Coal Fire Mind

Coal Fire Mind

Greg Young

Copyright © 2012 by Greg Young

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Part 1, Enter the Coal Fire Mind

• Fishing for Something

• On the lam with the moon

• Double Pane

• The Origin of Wind

• Recalcitrant Vehicle

• Healing the World

• Walking

• Talking About Cups

• Bless this Chaos

• Yin and Yang

• Ahhh, Family!

• Grandma

• Private Places

• Salt Air

• Death of the Quadrupes

• Conflict Knows

• Conflict

• The M word

• So Much for Grace…and Dignity

• More to Write About

• Sounding

• Art and War

• Perpetual Motion

• Leaving

• Miserable Legacy

• Part 2, Dallas

• Return of a Son

• Email from A….

• Victoria

• Email from A….

• Missing

• Remarkable Time

• Part 3, Korea

• Boundaries

• They Are Testing What?

• War Dreams

• Culture Shock

• Gender Relations

• Teaching

• To the Real

• In the Classroom

• Age Matters

• Deadly Hierarchy

• Sue

• Homogeneity

• Part 4, Looking For Amanda: The Early Years

• Constant Motion

• The Navy

• Marie-Louise

• Winnie

• Hawaii to Seattle

• Blue-Collar Funk

• Barbara

• Part 5, Still Looking for Amanda: New York City, India, Ireland and Seattle

• The Enigmatic City

• Moving to New York City

• The Tibetan Connection

• India

• Taking Flight

• Out There Alone

• The Train to Delhi

• Light in the Morning

• Two Hearts and the Sacred Cow

• The Irish

• Hash Dream

• Seattle Again

• Rocks

• Two Lives Aborted

• Part 6, The Way Back to Amanda: Mountains, Rivers, Sacrificial Fowl and One Witch

• Climbing with John

• Into the Spirit

• Manic Delusion?

• Dream of the Drum

• Initiation

• A Veil Lifted

• One Love?

• Mexico, Texas, Wales, Korea…Full Circle

• Love Is a Paper Trail

• My Routine

• About Writing

• Reaping What You Sow

• What’s In A Name?

• Dreamtime

• God Wanna Be

• Viral Discretion

• Pig Plu

• Fear of the Unknown

• Coincidence or…?

• Deception and the Eternal Mirror

• Deeper

• Caged

• Foiled Again

• Fly Away

• Bah

• Space Travel

• Long Goodbyes

• Definition of Distance

• Promises Unkept

• God is Dead

• Fear

• Doubt and Indecision

• Ode to the Kids

• Another Mirror

• By Bus: Korea

• Fear of Famine

• My New Travel Manifesto

• Lush

• Redemption

• Part 7, Seattle: One Last Time

• Circles and Chickens

• Shadowy Past

• The Witch and Radio Shack

• Circles and Trees

• Las Vegas

• Truth

• Desert Night Excursion

• Married Life

• Part 8, Paralysis in Purgatory and The Email

• Life and Death

• Amanda’s Appeal

• My Lame Appeal

• Now

• Lists and Lethargy

• Limbo

• Day 34 (That is 34 business days)

• I Love You So Much!

• Leaving and Arriving

• Backed into a corner, to write myself out of it.

• A Final Perspective?

• Acknowledgments

For

Amanda

Part 1

Enter the Coal Fire Mind

Freund, es ist auch genug. I’m Fall du mehr willst lesen, So geh und werde selbst die Schrift und selbst das Wesen —Angelus Silesius

Friend, this is enough. If you want to read more, go and be yourself the letter and the spirit.

Coal is life compressed, time compressed. I’ve noticed that while I’m tending the fire, I’m tending to many things. My life has been compressed; I’m like a chunk of coal ready to expend heat, experience. I then strike the match that lights the wood that starts the coal - pik, tip, crack, tik, snap. Life from another time is released from its deep black, chunk of coal prison to heat me, Amanda, Teg and the house by the sea in Moelfre, Anglesey in north Wales.

When does the burning start and stop? I have lain dormant until this moment and everything that came before will burn, layer by layer. What will become of me as I blaze away toward my core? Who can predict what could happen after having been held down and time is finally liberated, life liberated?

We eat, drink and absorb life and the sun. Parts, little selves, grow and die; we grow and we die falling on a palette and mixing together to create the next moment. I’ve suddenly realized that eight years have passed and now I lie in the arms of my lover, whom I should never have left. Now, as though the waiting made the reuniting sweeter, we start anew and slowly we fill space with us.

Fishing for Something

From a window looking to the bay I hear Amanda talking about the man I see in the blue boat, there just off the shore. He works alone – setting the wheel, walking to the stern to drop a trap anchor that sinks and sets as the boat pulls forward to release traps from the gunwale. Amanda spins a tragedy yarn: As a roofer he had worked with his father, who fell from on high onto a metal spike and died. Now he works alone. He and his work continue to float from my right to my left, like frames of a motion picture as narrated by my love.

On the lam with the moon

I am afforded the luxury of expressing the full moon in my veins as its ultraviolet mastery changes tides and moods; here at Swn-Y-Don, our house (pronounced Soon-UH-Dawn in Welsh), and translated as sound of the waves, I can run with the moon and love unconditionally. I don’t need the conviction of condemning others for what I too have done. I can look at myself in the mirror and know that at each moment I’m new and that my past is wilting there behind me, as I run with the moonlight.

Double Pane

I’m here and happy to be here sitting on the other side of the wind that blows off Swndt Bay. It’s cold, and I’ve been cold all day as the northeasterly wind has been at 25 knots for more than 24 hours now. I know that I’ve a fire here, and a warm bed and someone to share it with. I have a hot meal if I want it. It’s all here in this safe place behind two-foot-thick walls and an inch of glass, away from all the things that are cold and dark and without possibility.

I can see the reflection of the kitchen on the great picture window that looks out onto the black, friendless night. As the wind rushes up the field from the rocks below, it reaches a maximum velocity now, and pushes at the double-paned glass and distorts the mirrored image. The glass is there between me and the cutting wind and the insidious night; it is just a thin membrane between me and isolation, or my pleading voice muted by the fierce blow; cold, puffy hands with clumsy, numb fingers; wet rock; a windblown head and the untenable thought that no one is coming.

And I can’t get out of my mind the question of why I deserve such a luxurious life.

The Origin of Wind

Is it possible that wind has an origin? Can a scientist say That wind came from umm…over there by that bush? I can say that I’m from New Orleans because I was born there. If I were the wind, I can’t imagine where I’d say I was from. Over there, I’d say with as much conviction as I could muster. But my eyes would betray me.

But I’m the one sitting here writing this and I know where I was born. And when the wind comes from the northeast for five days at a ferocious pace, my eyes look like the wind’s – looking for a new place to be, looking for things misplaced, looking for a steady mind to muss up, looking for whence I’ve come.

It is curious here in Anglesey that once you’ve driven one mile from the coast, the wind is gone again – as still as to bring a pond to a mirror. The recondite force stirs my heart; I want to stay inside and watch the roiling sea. I’m incredulous as I ask, Can you believe this wind? only to have Amanda shrug her shoulders because she is from this abstruse land of wind aplenty.

Is it bothering you? she says, and I have no answer. A mountain man once told me that the wind, more than any other characteristic of the mountains, has been known to drive men mad. So, with eyes spinning, I say No, I just don’t know how it can just keep blowing day after day. And her settled look defies the wind; I’m left looking out the window for a reprieve.

Recalcitrant Vehicle

Everything visible, concrete… is purely an expression of an idea, and thus a mediator of the invisible. —Dogen

Amanda has spent some time defying definition. First, her body is what she would love to undefine; and then, as far as she is concerned, everything else can be what it is without bothering to name it. You see, she has known from an early age that she does not want to reincarnate; she doesn’t want to come back here. In a late night discussion it was intimated that she would rather not be here now. I must have become immediately edgy at this defining moment as she continued, It’s not that I’m suicidal, it’s just that what most people talk about is complete bollocks. And I guess I’m just bored with it all. I agreed with her, but found exception to the desire not to be where one is. Surely, to be is a concept or possibly an attainable goal, but to not be seems counterintuitive. If you wish to escape or leave from where you are, on a constant basis, how can there be any satisfaction – in anything? To not define would seem to work out well for a cloistered Buddhist monk, but when you have to live in this world, not defining seems to me to be a bit limiting. Funny, it seems that not defining somehow defines you, puts you in your place, possibly a place that would require no judgment.

The house we live in is called Swn-Y-Don. I like the idea of naming a house; the house is then animated with imagery and life. I would hate to go through life known only by my social security number. My name is from the Greek Gregorios, and means watchful, alert. With all this in mind, I suggested that we either paint Swn-Y-Don on the house, or make a small sign for it. This was met with a great deal of resistance, understandable considering her ethic of not defining. The fact that I don’t want to put the name of the house on the house is not an outward manifestation of my desire to avoid definition.

Healing the World

Amanda is three months from becoming a licensed homeopath; a career path based in a healing philosophy where, the patient is not the innocent victim of some quirk of nature, but actually the author of his or her own sickness, as proposed by Thorwald Dethlefsen and Rudiger Dahlke, M.D. in their book The Healing Power of Illness. None of us is a victim then. It is up to us take responsibility for everything that is sick in ourselves and in our society. For the source and cure of any illness, we need only to turn our focus inward and not outside ourselves toward most modern pharmaceuticals that only treat symptoms, create numerous side-effects and allow an illness to hide in a drug-induced penumbra.

Dethlefsen and Dahlke continue, The moment people cease to interpret world events and the outworkings of their own personal destiny, their existence sinks into meaninglessness and senselessness.

Walking

Walking is a natural part of life in the UK. It seems as though everyone walks. There are footpaths everywhere you go. Landowners are required to give access if a public right of way crosses their land.

I walk here around Moelfre, our village. I meet others with their dogs and normally just exchange nods. Yesterday I met a couple whose Airedale and Teg, our Jack Russell, got along famously. Although I haven’t been here more than one and a half months, I could tell that these folks were not from here; they were too inquisitive.

People who want to know something about me have a certain look about them. I see them looking past my shirt and skin for anything that might tip them off about who I am; at times they appear to be trying to peer around a corner. They wanted to know if I lived here and I told them yes. They offered quid pro quo that they had just discovered Moelfre only last year; they love to come in the winter because it’s quiet; they left the kids with the grandparents and took off for the weekend. Their necks craned to see inside my bucket, but I put the lid on quickly. I sometimes find it difficult to find the words to even say hello on my walks. I’m either still writing which means I’m in the middle of an out-of-body experience, or I’m mesmerized by the light, the wind or the way the stones are formed on the beach after the movement of the tides. My voice seems to come from a different place – like from one of those parallel universes where I spend my time while writing. My lips move and sometimes I wonder what it is that I’ve said.

Talking About Cups

I don’t like drinking from that cup, she said.

Why not? I said.

The ceramic is too thick, you see?

Yeah, I like drinking from thin porcelain and glass. Things seem to taste better.

Yeah, I wonder why that is, she pondered.

I don’t know. Maybe because we have thicker lips than most people. Maybe people with thin lips like thicker drinkware, I said.

She laughed, mused and sipped her hot coffee.

I thought we needed more evidence for our case, so I added, The Germans came up with the pilsner glass, and for that matter, they have a whole host of glassware for beer. As do the Belgians.

I thought we were on to something original, she said.

Bless this Chaos

People who fear disorder more than injustice will only produce more of both. —William Sloane Coffin

In any relationship there are those blissful moments that we treasure because there exist the other times that aren’t so euphoric. I’ve noticed, actually, that Amanda and I have acute differences that could eventually cause a panic in my pedantic soul.

Domestic chaos doesn’t seem to bother her. What is domestic chaos? ‘Tis when the kitchen counter is constantly full of so many products and kitchenware that while I’m cooking and want to use a certain ingredient I have to pick every container up, one at a time, to find what I need. While I’m trying to sort these things out in a kitchen big enough for two people, in comes the nephew, aged five, and he wants Amanda to cook him some porridge. She obliges. Now there are two grown people in the kitchen cooking on a four-burner stove, a five-year-old standing on a stool and Teg trying to follow Amanda’s every step by weaving between my legs, her legs and the legs of the stool. And then the phone rings – entropy Swn-Y-Don style.

In addition, there’s a sort of overstocking of flat surfaces throughout the house. It is more the function of a house with no storage space that has two occupants who have full lives and the flavor of many interests, than it is a function of some kind of laziness - though we are lazy. The house is replete with organic clutter, including shells, heart-shaped rocks, white-striped rocks, beach glass, candles, books, magazines, gift cards, pictures, photos… The list goes on.

So, in the middle of this harried scene, I escape and perch myself at the dining table with a perfect view of the kitchen and I watch as Amanda stands at the stove and wipes a small plastic ledge just below the controls for the stovetop. This little ledge, in my mind, is the least of our worries, but she maintains its cleanliness in an almost Zen-like fashion – fastidiousness in the eye of the maelstrom.

These differences in our sensibilities fascinate me and irritate the hell out of me. I am moved to make a comment. She mentions something about my halo being askew. I mention something about being in heaven.

Yin and Yang

It is at this time that I’m writing a great deal or I’m in the writing mind a great deal. I have no work except for teaching English online. I relish the state of wonder that is associated with being just to be; in a state of musing that is waxing due to living in my imagination. I can barely speak at times. I used to associate this feeling with depression, but it is a thing of pleasure to have nothing to say as I stare out at the sea/bay where we live.

It has been noted that we live in a beautiful place. The differences in light and texture vary and are noticeable from moment to moment. I see across the bay some days and there is a hazy, silver band of light in front of the far shore. On most cloudy days there are sun breaks where beams of heavy, bright sunshine pour through the clouds and strike the water in a way that makes one think of magical spirits being transported to the jade-green sea, to the heavens and back again. The mountains of Snowdonia, where Sir Edmund Hillary and his team trained for Everest, stand there shrouded in heavy clouds, barely visible; they are there as silhouettes, staring back at you with dark, dark faces as the bright white, orange and yellow morning light breaks behind. The combinations of light are endless.

Looking just to the left and behind a small tree in the field outside my writing room is a view of the open sea and the forever mysterious horizon where I throw my worldly disdain. Where and what is that horizon, that line? It is only after I have found that line between the twin vulvae sea and sky, and have entered, that I become bored, the chase over. However, as if I had forgotten my earlier urgency and subsequent torpor, I return time after time. Like an early explorer, I seek the horizon with insatiable appetite.

Amanda is also grateful for our view (I’m sure for her own reasons unconnected to my male obsession) and knows that the heedless horizon creates longing. She grew up here, and I’ve spent years in seeking that inviting, elusive line; a horizon in one’s constant view causes indefinite, insufferable craving – the longer one is confronted, the more one’s coveting waxes. I’ve known it to send me to distant lands, and on arrival find myself wondering how I got there – much like suddenly waking out of sleepwalking.

Ahhh, Family!

Amanda showed me an old photo of her great-grandmother and great-grandfather (who looked exactly like my great-grandfather) posing on a porch in Australia. They followed their dream of starting a sheep ranch and embarked on the six-week steamer journey on the R.M.S Otranto to Melbourne and stayed for 15 years. Then I read in their diary – stuffed with a postcard of a color drawing of their ship on the high seas – how they decided to go on holiday back to England to visit family. Their vacation turned into a permanent relocation as the Great War broke out and the family was forced to stay.

I noticed that the photograph was so well preserved that it looked like one of those fake ones where people of this age dress up in period dress from that age and have a photo made at Disneyworld. I scoured the photo for clues like movement, jewelry, faces in a window, etc. The people looked stoic, proud, well taken care of and hardworking. I then noticed the squared-back hands of Amanda’s great-grandmother. The large, broad backs of the hands attached to strong, board-like wrists with thick, strong, slow-moving fingers. The whole mechanism looked creative and not used to idle pleasure, but longing for work.

Grandma

At first she seems a charming woman. The first day I met her she invited me in to her family with open arms. The following day, I witnessed her yelling at her grandson in a way that would be unacceptable at any moment in my family. But I guess she is family now.

Now I sit in front of Adelaide, otherwise known as Ma, and she has the exact same hands. I sit and marvel at those hands passed down through generations and think these hands could knock me out if she ever found the energy. Her fingers, stubby like her mother’s, are packed with rings of gold, silver and diamonds. The fingers under the rings look to be of normal size and the skin is black from acid meeting metal; the flesh around the rings has naturally grown around the man-made symbol for unity and infinity, just like trees grow around barbed wire, cement posts or anything left in their path of growth. From the top of her head I see a bit of reddish pink scalp that yields wired Albert Einstein hair, reaching, looking for light and color, distracting you from looking at what it forms – a serious forehead that is condensed and won’t give up. From her temples, her face softens into wrinkles and hangs to her sad jowls. There are raw places where she has picked her cheeks while held to the button by her own self-treacherous, bemoaning solitude. Her lips are like pincers and her mouth is taking, always taking – a little food, lots of black tea – and she will breathe the life out of a room, taking. Giving? Her mouth gives her dentures to the glass by the bed, abuse to those she has entranced with her nebulous negativity and advice that sounds sage, yet falls short due to the missing element of oxygen as a medium. The light from her eyes wants to create a new face, one that doesn’t hurt so much with the self-loathing. Her stainless blue-white eyes betray the sculptured bone, muscle, tendon and skin that have formed an unhappy storm around her for the past 87 years. It is as if her child-like eyes are the lighthouses for