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INTRODUCTION It’s a ten-degree morning in the mountains of New Mexico, the first rays of sun warming the adobe walls of our living room. I’ve brewed two cups of Tres Estrellas blend while Renée kindles a stove fire. Yesterday we split and stacked another load of firewood to carry us through the winter. Task done, a shot of cognac and a hot bath proved ample reward. My creaks and wobbles are escalating now that I’m nudging into my eighth decade on the planet. So many amigos are talking about back pains, knee surgery, hip replacements, and the cumbersome effort it takes to rise from a chair once seated (Remain standing! I tell them)—all of which cause me to question our evolution into cane-toting, walker-pushing two-legged mammals. Wouldn’t it have been better to remain an amphibian? Forgetfulness enters into the picture, too. Does the desert tortoise forget? The Pacific salmon? But we do, and before it happens to me, I’ve thought to present a few instances of life on earth in the following chapters. In Rehearsal for a Sicilian Tragedy, a film on the vanishing puppet shows of Palermo, which Renée and I attended in 2016, Sicilian author Andrea Camilleri talked of the necessity to preserve traditions. “In an age like ours, which is an age of epic transformations, the only way not to be afraid of all that’s coming is to know who you are. If you know your lineage and your traditions, you will never lose your identity.” His words initiated some contemplative moments on this end. From boyhood on, books have been part of my tradition: the writing and making of them, the visual art accompanying them, journeys inspired by them. I grew up with the printed word, no television for the first decade of life; no bright little handheld device to dull the world. The books on my bedroom shelf were stirring companions, the radio a worthy server of voice and music. On my table, those marvelous instruments of wood and graphite—pencils—allowed my thoughts to become visible. Sometime later, I was gifted a second-hand typewriter from my father’s office, which, though interesting, required clumsy gestures of the hand quite apart from that of pressing a pencil or crayon. When electric typewriters appeared, I opted instead for a Swiss-made Hermes Rocket, an ultra-light manual typer perfect for travel. Much later came the Apple computer, a boxy contraption that was supposed to make life easier. Its word processing program was useful, but I could already feel a bit of foreboding as to where technology was taking us. In preschool years, my backyard rambles and indoor activities held me suspended, like a water strider buoyed on ripples radiating from a pond’s center. As I got older, time in a circular sense ebbed, the center vanished, and my world was squeezed into linear, measured time. It began in the first grade and slowly escalated into the curse of our times: an ungainly increase in speed. The rev-up has now become insane, fueled by an out-of-control tailwind. The newly purchased computer will be obsolete next week, replaced by a speedier update neatly downloaded into the body’s vital organs. The latest automobiles, self-driving pods on wheels, have the built-in option of hurling you over a cliff. Meanwhile the old monsters ply the road, their drivers doing ninety—seventy is too slow. You don’t dare flip them off as they nudge your bumper, headlights blinking GET OUT OF MY WAY. You bet I will. Life is too precious. I’d rather enjoy the steady pace of my rusting ‘98 Toyota and sip my coffee. In making selections for this book, a theme began to appear: that from an early age landscape was important to me. Those of Treasure Island and Huckleberry Finn in books, the slate-gray mountains seen from my treetop perch in the San Fernando Valley, the minarets of Old Delhi slowly coming into focus under the magic solutions in my father’s darkroom. It was a privilege to have been given a double dose of the faraway and near-at-hand at once. My father’s photos and stories, his souvenirs of silk, ivory, and brass made foreign lands real, while family drives through California’s coastal chaparral, into foothill oaks, up though snow-dusted peaks, and down into the desert gave dimension to the nearby. Encouraged by my parents, I walked with pencil and pad. The terrain came in through the feet, the ears, the nose, the taste buds, and rolled out from the hand. A journey was always an emotional experience, one of sensation rather than intellect. As a grown man, the act of travel, with its unpredictable encounters and mysteries, became a poetic venture born not out of need for entertainment or escape, but to engage with new geography, people, and culture. Curiosity played a part, so did naiveté. Certain people stood out, mavericks who didn’t fit the norm. If you had ears to listen, they had something to say. The physical world, too, had something to say: snow peaks— a musical shimmer on the raven’s wing And something to ask. Lawrence Durrell wrote: “All landscapes ask the same question in the same whisper. ‘I am watching you—are you watching yourself in me?’” Perhaps I heard that whisper as a youth, for it began to come clear in my early California explorations that “landscape” was not static, but an ever-changing meld of heart, mind, and mirage that matched an interior geography. Emotionally, it was the spirit of the land—geologic alterations, shifting horizons, drama of wind, water, and cloud—that both kept me on edge and made me at home. Beginning with my Peace Corps experience in the Andes, the landscapes that continued to draw me were semi-wild or rural places inhabited by people who preserved long-established traditions of secular and arcane rituals: the Bolivian altiplano, the American Southwest, Mexico, the Himalayas, India, Bali. As for India, my travels were not, as some believed, motivated by the quest for spiritual enlightenment that was fashionable in the Sixties. I simply wanted to see the places my father visited as an army private stationed in the subcontinent. But how could India’s spiritual realm not seep into an itinerary that had me following sacred rivers into cities devoted to Ma Kali or Shiva, or to the grove where Buddha was born, or up zigzag trails to cloud-hidden monasteries? I have divided A Luminous Uplift into travels afar and ones close to home. For many of us, home is a place we believe is permanent, a sanctuary written into the will to be passed on with those treasured possessions that often enslave us. The word “home” can be traced to the Sanskrit, kayati, “he is lying down”—any place we lay the body to sleep, dream, make love, give birth, etc. It may be a tipi in the high country conducive to contemplation; an off-grid cabin and garden where we discover the labor, joy, and neighborly exchange that accompany deep rooting; or a temporary residence in a foreign land, a tent in the field where we bear service to others. On a wall in my study in our house in El Rito hangs the following haiku by hermit-monk Ryokan (1758-1831): The thief left it behind the moon in my window The image was ours to savor two nights ago when Renée looked up from the kitchen counter to a crescent moon in the window. Viewed from inside our home, the moon was another home, a skiff rocking in a starry sea—a headrest in the space outside, suddenly brought inside. It was also a smile, the eternal call of the far away. I’ve sometimes been teased by friends (and scrutinized by literary types) as “the guy who is never home.” A misconception, for sure, since the majority of the year finds me right here, over the desk, in the garden, at the easel. The mesas, arroyos, and stony palisades offer plenty of trails to keep Renée’s and my feet happy. But if a voice calls from deep inside, especially when the snow flies, I’m ready to GO. Get lost. Revitalize the brain cells. Twiggle the nerve endings. Have an affair with the world at large. I’ve stoked the stove too long, now it’s time to fan a few flames inside the head. And how lucky I am to have an avid and curious poet at my side as a companion. I won’t say that any of the writing in this book came easy. As a poet, what I like about poetry is that a storm brews a voice from the air. In prose you risk the head getting in the way. Too much thought, tinkering, ball-juggling and you’re dead, a gnat smashed to the page. In the journey—as Herodotus, Basho, Kazantzakis, and the Taoist sojourners verified—two legs go forth, nudge the muscles, get the eyeballs rattling, the blood circulating, set the invisible free from the visible. You trust the feet, see where language goes—a magnetic pull, the third eye beamed into action. In a painting, the paint never completely dries. You can go back, blend, move pigment around, update, flesh out, renew the view. Preparing a book, you realize the same: the first, second, third, ad infinitum drafts are never dry. A few chapters herein appear differently from their original versions. I’ve revised with the intent to fact check, clarify, and tune the engine for a better performance. I wouldn’t say this gives a smoother ride. On the contrary, it may give a few necessary jolts—a bareback lift from the saddle that sets you back down with your eyes turned around. jb / Río Arriba, New Mexico STONE HUT YAK CAMP A monk holds out a smoking juniper bough and tings a finger cymbal, his prayer echoing over ten thousand valleys banked against spires that cleave and tumble into a brocade of evening shadows, their glow caught far below in the glint of a winding river. At 13,200 feet, I’ve arrived at a cluster of huts wedged into a splintered cornice of rock. A peppery tang to the air. Flinty drift of hammered stone. Resin from beams adzed by carpenters still at work in the last light. There’s a trace of yak-dung fire from the kitchen where Pema and Yangchen laugh and banter, knead dough, feed thistle to the fire. Even at work, they wear silver earrings, amber beads, rainbow-striped aprons over ankle-length robes. Potato soup dashed with garlic and wild spinach heats on a clay hearth. Shelves bright with platters and urns line the walls. Between bundled herbs the Dalai Lama smiles in a plastic frame. Next room over, through a door tacked with Sylvester Stallone, is a big plank table where guests take meals. The ladies warm me a cup of rakshi, the potent local brew. On the floor sits the old man of the house, his back against a wooden pillar, his legs stretched to the tin stove. He prays his beads, mind vigilant, a smile on his wind-worn face. When his eyes come round to mine, he holds them there. He’s seen many like me come through the passes to yak camps like these, sharpening their song on the wheel of clear-medicine sky. Could be we’ve met before, in this life or another, in a stone hut like this perched under the stars above the clouds where the valleys take leave. Rise from extinction return to extinction— tipsy, I grab at snowflakes. INTO THE DREAM MAZE If I pick apart the reasons for loading up an old pickup and moving to New Mexico fifty years ago, logical ones like wanting to live where the air is bright and the space wide open, my mind strays. There is a deeper stratum where logic falls away into the honeycomb of the psyche and reasons vanish. I’m here because the land matches an interior one, something dreamed, a place very alive, one that appears whether I shut my eyes or open them: a warp of sand dotted with piñon and juniper, a weft of blue sky fringed with gold chamisa, an unlikely arrangement of lopsided buttes and razor-sharp mesas backed by snow-dusted peaks. Sleep on any off-the-map canyon rim and upon waking dreams unroll into a convergence of physical and psychic worlds. In rippling heat waves, in ghost imagery of shifting mirages, the mind halts, body becomes still, unnecessary baggage evaporates. With lightness the eye takes hold. A sparse and elegant bounty reveals something personal in the remote, a reflection of a raw and wild self. Starlit chill warm slickrock tonight’s bed. WHISKERED INTELLIGENCE From a water-carved hollow comes a three-dimensional howl, a reverberating blip, a rhapsodic vocal blaze. Daybreak, and old Mr. Cool is heralding it in, his voice revved to greet the first quivering light on the cottonwoods. His is a cacophonous laugh, a wheel of concentric sound textures—electric circuitry of Shiva’s ancient dance pulling matter from nothingness, recycling it through the universe, sending it back into the ever-regenerative void. I put down my coffee as the lone crooner goes backstage, then reappears, family in tow, trotting a quick-rhyme choreograph of gone-crazy barks, operatic laughs, bubbled free verse—a scrambled time-signature, a vacant pause, a fresh rise of chortled wheeze—all for free in the grand ole desert opry. With whiskered intelligence, coyotes loop through ravines, eyes flashing, laughter hounding reality with praise. They bark to warm the soul, follow musical ridgelines with sovereign impulse, imitate passing clouds with soprano hops, amplify silence with sonorous color brushed from the palette of their canyon labyrinth. A down-home gospel choir belting it out in a Mississippi chapel rocks me out of my seat, but it’s old Mr. Cool who converts me. Dandelions bobbing to coyote’s Charlie Parker impromptu.
