverse attempt to make whole by taking apart.

***

“You shall be holy to me for I the Lord am holy and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine.” — The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version, Leviticus 20: 26

There was a time when we knew that the essence of God was everything and everywhere.  Nothing could be not God.  Therefore, we were God and we were everything and everyone and all was God.

Now the One who made us denies we are part of him.  Refuses the paternity test.  Casts us out.  We are orphans, clamorous to regain grace.

Now God becomes the sunderer, divvying up creation like candy after Halloween.  Dark from light. Chocolates from licorice. He from she.  Orchids from Brussels sprouts.  What’s good in me from what’s bad.  This God disarticulates the universe It’s made, pulls it apart bone by bone, tossing each to disparate corners. Our empty wrappers rattle in late afternoon wind.

***

“…Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand.” — The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version, Matthew 12:25

The body never forgets its severed limb.  Lost twins pine for their vanished cell mates.  The more we individuate, the more refined our discrimination, the more we yearn to reunite with all from which we find ourselves cut off.

Still, it is only a dream, this prolonged dismemberment.  Candy and bones.  Fissured map of the globe.  Lion.  Hunter.  Bear.  Time as a measure: before and after.  Only a dream being dreamed by an infinite mass of shimmering energy.  No beginning and no end.  Each particle indistinguishable from its whole.

Awaken and remember:

We are dream and dreamer

and we are shining.

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Text © Terry Wolverton, 2012

Photographs © Yvonne M. Estrada, 2012

Upon awakening, I am already fretting.  Before the curtains of my lids draw back, allow light to penetrate the retinae.  Worry works inside me before I can register the pale yellow of bedroom walls or hear conversations of birds beyond the window.

Sometimes I come to consciousness still clinging to the tail of some particular vexation, some not-quite-random selection from the perpetual list of disquiet—mortgage payments, lost love, real and imagined slights.  Other times my only evidence is tightness in my jaw, constriction in my chest.  Some mornings it is simply a dull ache in mood, as if I’ve awakened not into daylight but into shadow.

I’ve stopped setting my alarm to NPR.  Though I miss the grave but reassuring friendship of Cokie and Nina, I’ve lost the willingness to enter my day to the tune of body counts, political scandals, the latest epidemic, another species gone extinct.  Even with the speakers silent, radio waves still beam these warnings through our planet’s atmosphere. We are bombarded by frequencies of fear.

Still…

In the world beyond my window, a dog barks.  A rooster crows.  Children are pulled sleepily along sidewalks to school by their disheveled mothers.  Truck shifts gears to climb the hill.  Chainsaw whines.  Someone blasts rap music, bass turned high.

Beneath this surface layer of sound, there are others.  Wind stirs chimes.  Cedar waxwings broadcast their good news.  Sapote tree drops fruit onto back patio; it splatters, a pulp bomb.  The inexorable march of ants.  Imperceptible sighs as grass pushes skyward.  Deeper still, the roiling metal of earth’s core.

Deeper still into my own body.  Listen.  Soft bellows of lungs.  Faithful pulse keeps time.  Drip of enzymes into the duodenum.  Sparks of synapse crackle.

The music of everyday miracles persists as sun climbs sky.  But why do I hear—not chimes or birdsong—only dull drone of anxiety, neuronal radio tuned to cataclysm?

Why are not my arms outstretched to greet the day, instead of my jaw clenched to withstand it?  Why the heart curled into fist of dread?

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Text © Terry Wolverton, 2012

Photographs © Yvonne M. Estrada, 2012

Wounded World is a collection of linked lyric essays that examine how our social problems have their roots in spiritual disquiet. It often seems to me that only by shifting our spiritual perspective that these problems can be resolved.

The essays were written between 2005 and 2010. They were inspired by my meditation practice and my experience as a student and teacher of Kundalini Yoga and meditation, as well as a 2006 trip to Amritsar and Rishikesh, India that was made possible by a COLA grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

The collection was originally conceived of as a text work, but I was inspired by the photography of Yvonne M. Estrada, who so graciously agreed to have her images included here.

This blog is an experiment in publication and marketing. By publishing these essays in a serial fashion first, I hope to get comments and feedback that will influence the eventual publication as a book and an e-book.  I'm very interested in using new technologies to engage readers, and I am grateful for your attention and participation.

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Text © Terry Wolverton, 2012

Photographs © Yvonne M. Estrada, 2012