A Thursday Evening in Boulder

This was tribal.  This was a rite of passage and the whole village had circled around the fire for it.  I wasn’t quite sure what to think, and an inner skeptical voice spoke at times within me.  Sometimes it’s easy to be cynical, to think “bullshit” about gentle, open, honest, very present love.  Do you experience that voice too?  Here I thought I was a loving guy, and yet there I was disbelieving.  Atheism, or the deepest kind of atheism, seems to be disbelieving in love.

Something special happened tonight.  Having been invited by the soon-to-be bride and lightly acquainted with her fiancé and friend, I began the evening as a stranger among roughly ten guys—all “hippies” (a limiting stereotype I’ll employ to help set the scene). 

After hanging and good conversation, everyone sat lotus-style in a circle.  The circle then emerged as a sacred space in and through which blessings, prayers, empowerments, ritual, even powerful music whispered love into the groom-to-be as well as each man.

Afterwards and ready to leave, I had two conversations I really needed to have AND with two men whom I now have instant respect for.  I mean, wow!, you could literally see the truth blazing from their eyes, eyes which somehow expanded to contain a highly awakened and accomplished being within. They never blinked and you saw god in their eyes.  I had stumbled into an elite brotherhood.  As windows to the soul, I think eyes facilitate another—a deeper— conversation sometimes providing a healing while conversing.  Soul-to-soul communication.  The real internet (inter is Latin for "between").  I was speaking with gurus, with god, with truth, and I recognized it, even saw it wink at me, whom it had known before.  These guys didn’t fuck around; they practiced what they preached.  And they preached love and living from the heart, not the head, and a god that we all know—that we all are.  This is it.  Something important is here.  I can’t forget this night.  I decided to stay awake into the night in order to share this with you, dear reader.  Everything is impermanent.  I could die now or I may not awake tomorrow.  Don’t ask me why or how, that simply proves my point.  I had to share this. I had to inscribe it on the "eternal" marble of cyberspace.  Please, extract the ambrosia from it!

I hope to avoid that deepest of atheisms, that giving up on my all-too-humanness.  Once you find yourself in that kind of denial, you give up on love, you become a nihilist—in many respects DEAD on the inside.  I may always have that voice, however, and I must not punish myself for being human.  May I be mindful of that voice, though.  May I seduce myself back to the path of love and the present moment.  Carpe momentum!  We have that power at this second, at each fluid moment of our time, in each breath and in the smallest particle of time. 

A golden, mature, gentle wisdom is emerging in me.  I’m going to listen to it as much as I can. I am going to try and put it into practice as much as I can.  And when I can’t, I’m going to try and be gentle with myself, not push too hard…  Love thyself.      

I love you, 

Nick

Cohen Bros. Movie and the Ethic of Relationship

So I saw the Cohen Brothers’ Burn After Reading last night after chillin at rapper Talib Kwali's after-party--another new adventure!  After seeing it, I felt like I enjoyed a film that I didn’t completely grasp.  My experience with The Big Lebowski had a similarly lagged start but blossomed into an all-time favorite of mine.  The “Cohen aesthetic” twinkled throughout Burn, highlighting their mastery of conveying character-feeling. You'll see this at work when the camera focuses for a blatantly longer time on a character's idiosyncrasies, making for a slight uncomfortableness for the viewer.

 I think the film comments on human insincerity and the decline of an individual ethic when in relationship.  It highlighted a rampant materialism draining personal goodness and virtue.  It hints of the transient nature of life and one’s ability to shape it into new, sometimes dangerous, mosaics.  All this, of course, when we’re not randomly stumbling into things. The movie seemed to alert me to the reality that adults may be as lost and superficial as they were in bygone periods. At least the majority seems may be. 

Are ethical individuals going extinct then?  Is there renewed interest in living a life of systematic ethic—a kind of focused commitment to a general way of living that colors one’s total life?  Vegetarianism, green living, Christian anarchism, organic food, etc. tell us that people are definitely interested.  The ethics of human relationships fascinate me, as I believe them important for my time and place here in America (as well as my own and others' life).  I believe all humans ultimately, and fundamentally, want deep security and fulfillment—to love and be loved—and so an ethics of relationship, especially romantic ones, seems to be a practice vital to our times of individualism, materialism, and technological industrialism and development.  As an aside, the polyglot-Pope John Paul II seems to be similarly interested in this field as seen in his writings like Love and Responsibility.  I’m sure most of you have observed the depersonalizing of human interaction that the texting and Facebook phenomenon has brought along with its fun benefits.  Do many people, then, suffer because of a lack of sincerity, sensitivity, and true commitment to deep love? I think so.

Consider, then that it's an exciting time in our evolution and a tuning of our ethical structures, especially our ethic of relationship (and relationship is also seen in earth-human, animal-human, etc), may not be a bad idea at all...