Dear Dad,
Raising a metaphorical glass to you on this sixth day of July, some eighteen years since you slipped from your mortal coil. Listening to the overture of Tannhauser, much too loud for these battered eardrums, but absolutely loving it, feeling the same ecstasy you would so gorgeously give yourself over to. What we love about this piece, I think it is fair to say, is the unparalleled emotional power of its crescendo, it’s yearning and exuberance in contrast with the slow/sleepy sorrowfulness from which it emerges with such defiance and gusto.
Seven and a half years ago, in a desert canyon in Anza Borrego, I came across a decaying ram’s horn while on my first Animas quest solo. For reasons that are lost to memory, I later wrote, “HORN OF PLENTY: to gather and express (my soul calling in brief?)” I’ve puzzled over/imagined into this phrase and the image of the decayed horn on and off ever since. In the past few days, I’ve been back in this territory, deeply fed and deeply intrigued. A client came to me with a synchronistic tale of the Black Sun and an arresting image of a manhole cover with concentric circles, which itself was eerily reminiscent of a photograph taken by the Webb telescope of the “cosmic fingerprint”, the rings of dust clouds around the binary stars of Wolf-Rayet 140. This brought to mind my previous exploration of the Black Sun of pre-Christian Germanic myth, and how esoteric Nazi’s like Himmler went too far in their reclamation of its hidden, suppressed dark power by embracing it exclusively and thereby reinforcing the split archetype, the severing of poles in generative, dynamic tension into binaries of destructive, barren, and mutually exclusive opposition.
How fitting that it was on your birthday of this year (which I had, alas, forgotten!) that, in another Southwestern desert on another Animas quest, I found an incredibly beautiful, expired agave or yucca plant reminiscent of a spent sun (and also, I’m just now realizing, of the decayed “horn of plenty” of Anza Borrego). I returned to this fallen star under a full moon and made a ritual flotilla of golden swan vessels out of the dried leaves of the plant, a sort of solar armada to bring the dead sun to the underworld for a renewing, transforming nekyia. I offered a cloud of earth – adamah – to the cold waters of the four-eyed deer god of laughing waters creek.
There was a black hole in the center of all of those golden rayed leaves of Apollonian brilliance, and it was from that epicenter that a shockwave of deep grief/love, of feeling, exploded like a pulsar. The grief I felt – the grief that crashed over me like a tidal wave that night eighteen years ago on a quiet sidewalk on the outskirts of Tokyo three months after your death – was a germinal seed of eros, the secret heart of logos. How mysteriously sun and moon dance together, that in their coniuntio they penetrate and impregnate one another.
And so… to Gather and Express, this tidal rhythm, this circadian dance between the masculine and the feminine, between active receptivity and receptive activity, expressed so profoundly, so gorgeously in the taijitu…
I mused on that rocky, sun-drenched outcrop in Anza Borrego…”To gather and express (my soul calling in brief?)” and later “GATHER AND EXPRESS: i like it – could it be so simple?” This is not a new thought, but one given new clarity and life by all of what has been related above and more, what would it look mean to [at this point, a dragonfly lands on the page two inches from my hand, Gungor’s “Beat of Her Heart” playing. The abdomen breathes in, breathes out]… what would it mean to live this rhythm, to apprentice to its in breath, out breath pacing, consciously and passionately. I’ve been reading Robert MacFarlane again of late, inspired (and envious!) of his life, what I perceive to be a marriage of exploration, reflection, and creative output and collaboration. He is living his own experiment with this gather/express rhythm, this fertile conversation between the outwardness of the path and the inwardness of the study.
I have with me my sandstone fragment from Goldsworthy’s Stone River (Goldsworthy, one of the “three Brits”, along with MacFarlane and Martin Shaw who embody this Gather/Express ethos for me…). This fragment of Stone River, the paradox of fixity and flow, is a talisman.
Between fixity and flow, between life and death and life again, between event and experience, there is digestion, a slow salivary breakdown of the raw ingredients so that they may be reworked and reborn. So perhaps it is best to think of this rhythm not in terms of a binary, but as a quaternity, the trough followed by the crescendo, the peak flowing into the decrescendo before the process begins anew.
To an outside observer, this letter may seem a strange way to communicate with a beloved father who has passed beyond the veil. But for me, our relationship is a living one, and often it surfaces and expresses itself through this rather mysterious material. I experience you as a guide and ally as I try to navigate this world, a figure of deep integrity and surprising, illuminating paradox. No one in our family embodied Apollonian rationality like you, and yet no one was as unbridled in their full-throated embrace of beauty, as exemplified by your Wagnerian ecstasy. You are helping me, bit by bit, understand my own rhythms, my own paradox, my own way of showing up in the hurly burly of this life on Earth. For this and so many other things I love you and I thank you, for leaning into life and finding pleasure and zest in everything from spreadsheets to roller coasters.
A hug, a back scratch, and endless love,
Chad
