Night Terrors

 

 

 

Head held to my pillow

Comforter cover a mummy’s sheath

Sweat soaked sheets

He’s howling

My baby

 

Dream let me go!

I need to get up

get him but

I run in place against

 a hidden force of mechanical phenomenon

Thrashing about,  delirious

in the muck that

willfully conceals my way.

 

God!

Help me reach

His screams

Not for you

But ME

his long departed

deceased lifeline.

 

Impossible to save him

His neck pressed to the pavement

Life slowly suffocating

Squeezing his heart

His lungs

His voice

Calling calling for me

HIS MOTHER

to save him.

 

I can’t baby!

I can’t get to you

I’m letting you down

Letting you die

As I die again

Here in the next world

I die again.

.

I Can’t Breathe

Exploding canisters

We are all suffocating

Tears pouring

As autocracy creeps

Need a minute to get my breath

Some space

Some breathing room

 

Peaceful protesters flushed like roaches

Trump declares he needs no Governor’s blessing to bring them to their knees

On their knees they will have to look up

To him

He sets his flag for fascism

 

Breathtaking

Breathless

Relentless

Get off my neck!

Heavy metal death roar

This weight on my chest

 

Respirator, intubate, oxygen tank, hospital bed, mask

I can’t breathe

Wearing this mask

Anxious

Virus Violent

 

Permit to carry anywhere anytime

Weapons unmasked

Endangered cops and itchy triggers

Psychopath cops excuse to murder

Insanity

War

Smoke

Tear gas

 

In Nashville, my corner

Funnel cloud first

Dust storm next

Smashed sheet rock and ink dyed paper sheets

Scarred the air

Shelter in place, the virus is hunting you

Then the storm

Power out

For days

Hoarded frozen food to stay in for days now useless

What good was preparing for dearth?

 

You don’t know what’s coming

 

Black and White make black and white

Not gray today

Let Black have its day

 

The under loved rightly rage while

Savage Supremacists

stain

Intercept, interfere, interface

Time Square cleared for months by THE VIRUS

Teems with righteous indignation

 

Across the country

Tainted by anarchy placed and paid

Looters

Ruiners

Devastate the innocent and already broken

Misplaced misery

Monsters for hire

 

Being Black means no space

To mourn together

Protest together

Rise together

Yoga, ”The practice of the last breath”

Is not enough.

Ants.

A river of ants flow from the foundation of my home. They stream down the terrace on a single minded mission to multiply beneath a glorious seven foot rose bush.

These otherwise harmless creatures can wreak havoc. Their industry sucks the moisture from roots and mortar leaving dust in the wake.

Pour water down their exit hole to divert them and they disappear for awhile. You think they went somewhere else but suddenly they’re back at the same mission, the same route, to the same place. Maybe they were just “sheltering in place”.

Like us.

Nature’s balance pushed to new limits, the creature Covid 19 found a ripe opportunity to devour the toxic, polluted, immune repressed, stressed human race.

It forced us back to our holes with a Tsunami rage. Without the insidious ravage of humans, the earth had taken a breath. We might have seen how quickly it seeks to repair. Dialed in to needs personal and present we haven’t had time to expand the view beyond that.

The threat of number 19 is now greater than when we feared a water boarding suffocation by leaving our confines. But the autocracy says, it’s time to get back out there. So we take the same path do the same thing in the same way as before. We call it normal. We call it freedom to get back to the routine, to the route. Cloaked in masks, slathered with Purell we’ll clog the highways, swarm the stores, erode the foundation, compromise the roots.

A different path to fulfill one’s destiny is right there.

But like the ants, we just do what we did before.

Don’t know why, guess you can ask the ants.

 

 

Flower or Weed, Biden or Bernie? Trump? It Depends on the Time and Place. Election 2020

Vote for love, vote for gentle.

WE can’t take another angry man shouting in our faces.

So polarized, so hateful, so tired are we from squad Trump.

CRACKED.

I thought, don’t push it. The PUSH BACK might elect the Dictator again. We can’t stand that.

Tread lightly, make no waves.

Biden is a safe bet. Bernie always seems angry though rightly so.

And then the Virus finished us off. Blew off the doors, exposed the flaws.

Revealed corruption, pollution, inequity, racism in ways some might have ignored before.

The Dictator’s commands from the pulpit are a paucity of mercy that cannot be denied.

The Federal government is “not a shipping service”. It’s every man and state for himself says he. Bidding wars and price gauging while people die alone.

Not my problem. People are free to do what they want.

Work is money. Money is power. Resume your positions.

My show must go on.

Low gas prices, a welcome relief for you,is a crisis says he and you’ll believe it

because Dictator will explain it with a benign malignancy as he does all alternative facts.

And will repeat it every day just so you know he is unashamed and his words become gospel to the flock seeking salvation.

Tells you to your face he will fuck you in favor of his Saudi and Russian oil friends, for an oil industry that should have been phased out years ago

Look at his confidence!

Like, yes we put Jews in ovens but it was good for the economy

and say it every day until we are numb and inert or believe him.

Only a sociopath could pull off such a subterfuge. He’s such a charming fella.

You might forget right and wrong. Some have.

Bernie displays the pitfalls of the 1% disparity. Demands health care and fair wages as a right. Shows that in crisis there is not net for the most vulnerable.

For most of us.

And here we are.

Bernie did not radicalize us.

An invisible bug and ill prepared leadership beat him to it.

Rob Lindsay Pictures

If Bernie was a thorn in the Democratic party he is now a flower in its last phase shedding seeds for rebirth.

If Biden was a cultivated flower he is now a wild one. Will he genetically modify his platform to fit Bernie’s’ as Bernie holds some cards?

If reality star Trump was a flower on a clown’s lapel,

Dictator Trump is a poisonous vine.

Time to clear the White House battleground.

 Spray no weed killing poison but till the fields instead.

Let My People Go

Dictator runs the narrative, threatens, fires, lies and fury.

Controls the coffers, flogs his servants, incites the faithful, degrades the women, emasculates the men.

He is the sum of himself and his minions. Minions enable the one.

Without that symbiosis the dictator would perish. That parasite needs a host.

Like the VIRUS.

He is he and the sum of his parasites. The host is a shell once called a party.

Republican.

Greed, lust, disregard for the under gloried.

He is Pharaoh.

They are Pharaoh.

Hoards stockpiles of life saving devices in the temple

Those are for the privileged.

The under worthy can silently suffocate alone.

 

Who cares, thinks Pharaoh?

If they care now he banks on them forgetting when he puts a few dollars in their pockets and promises the moon.

 

He is/ they are corrupted Israelites on the radar of one Jesus.

The wealth worshipers.

Wealth is power.

Extra is power.

Time to remember.

At dinner.

At church.

Hunting eggs.

Or matzoh.

 

God threatened to kill the children.

Of the flock that wrongly enslaved and imprisoned.

Release them from bondage or the first born is killed.

And God killed his first and only.

Made him a martyr.

Guilt.

 

He died for you. Now it’s pay back time cause you didn’t get the message.

You weren’t humble.

You worshiped money.

Hoarded.

Abandoned values.

Didn’t notice, didn’t care.

 

Years slide by.

 

Injuries add up.

Poison the earth for a buck.

Flog ourselves to everlasting labor.

Enslaved to the dollar,

Owned by the man, the landlord, the lender,

Over step and step over.

Money will make us immune.

 

Well I’ll grant you it can help

like that fat lipid surrounding the Covid 19 virus.

Their are some shields;

 

Better healthcare, education,

the privilege of space to surround one’s fortress.

But no!

No one is exempt.

The innocent and the guilty will go when

their time is up.

Time.

What will we do when it is ours again?

Will we re step into the ashen streams

Slumber under brown smog skies?

 

 

 

 

 

Dump stockpiles of pesticides back on our food?

Ignore the poor?

Disable the ignorant?

What will we do with our time?

How can we people go

without a path to freedom.

Don’t tell me it’s the next life,

the afterlife.

Tell me something real.

The Earth Breathes and Nature Runs Free on a Pandemic Morning.

Do we need to lose our breath for the Earth to get hers?

Will the sky appear in China without industry?

What is India without a car’s exhaust?

Will the animals come back if the hunters stand down?

Will the plants reappear if the clear-cutters are laid up?

I drive down the road and remember the Nashville I love.

Traded Los Angeles for a place more small town than city almost thirty years ago. Because of us it became a city. Ironic.

Now small town charm hangs in the air like a friendly ghost.

Space and intimacy are  precious.

One fights to sustain.

We live in tiny tribes separated by things unfamiliar but not unpleasant.

We can buy anything, eat anything.

We can go to music venues morning to night.

Existence means some things are exchanged for others.

And we still find one another.

It just takes more effort.

Effort is good when it’s done with optimism. It’s not bad.

But I notice in this empty space that my optimism was a dwindling resource.

You know what I mean.

Last year I read a study out of England that declared loneliness to be the worst disease of our time.

It kills people.

You see? Social distancing is not new.

Are we at one end of a pendulum’s swing?

Is this Covid monstrosity the full tilt?

Will anything change as we emerge gray haired and naked before each other some time from now?

Still breathing for now.

Listening to the quiet.

Few cars drive down this street these days.

Every day is the third day of vacation.

It’s the fourth day when one succumbs to the reality that this life is not that life.

My time is my own.

What will I do to enjoy it?

.

Hazmat Suit Sleep

It’s the end of the life that we knew.

We’ll have to make a new one.

Nature is shaking us from our torpor.

Shaking harder I should say. Many of us have felt her urgent hand before.

Some of us will not wake up.

In the kosha layers of Ayurveda the human body is the last thing to feel disease. It comes from disturbance in the field of planetary agitation, emotion, mind and yes, breath.

Earth, you’ve got my attention. I will attend.

Like anyone, you want to be heard.

I hear you.

I see you Corona Virus. Respect for your massive power.

Now please leave us alone.

 

My eyes close at 9:00 P.M.

Sitting in front of the television.

I have no purpose. No schedule. Like some of you. I take myself to bed to rise at midnight despite the struggle to stay unconscious. I imagine prisoners of war. John McCain shows up. He’s young and brave and handsome looking up through a bamboo cage stuck in a hole in the ground.

He’s showing me that sanity now is a choice.

Why him? He’s not the first guy in my playlist of favorites but you don’t choose who visits from beyond.

Merlin, our new puppy will wake me at dawn, my favorite time of day.

Until now.

Willed to the mattress till the first bird sings had been my way. A lack of sleep made no difference. Joyous to fling myself smiling from the bed as my husband soundly slept. Grateful for another day, the sweet foam on my coffee. The peace of being the lone one at my kitchen island taking in the morning news.

Merlin’s sharp teeth and happy paws disrupt my Hazmat suit dreams today. I think I got back to this bed just hours ago. He and Layla, my sweet hound, beat the walls with anticipant tails that herald a delightful day.

Always new. Always hopeful.

I am exhausted.

I think, I’ve got time to make steel cut oats. It takes a half hour. Ha Ha. Why is that still surprising? Coat the pot with Ghee, boil the water with sea salt, add chopped dates with the oats. Sprinkle toasted pecans and dark maple syrup. Feed my husband and son something healthy, something happy, something lucky to have in the ever present rainy gray gloom.

I do a headstand in the living room. Wait for the upside down to get real. Land with clarity. In the upside down life is interesting. And it goes on.

Write this post. Figure out Venmo and Zoom meetings and send resumes for the future. Clean the closets already cleaned before. Clean out this old filing cabinet.

Call friends in California today. Seems a bit of an underachievement.

Call the bank and change my auto pays. Think about how to get unemployment for my part time but constant work of over a dozen years at Vanderbilt. Corporate America turned its backs on those of us paid the least at the esteemed University. What bullshit.

Note to self. Care less.

Some of my clients will buy a Facebook Portal. We will do virtual classes. Three books unfinished beckon.

I’ve planted hyacinth to bloom next year, weeded beds, fertilized and mulched with my youngest son.

The Crabapples are a canopy of white petals. Daffodils are still smiling under blooming Redbuds as the tulips prepare to burst. The wisteria I’ve sculpted on the front lawn is ready to break out. Our bluebirds are building a new nest. The woodpeckers on the feeder don’t know it’s a new world.

It is for us to nurture, to love, to protect and honor all of us.

To seek truth in the smokescreen,

To make sense of truth.

To act in truth for a better life.

What is the Feminine Side of Yoga?

It was the 80s in Southern California and I’d wandered into a well attended yoga class at a local gym. The teacher was a woman.

She approached me purposefully as class let out and asked, “What do you think about doing yoga from a more feminine side?

WHAT!

It took about three decades to answer that question.

Yoga was interesting though I can’t remember why I thought so at the time. Mostly I was curious. When I was younger yoga wasn’t even an organized thing.

Dance was the thing I liked. Long ago in New York there was Haitian dance that fed my soul and also a modern movement class that fed my ego.

That class was a disciplined method. Precise. A purposeful brain teaser.Haitian was the opposite.

Lose your mind. Complete freedom within the form.

Wild animal wondrous Voodoo magic, fierce, graceful,bewitching, athletic and feminine at once.

I moved between the fancy Upper West Side studio graced by the city’s elite to a condemned building on the lower East Side where I stood out among people of different color and cultures. Upper West Side ~ pop music, Lower East Side ~ live percussion. Polished wood to worn wood, view of Central Park to pathway through the homeless.

I lived a double life or even a quadruple one but no one ever picked me out for being wrong or a slacker. Or a guy.

Years and years later, I am sitting with a psychic. I’ve met several over the course of this life. Why would I go? People I believed in believed in them. Simple. And compelling.

Like others, she refers to a spirit guide who is appears to be mine. She says, he is telling me…..

He?

Oh yes. He. You are entirely male.

What!

Your guides are only masculine.

I recall the first psychic I met in NY in my twenties. She was a Channel. She kept saying, he and she said, he’s calling you darling. I’ve never heard him call anyone darling before.

You know?

Well I don’t but I never disbelieve anything until it’s proven impossible and so.

The weather turned suddenly cold in Nashville. I’m beginning a yoga class as I remember a description of bones being yin… dry and cold. The organs are yang. Heat.

To balance the brittle in our bones we begin to move from the front and depth of the organs and blood.

The spine is felt in the back body, the intuitive body, the receiving body. We take a moment to notice.

We will not harden what is already hard. We will move from the front body which is the way the nervous system works anyway and let the receptors in back be calm and gentle.

I realize even as I teach them that most of the yoga I’ve studied has focused on bones. Most of the tension I’ve felt is the feeling of spine and sacrum. So much attention there had hardened me.

And before I even saturated my life with yoga? Why did that teacher recognize the masculine in me?

I reckon that the reason I was drawn to Iyengar Yoga was the reason I persevered through the first dance class mentioned here. It demanded absolute perfection and attention to detail that was familiar. That environment would emerge in me later characterized by personal eccentricity. There was a militaristic quality that I was sort of used to as a kid. Structure and alignment for sanity.

Anyone who knows me would be shocked by that. Because I grew up in a loving home, given all one could hope for including scads of freedom. And more so, I was a recalcitrant. I ran wild and against the grain. But there’s a kind of OCD thing that runs through my mother’s family of overachievers that stealthily bled into me.

I am telling you a story that speaks to the unfolding of yoga that makes it ever interesting. It portrays our experience of ourselves as fluid. It is a shape shifter, an enabler, a shrink, coach, parent and child.

So what is the feminine side of yoga? It’s the folding and unfolding and relationship of organ to organ. It is core strength born from breath that bone follows but does not initiate. It is bone as the structure and the interior as home.

It is home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Animals are Watching

I woke at dawn as I usually do. And forced myself back to sleep. It’s Sunday and I’m working on relaxing. Respite in bed is not a reprieve for me but today it came easily.

My dog, used to my habits, came at our usual time. She climbed onto the bed where she’d been allowed once when a vertigo event triggered anxiety that only my warm puppy could abate.

Now she drank thirstily from the cool stream that was strangely swiftly flowing through a crevice behind my neck.

Alarmed, I rolled away from the warm comfort of my sleeping husband and rushed out of bed to the kitchen as usual to turn on the kettle and looked out the window.

Hilary Lindsay

The gentle slope from the terrace up the hill was a flooded field. The bird feeders hovered over submerged poles. And the field was patterned in stripes of black and white softened with brown that revealed a congregation of wild creatures sitting terrifyingly still with their heads just above the rising water facing me, my house, a silent call.

We are in trouble. We are waiting for help.

Herons, cranes, deer, even a monkey came into focus as I stood frozen.  The monkey rose from the water, writhed and slashed and struggled to move and I thought monkeys might not know how to swim.  They will die. They are dying. There are so many. They are wild and alien and yet they’ve come to us like they are domestic, part of this house.

I ran to the bedroom calling my husband. You need to come. It doesn’t matter if you are tired. Get up you need to see this.

It had just begun to rain. Again.

And I woke up.

Yesterday Elizabeth Warren announced and all I could hear was the word “fight”. Big money, unfairness in cash, race, …. Shift I screamed to her. Don’t talk about health care talk about the planet, the food, the water, the raped land. Talk about the poison we are ingesting. Tell us we are an extension of all and they us and if we are to survive we have to eliminate our toxic overlords. The toxin is greed. They give us charity to save us from cancer while they make us cancerous. They give us medicine for all the disease they cause us so all we do is worry and band aid our shaking, limping mutated bodies and stay alive though it’s a half life. Talk about rebuilding community, eliminating loneliness, feeding and educating everyone.

Get these damn guns out of here. In this town children are snatching them from open cars. Where are the parents? Are they made useless by despair? Have they given up, the invisible till their spawn end up on the evening news?

Another press cycle begins as the crippled make the tedious trudge to the next presidential election. Will we notice the deflation, the anemia, dementia of ourselves as we make the choices that guide us forward? We are distracted by the affairs of weak men.  We are guided to look away from the big picture to little pictures about little people and their pathetic or natural proclivities that are perhaps the worst of us.

Still, we go forward in small ways, in anonymity. This is as it should be and always was. We don’t need a megaphone and a platform to show us that.

But as the most powerful nation on earth influences the other superpowers that govern these small lives in our separate, intimate communal, we are bowled over, drowning in the sound and vibration of the doom broadcast through the sound and visual waves we flounder in, the undertow.

I know why the creatures came to me as the rain began to fall again. They are me and I am them and they and I know it.

 

Can’t you feel that too?

 

Downwind From the Crematorium

It flows from the top. Rogue winds carry the stench of decay. Trolls climbed on willing shoulders to the once hallowed house on the hill.  Now shoulders bow under the weight of our missteps. Some minds blown and others twisted.  Handcuff the free press. Release the free radicals. Banish charity. Dishonor agreements. Taunt, flaunt, violate. Ceaseless cycles of venomous discharge desecrate, devastate ravage and rage against the fabric of our country. That fabric that was flammable, flawed and fragile is being shredded and replaced with funereal shrouds.

Layla my dog and I head down the fire road toward the farm.

What’s that smell in the air? Chemical? Decay? The death of the E.P.A.?

Here at the Agricultural Center a group of four unlikely like-minded women from different worlds walk, talk and run their best buddy dogs. An unpleasant smell dismays me on this otherwise fine first crisp and dewy day of autumn as Layla and I round the lower field waiting for the others to show.

I smell disaster.

Bouncing between sleepless nights and stressful days, for the second time I’ve got symptoms of flu that disappear after a final collapse into a night of exhausted surrendered sleep.

It’s a virus that’s going around. Like wild fires, floods and opiates.  Warning bells toll in the ether. The force shields are down. We are subject to invasion.

Glenanne arrives with her dog Lucy. Christine is behind her with Chelsea. They want to walk the fire road I just came from. “There’s a weird really strong smell down there”, I tell them. I don’t want to go back.

Glenanne tells us the little red brick building down there is a crematorium for road kill. It’s not public knowledge. Carnage quietly turns to ashes under the ancient oaks amid serene white domed wooden barns and meeting halls. Moms gather to exercise, babies on backs and in strollers. Visitors amble among slave quarters and along paths beside the idyllic horse pasture that houses the police force’s tremendous and gentle beasts.

The surface is serene but listen to us as the dogs play and witness the rumbling underground.

We are all downwind from the crematorium.  The stink comes from the rotting head of a once youthful body that declared itself open minded, open hearted and democratic. It is clearly corrupted. It stinks.

On the other hand, under the oaks a group of friends share the rhythm of a turning season. There is a hint of new in the air. Change is always there and change cleanses the past. History is absolute but our impressions and focus shift. Rumbling leads to action. Action leads to change.

Here downwind from the crematorium, I smell decay but above me a lone hawk soars like a Phoenix.

 

 

 

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