What is Psoas?

Psoas is not only a material link between the dense body, instinctual motivations, the limbic system, the sensuous connection between the upper and lower body, but a process linking the animal and the spirit body.

Based on a personal history as a medical professional and somatic practitioner with background in martial and contemplative practices, these comments are long overdue. Liz Koch is bringing fresh clarity and innovation to this tradition as she breaks new ground in understanding integral structure and function: the body as process.

The story of every body is written in an ever-refreshing pixelated environment, an ocean of shifting light and motion, multitudes of biochemical gates constantly opening and closing. There is no permanent story. There is only a whirlwind of accumulation, adaptation and shedding around a seemingly constant and ever-mysterious core of sentience, practice, and belief, processing, light undergoing re-creation, temporarily held in a limbo of semi-existence, and constantly evolving.

Discovering and living in that core intelligence is to live on the ground, I daresay in the ground, to live in oneself in a deeper way than most of us know or imagine. It is also to redefine the meaning of self as well as relationship. There is also a superimposed cultured body, the body shaped not only by ontogeny, physical development and the family milieu, but also by the philosophies, commercial, social and political practices of modernity which objectify the body as we become removed from the fundamental nature of humanity as beings worlding the world.

Being conditioned to cultivate a subjective self while objectifying the body is to become lost, to remain in the world but not of the world. This is an ongoing ‘decontexualization’ separating us from the most intimate internal process, and thus also from the larger milieu, distorting a conscious interactive fluid sense of being and place. To be more precise, real embodiment, according to Koch, is to reconnect with the animal body, animal knowing, the subjective experience of being and becoming ourselves and the world, and of being created by the world. It is to shift from the world as object to the world as subject, which is to approach the dissolution of Other.

For Koch, psoas is a sense organ, though conventional western anatomy considers it a muscle. Its function is a material path to orienting our somato-emotional experience, awakening this subjectivity, which is a deeply enlightening and enlivening path. It is the perceptual vehicle not only of descent into core experience, but of the material connection between the energetics of grounding, our connection to the earth, response-ability to place and self and the felt sense of integrity. It also transmits the ascending character of spontaneous (rather than calculated) presence, the energetics of a whole being responding to gravity in a restorative way and moving from a living center, immersed in a continuous flow of feeling, creativity and intuitive connection to dynamic possibility. Except that arriving at this quality of integrity also undermines our habits of creating and perceiving Others. This is a profoundly awakening experience. 

Psoas (I hesitate to objectify it by calling it ‘the’ psoas) is not only a material link between the dense body, instinctual motivations, the limbic system, the sensuous connection between the upper and lower body, but a process linking the animal and the spirit body. Rationality remains an essential function meditating instinctual motivations, functioning to connect the limbic system and the animal brain with the fulfillment of spiritual aspirations, the activity of the cortex, bridging the experience of the world as it is and the motivations and formulations defining the pursuit of a fulfilling path.

In a dry anatomy lab, medical students learn the physical location and quality of psoas as a pair of structures and connective tissues along the back wall of the abdomen arising from and adjacent to the spine, stretching from the lower ribs, traversing the transitional curves of the spine, through the pelvis all the way into the hip. And in that inert context, it mechanical functions can be defined according to its geometry and power dynamics.

But in the living state, the muscular and connective tissue relations of psoas include intimate communication with the rhythmic rising and settling of the diaphragm, the stabilizing fascia of the lower spine, reaching around the abdominal wall to the crest of the pelvis, down through the pelvic organs and through the hammock of muscle stretching across the pelvic floor to finally embed itself as a subtle but powerful primary mobilizer of the hip. Normal psoas is related to the aliveness of the muscular hammock spanning coccyx to pubis, mediating generative relations to the earth and the sky, the gross and the subtle, the energetic, the electro-magnetic, the physical and the metaphysical, taking and giving away, becoming, arising and disappearing.

From an evolutionary view, homo erectus undergoes a lengthening of the psoas to permit a fully upright posture. The unfolding of these events is still fraught with limited or distorted function. Many bodies, formed as they are by culture, bodies of every ethnicity and race, remain in conflict with themselves regarding the interaction of psoas, the abdominal muscles and the powerful erectors of the spine. Distortions of the poses may have antecedents in the earliest experiences of life and trauma of every variety. It’s a delicate balance rendered there, easily descending into either torsion, rigidity or collapse. We’ve all seen it and most of us know it. But in the best of worlds, psoas mediates a responsive attention and motility in a body that doesn’t need to adopt complex compensatory and increasingly rigid patterns to marshal its reserves or experience its own capacities.  

What we know and see and feel in western culture is the image-making apparatus set to convince us of the dominance of more superficial musculature of the trunk: spinal erectors and the abdominal wall. We internalize the messaging of the patriarchy in the ways we present ourselves to others, in how we move and respond to the murmuring of emotion in our social relations, in how we exercise, fortify and protect ourselves against what we perceive as a competitive and even perpetually threatening world. The externalized conflict is expressed as superficiality, as progressive dissociation from lived experience, as the disconnection we have wrought upon ourselves in pursuit of the ideals and ideology of individuation, independence, competition, dominance, and our profoundly mistaken reliance on purely rational approaches to ‘problems.’ 

White privilege is a field of action permitting–even demanding– we get away with denying the wild, the erotic, the darkly and brightly creative, the subtle sensuality and continuous effervescence of the sacred. Re-sacralizing—or restoring a capacity to process experience more fully involves a literal re-centering of our attention to a different locus, a different viewpoint not so much about who we are but what we are. That locus is the energy center known by the Chinese as dantien, by the Japanese as hara, the Hindus as the swadisthana chakra. These words all refer to roughly the same thing: the source of power or intuition, the creative center of subjectivity, Koch’s ‘core awareness,’ a self-balancing, self-generating healing and restorative source, the descent into ancient wisdom, the alchemical cauldron that is the fluid, in its most primal function, keystone of human structure, the sacrum.

The systemic legacy of colonialism is white supremacy. We’ve witnessed the postures and behaviors of white supremacy in the most graphic forms and countless images of people of color being brutalized and killed. But that is a mere whisper of the deep and long history of dominance expressed in the movements, gestures, tonalities and finalities embedded in cultured white and black bodies. The non-verbal micro-rituals defining power, the learned gestures of deference and submission, the careful constraint of expression, the rigid hierarchies deciding who and when one may be permitted to assume one’s full stature, to fully inhabit one’s generative and creative integrity, to give voice to intrinsic intelligence beyond intellect. 

Historically marginalized people who assume their full stature (whether standing or kneeling) may be perceived as a threat to the prevailing power structures. The full access and activation of the muscles connecting the animal body to the soul, one’s relationship to the midline, the feet firmly planted, the unflinching gaze, the voice firm and direct–that quality of definitive physical presence without rigidity, aggression or retreat, unimpeachable moral certitude clearly speaking unassailable truth, that expression of intrinsic power communicates an integrity and expressive capacity that directly threatens the systemic barriers devoted to keeping those qualities of awareness and fearlessness from spilling out into the wilds beyond the limiting corrals of truth defined by whiteness. Those entirely conditioned in the epistemologies of whiteness cannot even comprehend such a thing. It’s immediately triggering to the hyper-defended identity of whiteness. 

Women are particularly subjected to those constraints as Susan Griffin articulates so well in her book of essays, The Eros of Everyday Life. We live under a tyranny of abstract thought at the expense of feminine life force. Women continue to be deemed inferior because they cannot be objective, because they typically live closer to the cycles of life and death than men, because they swim in a hormonal soup of creative eroticism, because they are subject to the turbulent and unpredictable, uncontainable currents of emotion or maybe they live somewhere beyond the fortress of rationality in which white patriarchy hunkers down. Historically, even the inclination of the pelvis was regarded as evidence enough of female inferiority. How much further from an authentic comprehension of biology, sensuality and erotic vitality could that possibly be?

The body is and continues to be a key battleground in this era of late-stage capitalism and the deconstruction of the legacies of modernity, supremacy and domination. It’s a long and complex journey. And we may not have as much time as we think to recover the animal within. But the closer we look, the more we will find our true selves there.

What is a White Body?

Just as external ecologies have been transformed, disrupted, or wiped out altogether, our internal ecologies have been tamed, altered and subjugated to conform to ideology (and the dominant narrative) rather than biology.

Most of the conversation (if we could even call it that) about race in America centers on identity, the most superficial designation. Then we talk about whiteness and blackness, imagining characteristics of those identities, drawing ever finer distinctions between ethnicities, behaviors, modes of thought, rituals, treating them as if they’re intrinsic–ontogenetic. When we speak of yet another proposition– white bodies– the conversation hardly ever touches the truth. Whiteness is a construct, nothing quite as fixed as it seems. We’re talking about conditioned bodies, bodies manufactured by culture. 

Part of what white-skinned people have been conditioned to become–at least in America and most likely everywhere else– starting more than a handful of centuries ago, along with scientific materialism and the supremacy of epistemology over ontogenetics, relies on subjugating intrinsic wildness. Just as external ecologies have been transformed, disrupted, or wiped out altogether, our internal ecologies have been tamed, altered and subjugated to conform to ideology rather than biology. Manifesting whiteness in the world, the expression of whiteness, has become, with the rise of colonialism, capitalism and Puritanical Protestantism, the exercise of that supremacy over every form of wilderness, including land, people and especially the untamed within. Whiteness is trained since birth to be the face of modernity in that body, as a body. It’s almost entirely unconscious because we have so few (and rapidly disappearing) alternative models. 

By inference, there is also a corresponding Black body, not necessarily the intrinsic Black body or the indigenous body, but the black and white bodies undergoing perpetual remodeling by the culture, the culture whose structures and hierarchies of authority and validity seek a monoculture of conformity to the essential structure of the slave ship and the plantation.

White skinned bodies have been cultured by modernity to hold, move, express or deny themselves in particular ways, forging psycho-emotional armor, all of it entangling the prevailing definitions of authenticity, dominance and power relations, somatizing the source code, if you will, defining the internal relations, rationalizations and compartmentalization necessary to maintain the social structure. Likewise, black (and other ethnic) bodies are also cultured to aspire to that model of whiteness, entrained to a different source code (locking them outside the ramparts of white supremacy and privilege) to disconnect and so far as possible immunize themselves from the legacy of their own trauma (in the same ways white-skinned people are conditioned to immunize themselves from the trauma of racism and genocide), the experience of forced submission and every possible form of loss, passed down through many generations—to aspire to transcendence and at the same time to internalize the submission.

This is the systemic duplicity of whiteness that continues to be visited upon non-white people (with police as the enforcement arm), sustaining the presumption to define and hold an aspirational standard which is then, by a thousand cuts, rendered unattainable. In psychology this would be the classical definition of schizogenesis. The cultured body, regardless of color, conforms to different social expectations, behaviors, responses, modes of expression, movements, postures and even patterns of attention to make its way in the world. The character of that entire assemblage is conditioned in a multitude of subtle and not so subtle ways in schools, the workplace, by the institutions of governance, in the hallways, C-suites and interior spaces that define law, public character and acceptable social behavior. 

Liz Koch describes the cultured body (regardless of race) as the balletic pose, the military stance or, I might add, the hyper-tensive image of the tightly wound gym rat whose abdominals scream defensive aggression, as the body modeling power over. An image that springs to mind is all the CEOs of the oil majors standing side by side with their right hands raised as they take an oath before testifying to Congress (this week!), the disembodiment of the tucked-in gut, insulated by the protective paunch, the shallow breathing, the clenched jaw and the taut pelvic floor. We know they’re going to lie. They know they’re going to lie. And they fully expect to get away with it, just as they have for decades. There will not be an ounce of authenticity to it. That’s patriarchy. That’s whiteness. 

Along the way, those expectations and behaviors become conditioned in the flesh, even from childhood, as boys are taught to ‘be a man’ and girls are subtly steered away from authentic expression. These patterns become embedded in the character and communication within the physical structure itself. They are reflected in the windings and asymmetries of physiology and movement. The history is in the flesh, in neuro-muscular patterns, conditioned sensitivities and in the storms of neuro-transmitter release. The body tells the tale. The body speaks its mind. We are consciousness as structure. These patterns form the corral of embodied modernity, the colonized body expressing and perpetuating itself in qualitative patterns of attention, what we notice, the creeping (and creepy) narcissism of what we feel and what we do with all of it. 

There’s a great deal I agree with about Liz Koch’s understanding of whiteness in the body, but I think the historical context could be expanded, going back to the 15th-16th centuries or even earlier: the extreme greed cloaked in religiosity, Church-sanctioned genocide for the glory of God’s Kingdom, the integral nature of capitalism, racism and the Church. The denial of the flesh and mostly the denial of the feminine, the ascent of rationality, the glorification of abstract thought, intellect, and the separation from nature are all included. The roots of whiteness run deep, even into the conformities of the microbiome, what we regard as legitimate sources of knowledge, how we understand human development, what we define as sanity. They also run deeply into the flesh, into our bones, our diverted, co-opted and contorted values entrained and reified by the state, fueling the disparities and polarities of our time, now even threatening our very fertility. 

Chimerica

In America, the chimera is no longer a quiescent aberration, a deep and nagging sense of unfulfilled ideals weighing down every initiative attempting to bring those ideals closer to reality. America has become the chimera to its people, to other nations, to the planet itself.

The chimera is a mythical creature depicted in dozens of ancient cultures. It typically is a combination of characteristics of multiple animals, like a scorpion’s tail with a porcupine’s dangerous quills–and maybe bat wings. It could be part eagle, part leopard or a multi-headed beast as described in the Book of Revelations. It might be combination lion and goat or a fire-breathing dragon with a snake’s head at the end of its tail. It might even have tentacles like an octopus. The mythological horse, Pegasus, one of the most widely known mythic creatures, ridden by Bellerephon, battled and defeated a chimera. The Buddhist garuda is a chimera.

The point is, they are all fantastic, dazzling, imaginative and implausible. And scary. They are monsters, wild, contradictory in their visual character and confounding in their implications. Are they wise or dangerous? What is the message they bring with their presence? Do they bring any comfort? Is their sole purpose to comfort the afflicted or–you know, like journalists doing their jobs, afflict the comfortable? Is there any shred of benevolence in them or is their only function to shock and confuse us, to remind us of the depth, complexity and the power of the unseen, the omnipresent and occasionally explosive contradictions humans carry: our capacity for strength, perseverance and nobility, courage and righteousness contrasted with bursts of violence in all its many forms, always carrying a subliminal threat of a poisonous sting, or our capacity for monstrous hypocrisy and fraud?

Since America is turning so many different faces to the world simultaneously, reflecting the conflicts raging within, exhibiting the sharp divisions, the social and economic decline, the descent into warring spasms of rhetorical gas, rising brinksmanship, burning its way through saplings of truth on the forest floor, scorching its way through the previously armored but suddenly vulnerable old-growth giants of science and evidence-based reality, snapping the stinging tail of backlash, transforming social discourse into a cacophony of Babel, America is now a chimera. In America, the chimera is no longer a quiescent aberration, a deep and nagging sense of unfulfilled ideals weighing down every initiative attempting to bring those ideals closer to reality. America has become the chimera to its people, to other nations, to the planet itself. Which of its animistic tendencies and talents will manifest next? Which will dominate and determine not only our own future but the future of the wider world?

Attempting to reconcile its most aggressive and nurturing energies, America’s foundation of democratic ideals, its aspirations toward egalitarianism, its shining successes with its belligerence, hubris, rhetorical duplicity, its blistering and bloody failures, the contrast between forging a new role for governance on behalf of all people versus a zero-sum economic regime tilted entirely toward wealth at the expense of all else, the radical divide has never been deeper or louder or more obvious. The multi-headed beast is tearing itself apart as it is beset with challenges as never before, at moments showing exemplary generosity, at others breathing fire at friends, foes and its own people, struggling to sustain a facade of competence, solvency, invincibility, economic dominance, unity and political relevance.

The term Chimerica was originally coined (unwittingly?) to refer to the mutual economic dependence between China and America in matters of trade and global finance. It was not intended to refer to a monster whose diverse capacities would keep us guessing which of its demonic energies might next be unleashed. While China’s dependence on America may be declining, bringing the Chimerican condition to a close, we’re witnessing an American transformation into a chimeric version of itself which is an increasing threat to the safety of all. Deliberately prolonging the pandemic, guns and gun violence, economic disparity, racism, a barely functioning justice system (whose legitimacy is falling like sand through our fingers), the surveillance state, remote control warfare, and above all, climate misinformation, disinformation and denial—these are the multivariant threats Chimerica has become.

With regard to China itself, the economic, political, territorial and ideological divergence is deepening. The sabres barely remain in their scabbards. I’m not an apologist for China. The regimentation, uniformity and compliance required of Chinese citizens is becoming increasingly intrusive and pervasive. The limits on individuality and free expression are closing in. What China has done to the Uyghurs is a testament that there are no limits to their willingness to destroy divergence.

The strategy, depth and manner of Chinese economic hegemony throughout Asia and in the developing world, their relentless pursuit of their own self-interest regardless of any principle other than to extend and deepen that influence are unprecedented. And at home, for generations now, the Party has instilled an intense nationalism and pride throughout the nation. Picture the way Americans were acting throughout the world not long after WWII, feeling our oats in obnoxious and overbearing displays throughout the world. That’s China now, only more intense, with a more enlightened and strategic vision, careful, but determined to overcome any obstruction.

What I have never heard admitted by any American pundit or historian is a name for what’s happening here. It’s not mere opposition to America per se. It’s de-westernization, a de-linking from the western idea of modernity, from western economic influence, from western finance determining the rules of the game, from western ideas of self-determination (its own form of economic hegemony). While the United States has 700 military bases throughout the world, China has diplomats, technicians, engineers, development banks, consultants and political strategists blanketing Asia, South America & Africa.

China is embedding itself in 1000 different places, building massive infrastructure projects, cleverly currying favor and dependence, and conveying the message that the time of Western determination of the rules is over. Modernity in the image of the West is over. Not that that in itself is a good thing. It’s colonization in a different form. It’s still the Perpetual Growth Imperative, just not defined by Wall Street. Economic hegemony is undergoing a shift from West to East. China is so far ahead of the United States in this regard, it’s making the United States look like its feet are embedded in cement.

The original meaning of Chimerica may be on its death bed. I’m not really suggesting that economic negotiation and mutual dependency are already a thing of the past. But de-coupling is surely underway. De-westernization is taking hold in the world, promoted and financed by China, and among the biggest factors turning America into a multi-headed, multi-species, unpredictable, fire breathing dragon of its own, and getting backed into an economic corner. With all its might, the United States is no longer Pegasus. It’s much more likely to be using Pegasus to spy on you. The hollowness of “We’re number One,” is only going to become increasingly obvious. What happens when something that dangerous feels threatened?

The options are narrowing. There will come a time when China, determining the time, the place and the way it will assert itself, will take steps the US government will regard as aggressive. The United States will be tested. It will talk about safety. It will say the ‘American Way of Life’ is not negotiable or that ‘commitments’ to our ‘friends’ are not negotiable. But in Chimerica, the difference between war and peace is already blurring as industrial espionage, cyber warfare, disinformation campaigns and self serving social media become more intense, amoral and the stakes continue to rise. So also the distinction between safe and unsafe will get so muddy as to become indefinable. The chimera is America’s shadow. Because we are ignoring the world, forgotten our ideals and not lived up to our promise, China is going to bring out the beast in us.

Parallel Lives

Those other lives–are they from the past or future?–hover about me, weaving themselves into my consciousness intermittently, reminding me of the true dimensions and the nonlinear nature of reality. At times they help me realize the choices I’ve made in this life are made of the same stuff as the roads not taken.

From time to time, I could be idly musing, even concentrating on something, writing, listening to music, lying awake in bed or simply staring out my window and I am transported into another dimension, another life, a waking dream, a parallel life. I can indulge it, be distracted by it, be transported into wild fantasies, imagining a small but fateful alteration in a choice made long ago. I can spin it all into a shining and novel journey, the golden thread of an entirely different life leading to an entirely different now. A small course correction on a long journey, after all, can take you far from where you thought you were going.

We have the capacity to invent such possibilities, spin dramas and tell stories to ourselves that may appear to have no immediate benefit whatsoever. Then again, what about scenarios that feed back into this life in a beneficial way? How do they do that and what are the benefits? How many alternate lives have you imagined? What’s different about them from the one you’re living now? Who would you be if you had made one of those choices? Are there recurrent themes? That’s the appeal, isn’t it? Wondering about all the permutations of taking a different path from the one you find yourself on now? Maybe they come with more appealing outcomes. I mean, really, we all do contain multitudes, do we not?

I remember the cover from one of my all-time favorite albums, In a Wild Sanctuary, by Beaver and Krause, circa 1970. It’s a classic instrumental, and seminal for the genre. It included something I’d never heard anyone else do–and few have done since (except perhaps by simulation), other than Bernie Krause himself. He became a doctor of bioacoustics and spent his life recording sounds of the natural world, a forest, an ocean shore, wildlife, insect life, pond life, and turned it into music.

The original album cover was MC Escher’s print, Three Worlds. The point, I think, is that we don’t just live in one world. We are living in multiple worlds simultaneously, a timeless cloud of energies, perhaps even living multiple lives in parallel–or at least I am–and from time to time journeying into them, encountering myself in them and deriving a multiplicity of benefits from doing so.

Three Worlds, MC Escher.

Music is the vehicle of choice for me. Something about hearing an attenuated note dancing all the way to the edge of space, hearing a bass line erupting from beneath the ground, creativity utterly destroying predictability, screaming high notes ripping emotion from my chest, harmonies suggesting poignant intimacies even mimicking biology, lyrics awakening forgotten longings, buried images, synthesizing cultures and histories, awakening body memory, evoking lives un-lived, sending me far into the past or future. They become more compelling than anything else I could do.

As I catalog some of those lives, even trying to say what they are out loud or at least to myself, a theme emerges. I don’t fantasize about power. I am neither the occupant of the C-suite nor am I the attendant. I seek neither notoriety, adulation nor wealth. I am not a scientist or an academic. What I am is an artist…in almost all cases, a driven creative devoted to the art, whether it be music itself, poetics, monastic life, physical arts, ancient wisdom or the hieroglyphics of the future. An intrepid pilgrim journeying into the essential nature of things. Those other lives–are they from the past or future?–hover about me, weaving themselves into my consciousness intermittently, reminding me of the true dimensions and the nonlinear nature of reality. At times they help me realize the choices I’ve made in this life are made of the same stuff as the roads not taken. In this life, I become their channel. They interrupt me from time to time; they inspire me, overtake me.

Why is music relevant here? Because, as David Abram’s elucidated so well in The Spell of the Sensuous, the primal origins of language reside in the sounds of the natural world itself. The original words, the alphabet itself, might have been mimicry, imitating the sounds of the more than human world. I’m pretty sure it’s safe to say all music derives from the same thing. All instruments were once organic. So the evolution of language and music are rooted directly in the original sources of sound. And parenthetically, those sounds are disappearing . Most of what we hear now is anthropogenic sound, not unlike urban lights blotting out the stars. So music can take us down and in, way down into the thrumming, screeching, buzzing, breath-taking, expiring, creeping cackles and calls of the underworld, into the earth itself and the earth within.

Where was I going with all that? Oh yeah. I was going into the choices we make about which life we shall live. The rest of the chorus we bring along may be obscured, but my fantasies of alternate lives remain as repositories and reflections of whatever wisdom I may have gained and as consultants to this life, feeding that wisdom back to me. They are never fully silenced. Nothing we do can negate our imagination nor diminish the aspirations flowing between this material reality and any alternate scenario, nor the internal communication arising as a momentary pre-occupation with a more spacious possibility.

And anyway, all lives, if we are fortunate, lead to the same end, do they not? At least in the best of worlds they would. Every one of us would become the sum of that assemblage, deriving something of value from each, embodying a clear vision, unwavering passion and a pristine integrity of purpose. We would each have found our true voice and learned to act and speak as a channel for all the accumulated wisdom of multiple lives, past and future, accompanying and feeding us in pursuit of our unique version of being exactly what we are and nothing else. We would all enter tantric mind, the vast view of unlimited and unrestrained compassion and ever-flowing mercy, soaring and drifting like a condor, adapting, adjusting course with minimal effort on the shifting updrafts, surveying the landscape below, resting in the nature of mind, in the cracks between the lives we live and lives un-lived.

Our other possible lives are songs we are still composing, dances of memory recalling our primal nature. We can sing them to ourselves as we add chapters to this unfolding mystery, even as the great silence of our own doing descends upon this world. We can access our own dreams, ever pregnant and ever in labor, energies across time, across generations, a time-release of wisdom fueling this life, gently inching forward toward ultimate knowing.

The Inner Commons

Fortunately, attention is not a commodity to be plundered like a vein of raw material. It’s a renewable resource whose value never diminishes. The domain of the inner commons is where precious resources may be buried but not tarnished.

I’ve long thought we should all be compensated by social media for our contributions to their bottom line. Considering they regard my digital activity as a commodity to be harvested, I thought I deserved a kickback, or royalty, if you prefer. But alas, I never got one.

I thought it might be difficult, but disconnecting from sources of distraction to follow wherever my inner process might lead me was far more important; as we all know so well, it’s also necessary. Even more than necessary, with the distractions intensifying and the algorithms ever more refined as they reach into my amygdala or give me shots of dopamine, the act of unhooking has practically become an act of sedition.

Fortunately, attention is not a commodity to be plundered like a vein of raw material. It’s a renewable resource whose value never diminishes. We have the capacity to regenerate and explore the intangible wilds, connecting to the depth of existence, anticipating the unknown, a birthright of being human, where all we are and all we know becomes a springboard to all we can imagine. Deliberate acts of renewal sustain our imagination and creativity.  

Neglecting to swim in the sublime inner worlds of feeling and imagination generates distorted, disconnected, and addictive behaviors. Just as going into the enveloping silence of wilderness reveals an abundance so often ignored, or worse, never known, so descending into silence reclaims the inner wilderness. The domain of the inner commons is where precious resources may be buried but not tarnished. Continuously regenerating a capacity for uncluttered presence sustains our access to the vital wholeness and emergent nature of life.

If you think about it, competition for our attention has been ongoing forever but has only recently accelerated in reach and sophistication. The Catholic Church may have been the original multi-national corporation, as Dara Malloy calls it in The Globalizating of God, seeking broad and lifelong influence upon an individual psyche. Its function was (and remains) to define spirituality in its own image, to define religious thought, faith and ritual, to deny other manifestations of spirituality, to literally own God and influence how we focus our attention in all relations. The Church was the original wave of what is now called modernity. The Pope himself was the one who carved up the New World and decided which monarchs would receive the spoils. That enterprise presumed itself the zero-point of knowledge and morphed into the multitude of manifestations defining the vertical integration of attention and consumer behavior. The marginalization and extinction of outlying traditions was a cornerstone of empire and foretold the dominance of religion and its hegemonic designs on the inner terrain we continue to see today.

The simple act of turning off the cacophony of modernity to focus our reverence and awe on anything other than patriarchal monotheism is now a battleground. Institutional religion remains central to that conflict as a symbol (and instrument) of coloniality and exclusivity. In its most radically conservative forms, Christian Nationalism, the ‘originalism’ of Wahabbist Islam, even among ultranationalist Buddhists, it is the status quo, it is business as usual. It promotes an increasingly tortured tribal definition of prayer as devout and uncritical submission to (male) authoritarian hierarchy.

On the other hand, prayer and ritual have been part of how humans inhabited the world in all times and places we know, though it’s much more than mere submission, supplication or asking for personal favors. Prayer is invariably attended by silence, at least implicitly. It resounds with silence regardless of whatever sound, rejoicing or lamentation, may (or may not) accompany it. Supplication and prayer are all infused with stillness, a return to the primordial womb of creation. If modernity is all about doing, then prayer is a recovery of being. Prayer is an act of love, especially self-love. It leads us into the realm of paradox and movement, uncertainty and inquiry. It’s an act of reclamation and connection, bringing us closer to earth and closer to the deity, to the unity of each, whether mythological or material.

In its loosest definition, prayer is a catchword for humility, surrender, devotion and wholeness. It is an affirmation of belonging, reminding us of our place. Prayer can be a sensory adventure into hidden realms of nature, our nature. Laughter is prayer. Joy is prayer, by which we reach beyond ourselves, not to remind ourselves of a presumed personal relationship with an omniscient and omnipotent force, but to re-embed ourselves in relationship, in belonging with. It’s a perpetual doorway to the unseen. To pray is to open your heart and get out of your mind, whether nourished by ancient history, last week or this moment. It’s an invocation of the gifts of ancestors who continue to deliver their wisdom in a continuous release seeping into the soil of culture.

Rituals of allegiance and submission have become the objective of corporate presence in every aspect of life nowadays, to substitute for what once was an immediately accessible connection with our spiritual home. While churches turn increasingly into corporations, corporations have turned into churches. Instead of allegiance to a deity, we now declare fealty to brands, products, to the ubiquitous presence and seduction of ritual consumption, now framed as delivering all the same benefits we once received through family or community ritual practices restoring connection, wholeness and renewal.

This is the tragedy of the inner frontier. Such values are now associated not with places or group practices or the most intimate sanctum of mind, but with products. Patriotism substitutes for spirituality with America as the product. Starbucks is the ubiquitous church of the caramel soy latte. The supermarket houses myriad distortions of our primary connection to the true source of nourishment. Amazon has become the god of all gods, greater than Odin, Ares, Esu or Tutankhamen. Thou shalt have no other gods before me! Kneel!

(So, if you’re an agnostic, where do you go for a cup of coffee? Where do you buy a book or…….anything?)

In some quarters, the formalized practice of prayer or any of the common forms of mindfulness are being coopted as instruments of control. No wonder church attendance is declining so rapidly. There are also fewer blessings, offerings or sanctifications and a poverty of rituals grounding secular life in any ecumenical framework. Certain cultures or sects remaining true to such values, in which protecting the inheritance of overtly mystical practices in which God is immediate and personal, are deemed foreign, extreme or even dangerous. We need reminding that the nature of our god becomes the nature of our world. And it is these very disagreements about the nature of the deity, who owns it and how we use our attention to connect with wholeness which are hastening the collapse already upon us.

When our actions in the world are founded on devotion to a zero-sum lie, they become either rough, halting or tenuous. If we can face how disconnected personal and collective actions have become, we find ourselves circling around the truth of our brokenness–how truly heartbroken so many of us have become in this time of loss. Getting on our knees, figuratively or actually, may not be the (only) answer. But how do we imagine our actions can be entirely divorced from our beliefs about God, a supreme being, Pachamama, InterBeing, the Most Merciful One, ineffable spaciousness without beginning or end–or whatever its name may be? Which of your actions would you argue can be separate from any of that?

If we lived your lives connected to the inner wild while remaining connected to the outer world, how would that look? Or feel? Sitting with this question, I cannot help but see many of the expressions of devotion all around me as more bewildered and confused surrender, more disempowerment than prayer, most likely salved by another ritual visit to one of the new churches of our broken world.

Re-inhabiting the inner wilderness may not heal a broken heart, but it’s a start. It would surely remind us there’s so much more to lose, and to save.

The Easy and the Impossible

But honestly, tell me you can look into the eyes of stranger or even someone you know intimately without having this experience. Maybe not all the time, but with rising frequency. What do you see? A desperate search for signposts or guidance or truth or any modicum of trust?

My ex-wife used to say sex was either easy or impossible. There was no in-between. That was quite a declaration coming from a sex-therapist who helped people work through buried assumptions and emotional obstacles to healthy sexual relationships. I’m thinking the same principle applies to writing. It’s either real or it wanders off into strange and strained territory to become something else, like a mannequin, needing more and more layers of make-up to appear real, when actually, contrivance can never replace the spark of life. Even so, breaking through contrivance to live in reality requires more than a wish.

So it is with living nowadays as well, apparently. As the unraveling around us continues, the despair deepening and the warnings arising from diverse quarters, I spend another restless night processing the turbulence of the day in dreams, sensations, and images. I awaken without words to frame new (or ongoing) feelings, rising with aches and pains, old and new. I, like everyone else I suppose, continue to ride the rising tide of challenge and increasingly complex and fraught sense-making going on everywhere. In fact, it seems we’re all being continuously triggered and probably don’t even realize how vulnerable we’ve become.

I can’t look at anything anymore, food or energy prices, the tsunami of waste, the latest manifestations of systemic racism, nihilistic political agendas, vacuous declarations of so-called experts on cable TV, the creeping security state, looming mass evictions, the arrogance of empire giving oxygen to old tropes, the economic puppet show, the building wave of global (and domestic) refugees, the deepening divide over vaccination and especially the accelerating frequency of extreme weather events without looking at everything. Earth has a fever—we are all under its sway —and our behavior is approaching delirium.

I am unable to keep the blinders on or act unaffected. More and more comes packed into less and less, such that even the smallest encounters, like a simple hello, are loaded with import. If I applied the original adage to my current circumstance, I’d have to say with civic dialogue descending into chaos and governance hanging by a thread, with most everything we take for granted in upheaval, that life is approaching impossible. And it’s impossible to look away. If there is an answer, it’s to meet our vulnerabilities with unflagging courage, not retreat into a cocoon of falsehoods, to permit ourselves to be exposed, just as any sex therapist would suggest, remembering that hastily following impulses is a dangerous path and that love is stronger than fear.

But honestly, tell me you can look into the eyes of stranger or even someone you know intimately without having this experience. Maybe not all the time, but with rising frequency. What do you see? A desperate search for signposts or guidance or truth or any modicum of trust? Knowing we’re all undergoing a something in common, everywhere from your bedroom to your community to every place beyond, we are thirsting for the sparks of life breaking through the mirrors, the robotic or performative nonsense, and we are drawn to them instantly.

Amidst all the talk and the growing awareness of our predicament, I wonder if what I am feeling (and seeing) is the true nature of collapse. I can’t imagine how you are metabolizing this ongoing trauma overtaking us, but it’s become a pandemic in its own right. Not only are our primal rhythms under assault, but water cycles, growing seasons, the jet stream, soil viability, ocean currents, all are wavering and fueling increasing damage and desperate grasping for stability. All the boundaries that define us, most of which are enactments of coloniality, are blurring in a storm of converging data from biology, neuroscience, psychology, and spirituality, not to mention political ecology.

We are trying to birth ourselves into an as-yet-undefined world beyond right and wrong—or at least we’d better be– because nearly everything previously defined by the sham religion of modernity as right and wrong is part of the prison in which we are all held. Right and wrong are being brutalized, stripped of meaning, contorted, ignored, rendered inert by capitalism and the nation-state, shuttled off to a state-run home for advanced cases of moral equivocation. No wonder the maps are blurring and there’s extreme behavior all around us.

Are we seeking something new or are we reclaiming something as old as earth itself? Are we diverging of converging–or both? As a white person living in a (formerly?) white dominated world built on the bones and ashes of non-white cultures, where do I look for guidance? The world I grew up in, when the polarities seemed clear, when it was easy to say which side I was on, is dissolving. How we think, how easily we are triggered, the default psychic frameworks we relied upon are under reconstruction. Justice and injustice. Racism and so-called equality. Authoritarianism and so-called democracy. Sexism and so-called gender equity. Even war and peace wear rhetorical masks mocking their convergence. We can’t not notice that virtually every principle we once thought clear, activism, the definitions of problems and especially solutions all exist within the framework of modernity now under challenge. That template, with its innate violence, exclusion and systems of control, arbitrarily drawn international borders, sacred systems of law, language, commerce, faith, ritual violence and spirituality is just not working anymore.

Where are the signs of life coming from? Who knows better than anyone about the malignant appeal and tenacious grip of modernity? Who stands in starkest contrast to whiteness as the standard of humanity? Who embodies the visceral legacy of enslavement, throwing white privilege into high relief, and gives voice to the necessity of becoming a fugitive from the hegemonies of western culture? What happens to our bodies as conflict rises, as we perceive deeper layers of conditioning, peering past the constrictions of cultural and linguistic structures to a multi-colored coat of a new way? Even if I declare a tenuous independence, that my body is not for sale, to be occupied or even subtly directed, that my body cannot be taken or its treasures plumbed as just another profit center, I don’t yet fully know what that means. I only know that going deeper into the sensations of change with a willingness to notice and feel everything is required.

Very little is easy anymore, not even hello, but we have yet to arrive at a new functional baseline. But one thing is crystal clear: the impossibility of modernity, which has taken 500 years to realize, externalizes more and more and offers only faux benefits increasingly removed from lived experience. Quo bene, as they say. Who still benefits from that ongoing construction? Only a vanishingly small minority.

突破: Breaking Through

I have wandered off from the campfire. I’m roaming in the dark, placing myself at the mercy of beasts of the night, divorced from camaraderie, landmarks, scents, ancestors, teachers, children, the whirling firmament and the community of souls that brought me here.

There have been moments when I’ve fancied myself a writer. It wasn’t always that way. I crept into it slowly, writing casually for entertainment, correspondence or popular appeal. Certainly, there were moments of personal disclosure when I would be navigating complex feeling, intention, memory and association. I didn’t particularly seek those moments, but neither did I avoid them. Along the way, I found a groove, enacting devices to engage, provoke or inspire. Writing arrived with the glib pouring forth of words to describe a travel experience or when I was either so angry or sad that I didn’t have to think what to write next. Or else I fancied myself at least a passable expository writer who could present a detailed subject with some clarity.

But I am no longer traveling, and my outrage button has become exhausted, replaced by disgust at the extreme performative nature of public dialogue and a nagging resignation about the future. It all resides in a cavern of helplessness that seems to have numberless rooms to explore, places to get lost, where scant light ever ventures. If you’ve ever been in a vast cave, lit only by the artificial kind, you might already know how boring it can quickly become, especially if you tire of being reminded, everywhere you look, of how small you are in the great unwinding of time in silent darkness.

As far as expository writing is concerned, I must finally admit it’s too barren. It cannot come close to communicating the diversity and complexity of the real lives we are living in this time of the great unraveling—or how we are being lived by events and each other, by the warming oceans disrupting the primary currents, the disappearing ice. It’s thus just plain boring. I’m not journalist. It’s not my job to bring you the news in that familiar way and it’s about time to stop trying instead of using volumes of words to defend vague ideas in an impersonal way.

But where does this place me? I must learn something new all over again. Maybe I’ve been that journalist, that academic, that remote observer, that pretender to some ivory tower. But now, deciding what kind of writer I am not is not the same as becoming the kind of writer I will be. Because, really, when we get down to it, we’re talking about what kind of person I will be, how I imagine myself, how I am connecting (or not) to the world. And right now, it’s the ‘not’ connecting that’s haranguing me from the back rows, which is to say, I have wandered off from the campfire. I’m roaming in the dark, placing myself at the mercy of beasts of the night, divorced from camaraderie, landmarks, scents, ancestors, teachers, children, the whirling firmament and the community of souls that brought me here.

I haven’t been a storyteller. I’m not sure I ever set out to become a storyteller or if I even knew what it really is to tell a story. And that right there is the story, the poverty of my course, the dubious credentials I’ve claimed so far. Telling the story is not solely about someone as it is about a time, a place, a multi-dimensional thread of events creeping in from all directions and from distant peoples and times. It’s about the teachers we would not normally recognize. It’s the sensory, the cognitive, the relational, the mysterious and the unseen coming together in dynamic play, in evolutionary unfolding, in paradoxical awakenings, in pregnancies delivered just in time. Because that’s the nature of the lives we are living. Nothing will ever be straight again.

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that nothing was ever straight to begin with, even though we clung to a biased fantasy of some narrow empiricism, the exclusion and violence at the heart of coloniality, the subtle catechism of modernity that all things have a place and must stay in their place as they are defined by science, religion and politics. We’ve been walking through these things as if in a hall of mirrors, wishing to see ourselves reflected back, confirming the ‘way things are.’ The entire enterprise resides in a fixed epistemology that always yields the same conclusion—the muting of nature and the supremacy of the (white) human and western ways of knowing. There, we never have to worry about the entire deck being thrown up into the air—as it is now—all the time.

When the way seems blocked, it’s time to break the mirrors. All bets are off. Empire is the Anthropocene monster eating its own tail, an exhausted enterprise shedding all but its most desperately loyal supplicants. The more they cling, the more they deny and pit themselves against the relentless and now accelerating de-westernization occurring throughout the global south and Asia, the greater the danger to us all. This beast of a nation will surely, under an authoritarian president, start an(other) entirely cynical and thoroughly corrupt (forever) war to reclaim its fantasy of supremacy, dragging a generation into hot conflict, brutalizing all dissent along the way, distracting from the rot within and the advancing consequences of its own extravagance. This will be the death throe of America—an economically and ideologically cornered giant drunk on its own self-dealing delusions and doubling down on its primary addictions.

The stage is set and the time for pretension is so over; the time to own up to my own pretensions is long past. Perhaps that’s why I am feeling so lost. Perhaps that’s why my recent gestures toward expression have felt so stale, so limited, and uninspired. Maybe it’s because the fire of my own truth burns as a small ember. I have retreated into my own incarceration. I am the jailer and the jailed. I am forgetting what I belong to. I am the sole party to the severance of my dependencies, my alliances, my symbiosis with the world. It’s time for oxygen, a return to (dare I say it) authentic spontaneity, time for a jailbreak, to explore the green glimmers of foreign and still hardy epistemologies, biding their time, and if it’s not too much of a cliche, breaking through the concrete of the dying order, revealing our true nature to ourselves and to each other.

Offering Mandala

Isn’t that the whole point of the mandala offering–to give up everything for the sake of realizing we never had anything in the first place?

The Middle Way pursues the embodiment of wisdom and compassion. The Great Vehicle of these attainments is parsed as a progression toward the fruition of altruistic intent and the transformation of all sentient beings such that consensus reality ultimately dissolves into unwavering non-conceptual blissful awareness: Dzogchen. The Great Perfection.

A tall order, indeed.

Wisdom is a reference to emptiness. To perceive the true nature of phenomena is called pure perception. A Buddha field is a pure realm manifested as a product of pure perception. Such a field would include everything we see, think or know, everything that happens ‘to’ us, everything we ‘have’ or “do.”

From the Vajrayana perspective…the understanding of Buddha fields is a deeper one. The root of the Vajrayana is “pure vision,” or the perception of the perfect purity of all phenomena. To enact this purity of perception, we do not perceive the place where we are now as just an ordinary place; we imagine it to be a celestial Buddha field.”     — Dilgo Kyentse Rinpoche

By offering everything we have to the spiritual home of Buddha, we are affirming it is all Maya, an illusory projection dissolving under the scrutiny of pure vision.

In other words, in Vajrayana, the celestial Buddha field is here & now in this moment. It encompasses everything in every instant. It is our everyday experience illuminated by the Dzogchen vision. The deliberate creation of detailed visualizations to further transformative experience is called Guru Yoga, a cornerstone of Vajrayana practice. Silly rhetorical questions like “where is a Buddha field to be found?” or “how would we know?” carry little weight against the benefits of engaging directly in a personal practice of developing pure vision, creating your own Buddha field, also realizing that the essence nature of everyday experience is already pure and exists whether we deliberately create it or not. 

The offering of mandala is a related practice dating back to the origins of Buddhism whose rituals, detailed in the Kalachakra Tantra, are intended to accumulate personal merit and thus ultimately escape cyclic existence and gain entry into the pure vision of a Buddha realm. The outer form of this practice employs a physical representation of the universe, all its worlds and continents. The universe we know as well as incalculable other universes we don’t know are considered pure lands to be offered.

A more internal intent of the mandala-offering practice is to self-purify by offering all possessions, all property, including one’s pleasant and unpleasant experience, one’s very body, to the pure realm of the Buddha field with a clear altruistic intent.

By the virtue of offering to you… visualized before me,
This mandala…resplendent with flowers,
– my body, wealth and enjoyments–
Adorned with Mount Meru and the four continents,
As well as the sun and the moon,
Without any sense of loss, I offer this collection.
May all sentient beings enjoy this perfect realm….

This shift in perception to recognizing our entire existence is suspended within an omnipresent projection of Buddha-mind, pure and transparent in quality and depth, momentarily breaks the grasp and completely overthrows our limited habitual view. We come into an immediate personal encounter with its illusory nature, which is telling us we don’t truly “have” anything at all.

Isn’t that the whole point of the mandala offering–to give up everything for the sake of realizing we never had anything in the first place?

Seeing everything arising as a Buddha realm renders “being” and “doing” as flawed constructions, relying as they do upon a dualistic view imputing actions and possessions with intrinsic substance. Being, since it implies the existence of non-being, is already an objectification. Doing implies the existence of a doer. The very nature of these references to something that cannot be rationalized or categorized holds us in the sway of illusion. Maya creates the language and language reinforces the illusion that there is any material reality whatsoever to objects, possessions or thought, including every conception about thought, including the very notion of Maya itself!

And yet, at the same time, we live in a world of consciousness and intent. The Two Truths are said to be completely interdependent, inseparable, and timeless, yet even these categorizations are also illusory. The Two Truths, we should recall, convenient though they may be, are neither Two nor “True.” We might even call them the Two Lies, or better yet, The One Lie.

Things, material realities, states of consciousness, arise and cease in every instant. Phenomena are both material and non-material in nature in each moment, like water at precisely 32F—neither solid nor liquid. Arising from a constant and changeless ground, they simultaneously exist and do not exist. They do not conform to any intellectual description. Nor can they be reified as constant states such as is light when we are (or are not) looking. The essence of phenomena is beyond conception, always empty. Materiality exists as an energetic manifestation of emptiness simultaneously and constantly, timelessly, without beginning or end.

Rendering everything–and it must be everything–to a Buddha realm potentially opens the pure vision of a Bodhisattva, the fruition of the Middle Way, the non-binary view in poetic dance, always becoming its opposite, destroying, and reinventing itself continuously in every moment, cause melting into effect and effect into cause.

The one in whom this altruistic intent becomes stabilized is no longer lost in the material view of contaminated Maya, resting instead in a radical openness and supreme unity, yet also finding a bottomless well of compassion for those who do.

COVID in the Land of Smiles

We encountered no other passengers, no open businesses, no other airport employees other than uniformed medical or police personnel. Under normal circumstances, Suvarnabhumi airport is one of the busiest in the world. Now it’s mostly silent and desolate.

I arrived in Thailand from Qatar on a flight barely 20% full. The word is out that Thailand is not ready for tourism. The exception is that tourists are now, if they meet certain entrance criteria, submit to regular testing and adhere to restrictions, allowed to enter several prime destinations such as Phuket, Ko Samui and Hat Yai without quarantine. That the Thai government would carve out exceptions to the stringent rules now applied to all other locations is testimony to either opportunism and a need for cash or careless inconsistency in applying prudent public health measures.

As we somewhat bedraggled passengers ambled in the early morning through a series of moving walkways down a long empty corridor and past entirely empty departure gates, we encountered cones and taped-off areas directing us toward a public health screening station on the way to immigration. We were met by a swarm of nurses and other functionaries, fully gowned with protective gear including shields, caps and gloves, who lined us up in appropriately spaced rows of chairs to await an interview and document inspection.  Everyone was ready with their Certificate of Entry, already provided multiple times to airline authorities as we boarded our connecting flights, our proof of hotel booking in one of the state sponsored quarantine facilities, proof of travel health insurance should we require any treatment or hospitalization, our proof of vaccination, passports and two other documents now required to enter Thailand.

We were grilled about symptoms as the nurses filled out pink forms to include in our handful of papers as we were processed and checked out and allowed to progress toward the usual immigration inspection and baggage claim, another 300 meters away. We encountered no other passengers, no open businesses, no other airport employees other than uniformed medical or police personnel. Under normal circumstances, Suvarnabhumi airport is one of the busiest in the world. Now it’s mostly silent and desolate.

Having entered or departed Thailand perhaps a dozen times in the past six years, this immigration experience was the most unusual I’ve ever encountered. Immediately inside the immigration control area, we were directed toward a long desk with a glass barrier where a dozen immigration officers sat six feet apart. We passed all our documents through the barrier for them to examine, presumably to verify that we just went through health screening. Our documents were compared to an online database which I suspect already had our travel information recorded. This encounter lasted about 5 minutes as documents were inspected and stamped.

From there we proceeded to the regular immigration screening normally encountered upon entry. An officer examined the visa and all documents again. Oddly, this uniformed officer was not gowned, capped or gloved. Strictly the regular uniform. All documents were photographed and stamped again. From there we go to baggage claim, which normally occurs at one of a dozen large carousels in a cavernous transition area as big as a football field. But now there is only one carousel operating and the rest of the floor is off-limits.

I grabbed my bag and headed through customs and into the arrival area, all deathly quiet and empty except for a small group of hotel drivers holding the usual signs. I was met by someone—again, fully garbed in protective gear–with a clipboard which had my name on it and the hotel where I’d be staying. She quickly herded me to the check-out desk where I was met by an escort who carried my luggage out to the hotel vehicle and driver. Altogether, between the aircraft and the shuttle vehicle, I had now encountered no less than seven different personnel in protective gear and one immigration officer in uniform. Inspection of documents had been repeated four times.

The hotel shuttle had been outfitted with a glass barrier between me in the back seat and the driver up front. My compartment included an air filter and no air passed between the front and back. Check-in at the hotel included an interview with a nurse from a local hospital and the normal check-in process with a hotel employee, except this encounter included a review of quarantine policies and procedures in a 12-page document in English and Thai, an opportunity to enroll in a local telephone plan and instructions how to order meals to be brought to my room. Leaving the room for any reason is prohibited.

There is a schedule for multiple daily temperature readings to be reported by telephone app, a schedule for multiple PCR tests during my stay, instructions for laundry and trash, supplies of disinfectant, soap, bottled water, linens, and other essentials—like coffee–for the duration of my stay. There is no other access to any of the hotel facilities whatsoever. The only time you leave your room is to be tested.

One might assume from these encounters that Thailand is managing COVID well. But let not the extremity of it all be deceiving. Thailand is struggling mightily, with case rates and deaths climbing to new highs. More deaths are happening at home and are likely not being counted accurately. The military government led by Prayut Chan-O-Cha backed itself into a corner by its hubris and conflicts of interest, believing their salutary response to the initial wave was sufficient and not ordering nearly enough vaccine when they had the chance. They were then saddled with an exclusive contract with a vaccine manufacturer with no experience and coddling certain interested parties by steering income in their direction.

Then they tried to recover by buying Sinovac, which proved itself not up to the task and which, whether justified or not, then ignited mass refusal to accept it—to which the government announced a plan to combine two different vaccines by adding a shot of Astra Zeneca on top of Sinovac. Otherwise, the strategy seems to be to withdraw into an opaque silence in hopes that things will eventually calm down. Meanwhile, the economy tanks and the threat of more COVID from out-of-control Myanmar rises.

Thailand is not smiling now. Suicide rates are unusually high, as is violent crime, petty theft, mass fear and economic desperation. Hospitals are full and oxygen supplies are scarce. A tsunami of community support is rising as Thais generously come to the aid of their fellow citizens. But social media and mainstream news are alive with their anger and speculation is rampant about the return of the banished populist former prime minister, Taksin Shinawatra. The only thing keeping the streets empty of protest is the fear of the delta variant, which probably suits the government just fine. But overall, the recent response, garbed in layers of protective measures similar to what I encountered at the airport, appears to be haphazard overcompensation by a government desperate to inoculate itself against its own incompetence. Short of a spontaneous and fearless mass uprising, only a definitive gesture from the notoriously disengaged king is likely to change the political and public health course now. Thailand is waiting for him to show his cards, but I don’t think anyone is holding their breath.

Afghanistan

Sometimes they say the dharma is not pretty
which means that one day you will know
maybe many lives from now
that lock and load is not the road
to our survival.

As the long-overdue departure from Afghanistan approaches, here’s something I wrote 16 years ago upon the loss of 2000 American soldiers there:

The ones who cannot stand to weep

are the ones who say that I must keep

my mouth shut when I penetrate their spin

while they bring comfort to the enemy within.

They say a citizen must ignore the bureaucratic fuel of war

the official juggernaut of Right exercised under cover of night

twisted to their purpose

out of sight.

I have to wonder how they hide as the storm of conflict roils inside

that must be silenced lest the voices bare

their fantasies of greed and fear so empty of the urge to free

themselves for any nobler purpose than extinction.

 

I am not your enemy I say I am your mirror with this scarred half of me

the missing leg below my knee the plates inside my skull

I’m not quite here and yet aware with halting gait and forever stare

searching for my lost parts anywhere I can find them.

I look into a stranger’s eyes and ask if I am known.

He asks if I am somehow lost and then my cover’s blown.

I try to tell him of the cost that makes me but a rumor now

of the man that has been lost.

 

The past will not leave me be and the future can’t come too soon.

The doctors say that I’m all right that I can live a normal life

but they can’t see what I have seen and cannot see me now.

 

Rockets blast my dreams each night and a python tightens

round my chest robbing me of sober rest.

A life digested. Sweet sleep if I can get some.

 

I’m sorry to disturb you from your reverie but a soldier’s bleeding in the streets.

He is my brother or your son or a sister loved by everyone.

They are my nation fallen.

 

Each day’s supply of coffins flown in silence to some distant home

When you close your eyes at night you never see the fading light 

of lives undone. They come from Idaho or Montana from Texas and Looze-iana

their dreams pumped with your sad fiction

the vice of economic conscription.

How many more will have to fly before the chaff of falsehood

separates from the truth that made them.

 

Sister Cindy Sheehan tore through your carpet of rhetorical bombs

broke through the frosted glass of pious platitudes echoing through

the mighty marbled bunkers of government

Her fighting vehicle was not made by Bradley her ammunition not in

short supply her simple question pierced the armor of official aplomb.

Why?

 

From that day more eyes were peeled to see your naked lies revealed

A million more converted to the truth that cannot be diverted.

You can take the nation into your storm of oedipal complaint

without reason or restraint but you cannot hide

from Jesus on your shoulder. And now no matter where you turn

sound bites.

 

Sometimes they say the dharma is not pretty

which means that one day you will know

maybe many lives from now

that lock and load is not the road

to our survival.