the voice of many waters

Can you fathom the mysteries of God? Can you probe the limits of the Almighty? They are higher than the heavens above—what can you do? They are deeper than the depths below —what can you know? Their measure is longer than the earth and wider than the sea.

  One of the strange silver linings of living in a dying town is even the peons have access to cheap rent within walking distance of the lake. It is true that most of our lakefront is cut off by highways and salt mines and the homes of the affluent, but to have the simple primal pleasure of being near rocks and water, it is there, and we make use of it. It keeps us alive, keeps us from killing ourselves, lets us clear our heads. Is it some kind of thing wired in us to love rivers, oceans, lakes, to live near them, to drink and baptize and immerse, because they are our lifeblood, we would die without what they give.

The rational side of my weird brain knows that these moments of extra intense melancholia have their reasons and that they'll pass, that feelings and reality are not always congruent, and so I let the waterworks dry up and went to the park where the rocks and water are, and walked down, navigating the concrete breakers and the scrubby trees growing between the boulders that keep the shoreline from washing away.

I try not to think of all the people who used to come down here with me, all the memory of this place,  I try not to think of the occasionally encroaching loneliness that hovers closer like a bird of prey each year.

The waves were too high to walk across to the beach of pebbles beneath the cliffs so I made my way to a flat rock not completely soaked by water, far enough to not infringe upon someone doing the same thing. And I sat there for a couple hours at least, in non-yogic quiet meditation, silently pouring out my soul to the creator of all this beauty, seeking some kind of oneness with indescribable longing, with the waves breaking and the water undulating through watering the deep green moss on the sides of the rock where I perched, taking a break only to grab a sweater out of the car as the sun sank lower and changed from orange to pink.

The water in this lake may be dirty, and I haven't swam in it since I was in my teens, but there was this cathartic cleansing in the moment, of the sense of smallness of one's self and one's inner drama in the face of elementals that made me realize I should seek out this place and others like it much more than I do.

Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me.

I walked up to the top of the hill to watch the swollen pink sun sink into the violet waters, with the sounds of the birds and the sweet smell from the honey locust trees, we were all enraptured by the newest installation of the endless cycle, the teenage girl scrawling in a notebook, the Muslim family on the park bench, the dead ringer for latter-day Kerry King, the couple with the big hair and the couple embracing on the breakwall, and the old man on his night walk. As the light vanished, we walked back to our cars, back to the neighborhood, experiencing some small moment of transcendence.

For the grace of the presence, be grateful.
Touch the cloth of the robe,
but do not pull it toward you,
or like an arrow it will leave the bow.

Images. Presence plays with form,
fleeing and hiding as the sky does in water,
now one place, now nowhere.

Imagination cannot contain the absolute.
These poems are elusive
because the presence is.

I love the rose that is not a rose,
but the second I try to speak it, any name
for God becomes so-and-so, and vanishes.

What you thought to draw lifts off the paper,
as what you love slips from your heart.

 - rumi

Wizards, Weed, and Outer Space

Over the Elixir of St. Drogo this morning, we pondered the aesthetics of one of our mutually shared favorite genres, known for its general worship of Sabbath and Zeppelin, downtuned guitars, and vaguely arabesque instrumental passages and a generally kitschy lyrical amalgam well-known to teenage boys who read Tolkien and comics and played card games that involved mages and sages, and in this case, the girls who loved them. As I've gotten older, I've realized how devoid of estrogenic conversation I was when I was younger, because I still don't always know what to talk about in the world of women, and inevitably fall back into geekery of board games and MST3K, debating the merits of guitar solos and quoting Spinal Tap.

It may in part be the cultural heritage of being Parmastani in the last part of the 20th century and growing up on a certain strain of lovable loser pop culture, of acid-drenched classic rock, cherrypicking our favorite bands, deriding the boomers who still prefer the polemics of St. Robert of Dylan. That's completely different of course, because War Pigs has always resonated way more for me as a timeless commentary on the world than any Lennonista giving peace a chance or imagining a world that will never exist.

As a long-haired geeky teenage girl, I got out piles of CDs from the library, delving into genres without regards to cachet of coolness, and along with the spiky noisetastic indieish rock that actually had loud guitars and some teeth as opposed to what The Kids are into these days, found the sonics of stoner-rockdom much to my liking though the only thing close to a mind-altering substance I'd ever imbibed was an ill-advised Surge drinking contest at someone's birthday party because I'm really not too thrilling in real life. I transferred in junior year and spent a year anonymous, listening to a discman and doing my homework at the far end of the cafeteria, holed up in my room painting on the weekends of taking long walks with the dog before finding a niche later on. I like people, but I find I still enjoy the solitude.

Blame it on the Soundgarden, perhaps, and the college radio I listened to while getting my braces done and cutting class with my dad to drive around and listen to the likes of Pentagram as a gateway drug to the drop C, because the acolytes and contemporaries of the rest of the Seattle bands were found wanting. It didn't necessarily have to be earthshatteringly new-sounding, it just had to sound good, have that right amount of heavy low end and trippy lightness of being.

While the Fu Manchus and the Nebulas were a little too testosterony for me, as I'm into neither babes nor bikes, the more mellowed out sounds of Kyuss and Dead Meadow, the soulfulness and murk of Corrosion of Conformity, the sublime sludginess of the Melvins. There is a certain dorktastic aesthetic that doesn't lend itself well to hipsterdom. The touchstones don't involve New York artists, or the usual canonicals. D&D, Lord of the Rings, suburban drugs, wizards, outer space, the kind of things that get emblazoned on tie-dye t-shirts seen on middle-aged women. Kitsch, I guess, but awesome.

Up until the time I was gainfully employed here, this wasn't the kind of thing that most of my friends were into, as in high school, the most underground it got was usually Pantera, and the metal kids I knew in college were into sounds more technical and the indie kids preferred the Locust or whoever if they weren't listening to something more folky or twee. It's never going to be the thing that The Kids are into, if the ones in my world are any indication, and it's not as much a chick thing I guess most of the time, and I've never been one for leafy substances so I feel like that makes me even more of an outlier. At least 50 Foot Wave, Worm Ouroboros and Subrosa still like the low end and don't make me feel quite so alone.

passio

I was late, and was foiled in attempts to sneak through the back where incidentally the choir was set up and already singing, no seats to be found so I kept moving forward, finally settling on the cold marble steps of the altar in almost complete darkness as the tintinnabulated voices and mournful strings soared up into the vaulted ceiling as the sunset light shining through the stained glass windows faded into darkness.

The words of John's gospel translated from Latin, the chorus of voices narrating, and I marveled at the banality of the church music I grew up hearing that lacked the gravitas, the weight of sadness, the magnitude of events sanitized by a culture that cherishes positivity rather than profundity and sanitizes anything morbid or painful. I read through highlighted pages of Isaiah, of brutalized suffering servants and promises of judgment and mercy and the intensity of the sound and its meaning overwhelms me in the darkness so perfect for pondering, because it's just me and sound and God and here, here is exactly where I needed to be.

 I sit there scrawling prayers into a notebook and weeping because while it's sunk in before, it's hit nerves that have never been quite so exposed, of the injustice of the state, the toxicity of misguided religiosity, of betrayal and desertion of one's closest friends, of selflessness and incomprehensible love, of our own pathetic mortality and attempts at morality. Forgive us, for we know not what we do, it is so hard to even begin to understand.