Sunday, The Lord's Day

I promised my friend Andrea that Sunday being “the Lord's day” I would ascend to a high place, rend in two the Veil of the Temple and penetrate a Secret Female Place.

 I did ascend to the high place, Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill, which is why I was unable to find net access and post on Sunday. Yesterday (Monday) it rained and I hung out in a dry spot across from the Mark Twain Hotel on Taylor and did prostrations and didn't get to typing then either.

As we shall see, I did also rend the Veil of the Temple. But that Secret Female is playing hard-to-get. I am told there needs to be more romance and foreplay first. (I try to act nonchalant, like this is not news to me.)

Tonight, Tuesday, is the Full Moon and I have high hopes. (I am slacking a bit today and writing more, because I plan to bow and bum my way through this Full Moon downtown tonight.)

But let's go back to Sunday, the Lord's Day.

My biggest concern as I packed yesterday was whether my cardboard prostration mat would be where I stashed it by the dumpster at UN Plaza. I thought about leaving my donations box unpacked, the one with the schizophrenic's candy offering in it, since I only got about thirty-five cents in donations at UN Plaza.. (“This will help,” the schizo said, and it did save me from the Rastafarian's temptation.)

I couldn't do it. In went the donation box and the precious candies. As you will read later, they saved me again.

I walked downtown from the outer Mission by way of Valencia Street. It was there at the corner of 15^th Street across from the Valencia Garden's projects that I met my Guru under unusual circumstances.

I was living near there in the eighties separated from my fiancee while we figured out if we really wanted to get married. After living together for years, we were experimenting with an “open relationship,” which in the way of things was going better for her than for me. She was seeing another fine man who was in love with her, while I was pursuing a young woman who wasn't with me. I was fragile and it hurt, so I did what I always did in those days when things got tough: I got in half lotus, faced a white wall and tried to “just be there” with all the complicated fireworks inside me for hours at a time.

I had just formally taken refuge at Kagyu Droden Kunchab after about ten years of sitting practice, including some fairly intense long retreats in solitude. I was more than intrigued by Lama Lodro's presence, but the formal tradition was confusing me and one of the things I was confused by was my relationship to the Christian tradition.

Like most modern Western dharma practitioners I had an aversion to much of the theology and the moral codes of Christianity, but as a poet I was steeped in Christian symbolism and was trying to work it all out. So I took out my Tarot cards and looked for guidance..

I won't go into the details, but the reading was powerful and I came away feeling like I had made a break-through in understanding. Buddhadharma would be the tradition I practiced in the outer “solar world,” but in the inner “lunar world,” I would study and write poetry as a heretical Christian, like my hero William Blake.

Excited, I left my room to walk and there one block away, on the corner of 15^th and Valencia, was Lama Lodro!

To really appreciate this you must know that at that time this was one of the biggest crack dealing corners in San Francisco, crawling with buyers, dealers and gang bangers; guns, drugs and money. (It has been rebuilt and cleaned up since.) To see this Lama, who had practiced in caves in Tibet, studied with the 16^th Karmapa personally , whose picture touching foreheads with Trungpa Rinpoche was prominently displayed at the center, to see him standing on this corner smiling at me was uncanny. I was speechless, but bowed and said, “Lama.” He clearly would have talked to me, but seeing that I was too shy, he nodded and we passed.

He married me and my fiancee, and I went on retreats with him and had personal interviews and conversations, but I was his worst student ever. I admired some of the people who studied Tibetan and “joined up” so to speak, but it was clear that for me this was not to be.

I never asked him what he was doing there on the crack corner. In the prosaic world of ordinary experience he was just this chubby guy who had a son out of wedlock and a string of girlfriends some of whom were probably ticked off at him and a marriage or two, but he conducted extraordinary meditation retreats and had a combination of fierce pride and disarming humility I had never seen before. His every move seemed to have meaning even when it seemed casual or even “wrong.” Tiny things he said and did have lived in my imagination and answered numerous questions of the mind and heart ever since.

In my world of poetry and magic, I knew why he was there and I have never forgotten. He gave me the Tara Mantra and the Mani and inspired me to practice mantra and prostration right here in this crazy crack head world. There was also something in his presence that had nothing to do with any practice or experience at all. He might not even remember me, and he certainly would not approve of many of the things I have done but he was extraordinarily unbearably and relentlessly kind to me and never judged me either. For me he is mysteriously inseparable from the rest of my life and our social relationship had little to do with it. Some may say that invoking him in devotion is purely a matter of my mind, and has nothing to do with him. Maybe this is so. Who cares?

I bowed at the corner of 15^th and Valencia and chanted the Vajra Guru mantra and recited my poem to him:

Let every thought of you be a million bows
and every bow be a million more
Kind Teacher think of me
These six senses I gather up for you
Please use them to make others happy
In every lifetime may I be your worst disciple
cut off and alone, lost and confused
taking suffering, spreading joy
calling only on the Love and Kindness in your Heart
let me sing your Mani among the forgotten people
till the War stops

This poem never fails to make me weep. I decide that today as I bow, instead of my refuge prayer, I will sing the Mani in a way I learned from Lama Lodro. On I went to the Tenderloin to bow.

Next, I will steal Fire and rend the Veil.


Love to All,

John O.

Display of Experience

Woke up stiff and sore and ate the breakfast burrito I bought on the way home yesterday. Packed another burrito into my backpack for dinner, showered, glanced at the aspirin and wondered, “would that be cheating?” Not if I confess it to you dear readers, so the truth is out: anti inflammatories are used on JO prostration retreats as of today.

Yesterday I took a rug and my ukulele downtown. The rug seemed like a good idea and the ukulele was in case I felt like busking in the subway. But the rug became a drag to carry around when I was evicted and repositioned by the authorities or had to go the bathroom, and I was too tired to get the proper busking mojo going, so today I decided just to pack a yoga mat and make it simpler. Also packed my Tarot box and thought I might offer some readings by donation. I decided to walk the 3.5 miles downtown doing Tara practice to loosen my joints.

I walked and chanted in the predawn cool air and everything, even the vomit on Mission Street seemed magical. (Counted three separate incidents—all looked just like those fake rubber vomit gags you buy in joke shops). Suddenly I realized I had forgot the yoga mat. Uh oh. Prostrating in wet grass or pigeon shit was not going to be pleasant, but I didn't want to walk back either. “Guess the Lord—or 'causes and conditions' or whatever the hell it is that provides—will have to provide,” I thought and kept chanting but started looking for cardboard. The same helps them that help themselves.

I was losing faith when I arrived at UN Plaza. Lo and behold there they were! A pile of Office Depot folding table boxes exactly the right size. I was worried that I would have to read “office depot” all day long as I went down into the horizontal position, but I folded them the other way and they were as empty of content as experience is empty of substance. Just restful brown cardboard. I felt happy and free. Little did I know I would spend the rest of the day worrying about losing this prized possession. Cardboard is worth money on the recycling market and there were far more scavengers interested in my cardboard than there were thieves interested in my old rug. “You sure you want that dude?” they would ask, looking at it like it was a dollar bill.

It's a good thing we are not looking for “progress” on retreats, because I am a lot slower and more distracted today; slowed by sore muscles and distracted by a quivery vulnerable feeling in my chest. When I pray “Please look upon me with eyes of compassion” while in the vertical position with my chest opened up and my attention on the in-breath, I feel near tears. I would like to say it is because I am surrounded and moved by suffering humanity and urban animal life. (Counted three men without any legs and two pigeons with just one within an hour or two, and that's not even getting into the countless eruptions of anger around me, some by people spiting angry gibberish to themselves, others by people throwing angry threats to one another.)

But actually I think it is because I am feeling ashamed of the whole thing. Who am I to do this?

“I” is in there somewhere anyway. The fact that there is soreness and less strength today is not that big a deal in itself, but I don't have the same steady rhythm of prostrations to distract me from myself. And self is a spinning wheel of pride and shame. Heaven and hell. Today it's shame. Hell.

Oh well. Keep on bowing, John. Open your chest and let the “awakened one” see the shame. Breathe it out and let it go into the brown cardboard. Get up slowly (fewer prostrations per hour today for sure!) and do it again. When the tears do come, notice that they actually feel pretty good. Or rather the welling feelings that radiate from the heart through the throat and eyes feel good. Admit it. And no one will notice here among the almost unnoticed.

Almost unnoticed.

Here are my two favorite encounters of the day:

I was in the vertical position with my palms together in the universal mudra of prayer, when a movie star-handsome though somewhat mask-like chiseled face leaned into me like we were buddies sharing beers at a bar. He was wearing a black leather jacket, clean and well dressed and pulling a stack of luggage on a handcart. He motioned with hs thumb to the next block of Market and with buddy-buddy intimacy smiled and said:

“You tellin me that's the only titty club left on Market? Back in the eighties there were like five of them.”

I smiled and said that now there were so many full service massage parlors, maybe no one felt the need for the clubs anymore. He replied, “But you could get it there in the eighties. I's in there with a buddy and he said, 'don't look behind you,' but I did of course, and she was fucking this dude right there!”

I shook my head and grimaced in the classic male, “is that so?” move, and he shook his head, gave me a thumbs up and moved on with a “later, man...”

I recalled knowing a dancer or two at those old clubs, through my beautiful and relentlessly friendly ex-wife no less, who knew and knows everybody in town it seems. I returned to my prostration. “Till all are free...” I noticed my buddy pulling his luggage up and down the same couple of blocks for the next hour or so, as if maybe the clubs would reappear if he just kept at it.

Lunch today was on Rhoda, a lovely sweet filipina who asked me, “Would you like a sandwich?” Sure. (I am no liar in such matters.) She gave me a McDonald's burger and a Dr. Pepper and asked me whether I knew God loved me. As a matter of fact I did. I was in no mood for theological disputes with anyone so kind, and, anyway, I was feeling loved somehow. I said, ”Yes that is what I am doing here, bowing and feeling loved.”

She let the lack of a deity in that sentence go right past her. She was obviously pleased that I did not want to argue. “God loves everybody and He is in control,” she said. Here I was more tempted by theological dispute. I wanted to ask her why, if God was already in control here, did Jesus pray that God's will be done “on Earth as it is in Heaven”? But I agreed, smiled back at her lovely eyes and drank my Dr. Pepper instead. They were divine and the sweetness of both revived me.

She told me not to despair, and as a matter of fact I was feeling better as she went off to give a sandwich to an angry looking tattooed dyke who looked like she might be coming off a bender. Rhoda seemed bewildered but intrigued when I started bowing again.

Gotta love the display of experience.

Love to all,

John O.

Keep on Bowing in the Free World

Found a cafe with wireless and decided to post before I go back for the remaining 5 hrs of today's prostration retreat.

I was up till 2am giving  friend a Tarot reading, which was not very smart and made my 5am start time slightly unrealistic, but I was on the corner of Powell and Market doing prostrations at 6 sharp.

If you are thinking of indulging any tendencies toward exhibitionism, I do not recommend prostrations on the streets of San Francisco. You have to be a lot weirder than me to get noticed here, and as most of you know, I am pretty weird. Most people looked at me with about the same level of interest as they might have in a dying pigeon.

Except for a phone call to wish Diotima well before her sesshin, I bowed for three hours straight and during that time I had one person give me a dollar. But a schizophrenic came by spouting gibberish and dumped a handful of hard candies in my donation box. His only recognizable words were "this will help!" I took that as a good omen, and it is my proudest accomplishment of the day.

A dear friend from out of town came by and took some pictures which I might share at some point. She said I needed a better sign than my little hand printed one.

My only other visitors were San Francisco's finest, who asked me "Who are you bowing to?" I said, "You," and they didn't get my subtle reference to their Buddha nature, but made me promise to leave that spot by 9 am. They were back promptly at 9 to see that I bowed somewhere else and recommended UN Plaza where the riffraff hang, which is where I belong, no doubt about it. "We will welcome you there," said the smiling cop. He was pretty nice about it, and I thanked him.

After breakfast and an interesting discussion with my friend, I went to UN Plaza and bowed on the grass there till the sun came from behind the buildings and threatened me with melanoma. I moved to a shady spot near a building and was moved by security to a spot where I had an opportunity to practice with the "one taste" of Mahamudra. Well, "one smell" anyway, since the distinct odor of urine wafted from somewhere nearby. Actually a boombox playing old Shuggie Otis tunes was harder to deal with. Just keep bowing, John.

Before she left, my friend sneaked a $20 bill into my box and I planned to donate it along with some sponsorships to St. Anthony's Dining Room. But then a desperate rastafarian came by and gave me a very sad family hard luck story and begged me to buy a cannabis bud for $5. I happen to be a recovering canabbis addict and  offered him the $20, saying, "Here, man, your lucky day."

He was confused; in fact looked at me very suspiciously, but took it, and then after hesitating, as if it might be bad luck to do otherwise, he dropped a very nice looking bud in my box and left.

Great. Here I am trying to impress you all with my dharmic dedication and suddenly I have to fight off the urge to go buy a pipe and get loaded!

No problem, while listening to a conversation between the angel on my right shoulder and the devil on my left, a down-and-out hustler came by and offered to sell me me some probably hot luggage. I declined. He spied the candy and said, "Hey, candy! Can I have some?" I said, "Sure."

After he left, I looked and of course he stole the bud. Problem solved. But for quite a while I couldn't decide whether I was pissed off or relieved. Actually, I still don't know.

Another noteworthy event was that while I was bowing, trying to raise money to feed the hungry a group of people came by and handing out free lunches and I took one. Peanut butter sandwich, an orange and a carrot. Delicious! I talked to him and he told me they are a group of 10 people with no name who just make about 200 lunches and give them away.

I took a break and went over to St. Anthony's Dining Room to donate the $100 I collected online from generous sponsors. They were glad to get it, and I got a receipt, but the system seemed a little loose, and I started worrying that maybe the staff kept it for themselves. Hmm. Ah well, they looked like they could use it too, I guess.

All this karmic accounting is confusing as hell. Better get back to the streets.

Keep on bowing in the free world.

Love to all,

John O.

Tenderloin Meltdown Bowdown

To the pregnant schizophrenic girl who had me touch her belly

and told me she would birth the Savior of the World.

Your face was yellow and the swelling of your skinny body felt like a tumor.

My Teacher's painful vision of my overweening pride,

I never saw you again.

I bow down to you.

To the Vet who wept and told me “I killed them for nothing.”

You took my five dollars for a sandwich and a beer,

said “thank you, brother” and hugged me when I said I too have killed.

My Teacher's painful vision of my paralyzing shame,

I hope you found a job.

I bow down to you.

To the broken and addicted,

squealers, dealers and afflicted

to greedy johns and needy whores

and their mamas doing chores

and the hustlers running scams

and the bustlers trying to scram

to the children off to school

ignoring all the butts and drool

to the rollers cruising through

saving many from a few

until they lose it will-nilly

and beat some poor lone bastard silly

to those who preach the Unknown God

transgendered with the unreal bod

and the ladies cutting hair

while the crazy spit and stare

to the howlers and the moaners

cheap liquor vendors and bar owners

I too will do what I must do

until we don't.

I bow down to you!

Love,

John O.

Flame of Love

Though he fall into the blossoming flame
and smell the burning flesh and feel desire,
in his howl of agony and shame
the wise will hear the voice of someone higher.
This world must burn, desire for beauty rage.
Love spares neither flawed nor perfect mind.
The fool, the rogue, the sot, the sage,
Love burns to leave one ash behind.
He will. He will breathe deeper than he can.
From far beneath him lift his eyes above.
Look: John is a fine wise man.
But burnt.
                 I AM alone the flame of love.

                              [adapted from the Mr Bones Doggone-Versations]

Love,

Burnt John

Love and Death Sonnet for Diotima

Some point out rightly all things joined are parted.

There’s no exception to this bitter rule.

So why pursue what leaves one broken hearted?

Why love, they ask, when Love's end is so cruel?

I’m tempted to reply, they've not loved You.

But I know well that answer won’t persuade.

Another fool, they’ll say, who fears what’s true,

Who lives oblivious to Death’s sure blade.

I am a fool. Let that be stipulated.

For only fools are granted to glimpse this:

In perfect Love, not even Death is hated.

His cruel cleaver also joins in bliss.

All things must pass. This truth brooks no exception.

But Life’s our wedding. Death is our reception.

Love and Death to All,

- John O.

Mystery (for D)

Such a Mystery to tell

from high above your Fontanelle

to deep beneath your Sacred Toes,

there's a Mystery I know

I don't know, and cette je ne sai quoi

hushes me and pleads “tais toi!”

But as poet I must sing

this Mystery and I must bring

a thousand times through Heaven's Hell

such a Mystery to tell.

Forgive me if I tell it now:

You have made me Love somehow.

Yours in Your Mystery,

- John O.