Remembering

Driving through town today.
Radio scanning, lingers on male a cappella group singing “Star Spangled Banner.”
Stop to listen.
Take a moment to see the stars and stripes flick in the wind out the corner of my eye. Cotati Veterans Memorial.

Listening to the lyrics, never made the Orwell-Buddhism connection before:

“And the rockets red glare
the bombs bursting in air
gave proof thorough the night
that our flag was still there.”
(from Francis Scott Key’s SSB)

“War is Peace”
”Freedom is Slavery”
”Ignorance is Strength”
(from Orwell’s 1984)

A monk asked Tozan, “How can we escape the cold and heat?” Tozan replied, “Why not go where there is no cold and heat?” “Is there such a place?” the monk asked. Tozan commented, “When cold, be thoroughly cold; when hot, be hot through and through.
(from Zen Koan)

Through something’s opposite a thing itself is defined; understanding of what something is by what it is not. Or, we have greatest proof of the value of our country, our home, our freedom (our peace) when we are faced with its opposite.

This is not a political statement. On this Memorial Day, I am driving around aimlessly to procrastinate working on my poetry, having slipped under a covering of self-doubt. Listening to 98.3 Froggy FM (“real country variety”), I think about why we remember the dead, duality, and how it relates to the death of our selves — and the importance of remembering and then accepting this death. And the need for it.

I know what I am by what I was, am not, and will never be.

Or: Death is Life

There are so many dead of me. Each life I cannot live blossoms wastefully before me — unpluckable. Not able to bouquet. Perhaps I have grown to be a woman of grand accomplishment, a propeller spinning glorious, creating her own wake of energy: she the boat, she the passenger. She: the water.

Yes. I thought I would someday be standing on top of a very tall mountain, my achievements littering the mountain-side like wild flowers. All paths taken, multiple lives lived. There — I would see in the town below, where night has come to kiss roof-tops, only the glow from neon humming: my name in lights.

But instead down below, I, through the graveyard of my possible selves, unborn: “We all must put to rest Possibility under headstones ever-multiplying.” Laying down the flowers.

I could have stayed in San Francisco;
I could have gone to law school;
I could have married my high-school boyfriend;
I could have gone into farming;
I could have worked my way still up corporate america, jet-setting until death by vertigo;
I thought I would be a teacher, an academic, an actress, a writer. I thought I might be skinnier, suicidal, married, have a master’s degree. I thought I’d be living in Spain.

I am none of these things. Instead I am

I have life but one. And sweet that it is this. So now there is no remedy for anxiety of what is not, except for medicating with what is. Mediocrity must be swallowed.

And who is this that wanders, tripping on epitaphs fresh from the chisel? It is “I” and she, too, must be put to rest.

There is a singular experience, yours the grass crunches. Softly, dried carnations: winter not far behind. It is stated. The headstones shrug, silent.

No time for mourning undone acts. Lay down the death of lives possible. Thank them for their death, what they’ve done: they are there to show you what you are not, you are not to know what you are. From death, life.

“True words seem paradoxical”
(from Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching)

And did you know? The “Star Spangled Banner” has four stanzas? Enjoy:

O say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation,
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the Heav’n-rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our Trust”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave

. . . [ ] Memorial day