the j krishnamurti guide to swimming

i was looking at a branch and it loved me. with all the love a person or a pet can muster, with everything in it's very being. i should explain.

i woke this morning earlier than usual and stepped outside to smoke a kamel red light and read my overly beat up, overly used up copy of Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters.

i went inside after a few minutes and decided that Salinger just wasn't what i needed right then. i dug out my copy (after some stellar bookshelf examination) of j. krishnamurti's Think on These Things and returned to the back porch.

i was reading the chapter on orderly thinking (perhaps i should take a moment to explain the layout of the book. it was transcribed from a collection of his talks in india in the late fifties. each chapter begins with his specific talk about his chosen subject [seldom more than a few pages] and then he open the floor for questions. rarely do the questions have anything to do with the topic of the talk itself). this young student was asking him about happiness. rather than trying to explain his answer i'll just include it here. P>

"questioner: what is happiness in life"

krishnamurti: if you want to do something pleasurable, you think you will be happy when you do it. you may want to marry the richest man, or the most beautiful girl, or pass some examination, or be praised by somebody, and you think that by getting what you want you will be happy. but is that happiness? does it not soon fade away, like the flower that blossoms in the morning and withers in the evening? yet, that is our life, and that is all we want. we are satisfied with such superficialities; with having a car or a secure position, with feeling a little emotion over some futile thing, like a boy who is happy flying a kite in a strong wind and a few minutes later is in tears. that is our life, and with that we are satisfied. we never say, "i will give my heart, my energy, my whole being to find out what happiness is." we are not very serious, we don't feel very strongly about it, so we are grateful with little things.

but happiness is not something that you can seek; it is a result, a by-product. if you pursue happiness for itself, it will have no meaning. happiness comes uninvited; and the moment you are conciouss that you are happy, you are no longer happy. i wonder if you have noticed this? when you are suddenly joyous about nothing in particular, there is just the freedom of smiling, of being happy; but, the moment you are concious of it, you have lost it, have you not? being self-conciously happy, or pursuing happiness, is the very ending of happiness. there is happiness only when the self and its demands are put aside.

you are taught a great deal about mathematics you give your days to studying history, geography, science, physics, biology and so on; but do you and your teachers spend any time at all thinking about these far more serious matters? do you ever sit quietly, with your back very straight, without movement, and know the beauty of silence? do you ever let your mind wander, not about petty things, but expansively, widely, deeply, and thereby explore, discover?

and do you know what is happening in the world? what is happening in the world is a projection of what is happening inside each one of us; what we are, the world is. most of us are in turmoil, we are acquisitive, possesive, we are jealous and condemn people; and that is exactly what is happening in the world, only more dramatically, ruthlessly. but neither you nor your teachers spend any time thinking about all this; and it is only when you spend some time every day earnestly thinking about these matters that there is the possiblility of bringing about a total revolution and creating a new world. and i assure you, a new world has to be created, a world which will not be a continuation of the same rotten society in a different form. but you cannot create a new world if your mind is not alert, watchful, expansively aware; and that is why it is so important, while you are young, to spend some time reflecting over these very serious matters and not just pass your days in the study of a few subjects, which leads nowhere except to a job and death. so do consider seriously all these things, for out of that consideration there comes an extraordinary feeling of joy, of happiness."

at some point during the reading of this i noticed that tiny spectral rain drops had begun to fall, grazing the surface of the pool.

there is a certain closeness i feel with existence when it rains so i took the opportunity to pause from reading about the preciousness of life and actually expereience it.

i carefully, in an act i could only be clear about were i to call it sensual removed each peice of clothing from my body. i felt a deep admiration fro them suddenly. the cotton shirt i wore was the progeny of two specific cotton plants growing in the depths of south carolina somewhere and the cotton itself was picked by hands that feed a family. by a man who loves his wife, hugs his children maybe too much and kisses their eyelids as they fall to sleep.

the denim from my jeans was processed in a factory by a woman who works twelve hour days at minumum wage because she can't get into the union. when she gets off work she buys a pack of cigarettes and a six pack of miller high life and goes home to her empty house to do the things that give her cause to wake. she makes a simple dinner for herself. a canned vegetable, a breast of chicken she baked at the week's start and a dinner roll that comes in those pillsbury rollout tinfoil tubes. the ones that pop when you open them and eats dinner on the green knitted placemats that she got when her grandmother died (her careful, old bones had crafted them).

then she plops herself in her garage sale recliner and watches melrose place ruruns on channel 52 (the only one that comes in clearly) and drinks beer after beer until she passes out.

the neclace i've had since i was fifteen and was made for me by the woman who smiles more than any i've known and takes pictures that remind you how beautiful the world is.

then i loved all of these people immensly. for having the strength to wake each day and make the clothing that keeps me from getting scorched by the sun that lights our world.

as i stepped naked from the piles of loves and lives at my feet and from beneath the awning i began to feel the raindrops falling on me, cleansing me, trickling down my spine, tickling my toes.

i stepped into the pool and it was the temperature the swimmings pools in any heaven worth it's name must be, so i slipped all the way in. i felt the droplets of water (billions of them) all over my body, sorround my testicles, slip between my toes and fingers, tracing behind my knees and on the inside of my elbows. i slithered in up to my neck and watched the rain hit the water and bounce in controlled frenzy upwards reaching out to god and a starlight that had gone longsince.

i could feel the rain still addressing my forehead and nose and suddenly i noticed a plant overhanging the water loosely. this plant had been there since my childhood when i lived here, through the years i lived in colorado and the house was rented, until now, when i am soaking up the last few days of my rental of the house before it sells and i am forced to move on.

(even the word "forced" feels so out of context with the softness of my mood. just writing it takes great effort.)

i realized i had an erection, though it couldn't be called sexual or lustful even, just a genuine physical excitement at the fact that life is.

i wanted to be beneath the branches of the plant. the one i'de only noticed in passing or as a part of a landscape that must be trimmed back and manicured. so i slipped beneath the branches of it against the two foot rock wall along the fence side of the pool and felt the raindrops cease to hit me with the seldom exception of that one determined droplet that felt the dire need to baptize me in the sacred water that formed its body. i let marinate a moment the miracle that formed me in the vulva of a woman that raindrops washed just as surely as me.

in that moment i felt very close to that green leafy, nameless object dangling above my head sheltering me, not from the rain, but from the storm life often seems to be.

i leaned to smell the newness of the branch noting the detail with which it was created (with all the careful precision of a vagina, specific to itself. on the first glance, the same as those before, but at a real look, new and made just for it, with characteristics all it's own). the rain sat trembling in groups on the branches.

at that moment i felt the branch lean inwards, maybe as an offshoot of the slight breeze but it seemed to rest there. the branches hugging me, letting me know the only way they knew how that there was love for me in this world. it's easy to forget such things in the bustle of the sex and piss and limelight that is life.

(i wonder where the term limelight comes from.)

i stepped from beneath the branches suddenly drastically in love with life, and moved into the center of the pool. i put my arms out and made my best attempt to hug the sky, the falling rain, the wind and every sentient thing that has ever rested on this pile of dirt called earth.

(this must have looked quite odd were any onlookers near their windows at that moment.)

suddenly i felt felt new and sacred. this, i believe is the experience originally craved and dolled out by water junkies like john the baptist. this feeling.

i stepped from the pool and stood on the gravel-cement combo that is so hot to the touch in the dead of summer and let the breeze hit me. it was picking up, shriveling my penis and harndening my nipples. it was cold. and cold is new.

i walked back to the porch and pulled some shorts on and threw a shirt over my head without drying off (cold is good, but when your balls are in your lungs, that's not) and sat down on my green gingham sofa made of polynesian bamboo wicker. i lit a kamel red light. it has been a long time since i've smoked this brand. i took a long drink of water then proceeded to the next question in krishnamurti which, of course, i will include here.

"questioner: what is real life?

krishanmurti: what is real life? a little boy asked this question. playing games, eating good food, running, jumping, pushing-that is real life for him. you see, we divide life into the real and the false. real life is doing something which you love to do with your whole being so that there is no inner contradiction, no war between what you are doing and what you think you should be doing. life is then a completely integrated process in which there is tremendous joy. but that can happen only when you are not psychologically depending on anybody, or on any society, when there is compplete detachment inwardly, for only then is there a possiblilty of really loving what you do. if you are in a state of total revolution, it does not matter whether you garden, or become prime minister, or do something else; you will love what you do, and out of that love there comes an extraordinary feeling of creativeness."

then i realized: i don't miss her right now. it has been almost a year since i could even fathom the way it felt to not miss her. it feels good. and i can almost remember this way how the world smelled before her, during her. i can almost remember me.

i looked up to see a squirrel on the fence, just under the awning of the house, where the drain pipe filters water from the roof and downwards in a tap dance symphony to the driveway, alleyway, street, stormdrain, lake. and all the while droplets join the march, glad to be in like company.

the squirrel was drying itself (it had had enough rain), leaning upside down dangling it's head over the inside of the fence rubbing frantically against the dryness of the fence in a fluid motion that reminded me of rocky IV when he's in siberia training and doing the situps off the blacony of the cabin and leaning up to let fly two controlled punches. (i have found that most things in life worth noting can be found in one of the rocky films.)

the squirrel looked at me for a long while. right in the eyes and i knew then that it was male. we had a man to man chat without words. he seemed to be letting me know that it's okay, that life can be a motherfucker but a man's job in life is to be strong. strong for children. strong for women. strong for the world. and i knew then that just as a woman's job is to be understanding when no man can or will that what must be endured, can be endured.

he went back to cleaning his brown coat, i went back to reading, and the spell was broken.

so now, hours later, i am mostly just thankful. thankful for the plant i never paid any attention to before now. thankful for the fence that gave jim squirrel a place to sit. thankful for the porch that gave me a place to sit. thankful for the breeze for overnighting me air to breathe. thankful for the rain for falling across my body in a way that a shower just can't do. and thankful for a pen with which to scribble this little ditty down. without these things i am nothing. amen.

2002-09-08 | 1:46 p.m.
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