I want to say thank you to something

but I don’t know what to call it.


Show me the fragments of knowledge

shared across cultures, countries, continents

through the ages the languages the world religions.


It can’t be some grand conspiracy

too many coincidences.


Each seeing, feeling the same concepts

writing the same thoughts in poetry.


It makes me believe

there is something.


When the missionaries in Utah asked

if I believe in God,

I told them I didn’t

understand the question.


There’s something I want to thank but

I don’t know what to call it.




Could Be Worse

It was a big ordeal, the family vacation.

We were at some hotel. My brother, sister, father, grandparents, aunts and uncles, I think. My dad loaded the van with our luggage. I think it was a rental. We were headed to the airport for a long flight to the other side of the world.

It was a big airport. Busy. Crowded. People bumping into each other.

My sister was taken away. Detained by security, maybe. It wasn’t clear but I knew she would be OK. She can handle herself.

We arrived at the area where only passengers can go and the person behind the counter asked for my ID. I didn’t have it though. I didn’t have my wallet. My wallet is in my backpack. Where’s my backpack? Dad, where’s my backpack? It’s not in the pile of other luggage it’s not there on the white tile floor of the airport with the other bags. The man behind the big counter, separated by glass, needs my ID. But I don’t have it.

My sister must have my backpack. But they took her. Where?

I stand in a line and then tell another security person that I don’t have my ID. She gave me a card that will let me through without my ID. It has numbers and words printed on it. I stand in another line and the next lady I talk to, a young black woman behind a counter, tells me the card isn’t enough and she needs ID. I don’t have it, what should I do? Go talk to that woman who works in airport security.

She’s a white woman and I tell her my sister has my backpack and it has my ID inside of it. You took my sister so where is she? I look away and when I turn back she had turned into a short, rotund black woman and she told me to follow her.

She led me away from the busyness. Where people just pass through to get from one place to another because they make airports really big so you don’t wait so long. People need the exercise anyway. Objection, relevance. She takes me back further in the airport and this large door that didn’t look like a door, but a kiosk of some sort, opens leading to a warehouse.

There are gray concrete slab floors, fluorescent lights high up in the ceiling and people in uniforms milling about. Long, domed rooms inside of a warehouse. The black woman who works in airport security was guiding me. She would run and then slide around corners and tell me to follow her.

We are walking around the warehouse for a while. There are different sectors with different activity. I think to myself that it reminds me of when I worked at the recycling plant, but I decide not to tell her. 

She takes me to the edge of a holding area of some sort. I remember her trying to tell me that I should just give up and that I won’t find my ID but I ask what is in that area and she doesn’t care if I go inside.

I walk through a doorway and see rows of bunk beds filled with people who seemed to have been detained at the airport for some reason or another. There were hundreds and hundreds of people here. There were long picnic tables and bunk beds with people everywhere. I remember curves. The ceiling or walls or something was curved and not linear. Actually, I don’t remember there being a ceiling at all. There were birds.

I wonder how I am ever going to find my sister here. I start yelling her name. People notice me. They look, dozens, hundreds of them, and see me. Some of them join and start yelling my sister’s name. They don’t know why they are doing it. They just see me yelling  and join in.

A shirtless man runs over and points with both hands with his elbows pointed and says go over there. I turn a corner of long picnic tables filled with people and see my sister sitting down. She is happy. She made some friends, was laughing with people who look cool, and was having a good time. I was never worried about her.

I tell her I am happy to see her and ask if she has my ID. I think it was in my backpack or maybe you had it. She is wearing a fanny pack. She opens it and I see a bag of weed and a bunch of cards and a few little odds and ends. She looks through the cards and says she doesn’t have my ID.

I tell her thank you and I am leaving now.

I walk away, resigned to the fact that I am not making the flight. My sister didn’t seem to care about that she was missing the flight, but I do. That ticket cost a lot of money. It was for the other side of the world.

I walk away and suddenly I’m in a different environment. The desert. Another black woman is with me. She has caramel skin, wears a loose fitting tank top and doesn’t work at the airport. She is kind and gentle, understanding. We are walking, or floating, or she is carrying me, comforting me, holding me. She smells good, refreshing and sweet and her skin is warm. We are moving down a curved sidewalk in the desert. There are a few shrubs, grasses and trees around us and it is just before sunset. She is comforting me.

I tell her I am upset that I am missing the flight and that ticket cost a lot of money.

The last thing I remember is telling her, “But it could be worse.”

I wake up on my air mattress in a cold room.

… I lost my identification?


Why do the butterflies dance in front of me?

Why does the wind whisper in my ear?

Why do the ravens fly over my head?

Why do the rocks support me?

Why does the sun beat down on me?

Why does the moon protect me?


They don’t do it for me.

It’s just part of their nature.

We make believe we are at the center of it all.


The Hatred

I fear that I will never overcome my pure hatred for the humans.

I wake an hour before dawn and walk ten blocks to my nature spot where Eleventh Street turns to dirt. Sage brush, cacti and spindly trees overlooking a small red rock canyon greet me along with a family of deer who just stare at me as I do a shoulder stand, a back bend and warrior poses on a large, flat rock. I sit down to try to meditate as the blues and purples turn to deep red.

Usually peaceful.

But my mind cannot stop thinking about that fucking asshole who was running his pickup in his driveway when it’s not even fucking cold outside. Three more assholes were heating up their cars on my walk back home. What is wrong with people? I could hear the overwhelming whirr of the engine from the shitty old truck two blocks away and as I walked past I could smell the gas fumes. It’s not even cold outside why must you heat up your car and disturb this peace and poison the world?

Meditation tells me to be filled with love instead of hatred, hope instead of despair, light instead of darkness, with the goal of realizing that a unifying spirit courses through all beings, rocks, plants, birds, dirt and water.


But these humans don’t give a fuck about any of that. They are all fat. They don’t care for their own bodies. They are overweight and unhealthy yet when I walk through the grocery store and stand at the checkout line they purchase soda, candy, cigarettes, meat, cow’s milk and they walk out with a sugary bullshit Starbucks drink in their gross fucking paws. Then they get in their massive F-150 that costs more than their manufactured home and they don’t feel like using their turn signal today.

They act against the interests of their own bodies and don’t even think about acting in the best interest of the fucking planet they live on. They are the 42.3 percent of Americans who support Trump and live in a post-truth society. They like him because he is an asshole just like them and because a black man used to be the president. The planet is here for ours to take, they think. It’s was all made for us to harvest and benefit from and we don’t consider that maybe these are limited resources. And it’s really too bad we can’t own slaves anymore. A shame, really. Also fuck our grandchildren and the planet they will inherit.

Wow. Ok, buddy. But what about on Monday morning when there were no assholes.

There was a quiet man with a gray beard wearing a blue flannel jacket with the hood pulled over his bald head walking with loyal, aging black dog. We knows the secret of sunrise, the mysteries of time. We said good morning as we passed, walking on the street without sidewalks in a broken town, and on the way back we gave each other that nod that all men know.

Let it flow.

Then I watched the sunrise and did my asanas and everything was fine. I felt refreshed and poetry came to me.

Why do they show me the assholes some mornings and the nice people on other days?

When there are assholes, the deer do not greet me. Maybe they could sense my emotions and decided to avoid me on this morning.



I realized something was wrong with the way I think when a woman at the Sabido vigil was nearly in tears, lamenting that she has been working too hard in her graduate school studies and has not been helping other people or spending enough time with Rosa, the Mexican national who had been living in sanctuary as an ICE fugitive at a Methodist church for 600 days.

She used to devote herself to helping others, she said, but apparently had lapsed in her ways.

Everyone is a little broken.

I couldn’t understand why this young woman was so upset with herself. I typically don’t care about anyone but me. I don’t know if that is a side effect of being a reporter and feeling like I am not allowed to participate in the community that I am covering, or that journalism is the only form of community service I was allowed to perform. Or living alone and only thinking about making enough food for myself, providing for myself, playing video games when I want, rarely if ever thinking about calling a friend or being around other humans in my free time. I can do everything myself. Except be happy.

Eknath Easwaran says that’s the wrong way to live and I believe him. He writes:

I am told that people now want to be loners and live by themselves. If you ask why, they will say it is more convenient; they can do what they want, when they want, in the way they want. When they shuffle in the door from work, tired and edgy, they don’t need to concern themselves with squabbling children; they can kick off their shoes and drop their clothes anywhere. … All this is called freedom. I call it sterility and the surest road to making ourselves more separate and self-willed.

Ouch, man. That’s exactly how I live — in sterility — and it will take time to change that behavior and outlook on life. How can I unlearn my habit of being self-willed and understand that it is in giving that we receive, it is in loving that we are loved if I am always alone?

I’m reminded of a Desmond Tutu quote: “A person is a person through other persons; you can’t be human in isolation; you are human only in relationships.”

When I stay in my apartment with video games and marijuana and darkness and isolation, I feel less and less humanlike, more robotic as I interface with screens all day.

A toxic thought crept into my mind when I was out for a walk a few weeks ago. My brain pondered the concept of making a friend. Of meeting a like minded man or woman and spending time together, maybe invite them over to my apartment to do… what? Hang out and watch TV? Talk? What do people do?

Everything changes.

I immediately thought that that was the stupidest idea I’ve ever had. How weird that would be, to make a friend and spend time together. Then my brain told me that it was exceedingly weird to think that making a friend is exceedingly weird.

At least I’m checking those thoughts and recognizing that I need to change. That’s the first step in this process, I think.