March 30, 2014

What Do You Do?

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shadow love

Warning: naughty language ahead.

In a culture where we are defined by our vocation, you hear the question all the time. “What do you do?”

What do I do?

I love.

I love my family. I love my son. I love my momma and my sisters. I love my woman (that’s you Suely, mi amor, reina de mi corazon). I love them and I tell them so every goddamn day. I love them and I do whatever is best for them, whatever I have to do to protect them and provide for them, to give them the things that they need, the things they deserve.

I love to tell stories around the bonfire. I love to sing. I love to drum and play guitar. I love to make music. I love to dance. Badly, but I still fuckin’ love it.

I love to work and to sweat, to fix what needs fixing, to do what needs doing, and do it as good as I possibly can, to put my whole heart into it and make an art of it. And then I love to sit in the evening, with my best friends gathered around me dusty and tired, and drink ice cold beer and tell dirty jokes, and laugh and look back on the day we’ve just lived, at the work that we’ve done, at the problems and obstacles overcome, and stand with my shoulders strong and my head held high, and say to the universe,

“Yes. Yes and yes. Come with it. I’ll take it. Give me all that you’ve got.”

I love to spend time in my garden. I love to go camping, to be outside. I love to walk through my neighborhood and look at all the trees and houses, at all the flowers doing their own little colorful living dances. I love to talk to the children playing outside, I love to play catch with them, and learn their nicknames, and tell them how good they are, how awesome and cool. I love to wave and smile at the old women on their front porches, to the old men tending their lawns and gardens and waxing their cars.

I love to admire the splendor of Nature, to shower the cosmos with my adoration. I love to listen to the birds and the angels chirping, to all the cars and the engines humming, to the sirens and the people wailing, to the whole holy Aum of existence existing.

I love to be ripped open by awe and wonder.

I love to write. I love to weave words and emotions and ideals all together, to compose a lasting edifice in the mind of God, a sort of vista in the soul where we can look at our living and dying and loving and fighting and see it all clearly and know what it means. I love to say what needs saying, even when it hurts.

Especially when it hurts.

I love to pray. I love to sit and marinate in the silence, and savor the depth and richness of reality; to be in the presence of the All-In-All, to vibrate like a living harp string in the hands of something truly incomprehensbile…

I love to create, to give birth to the most amazing earth-shaking ideas of what this world could be and how we could all just love one another, and help one another, feed and clothe one another, and just care for each other and give each and every human being a smile and a hug, and the space and the freedom to be what they are deep down, and all that they could possibly be, which is divine and incredible and beautiful.

Period.

Hare Krishna, Hare Rama, Hallelujah, Amen.

What do I do?

I love.

And I slip and I fall. I forget, and go back to the old autopilot. I suffer and hurt; get angry, depressed.

But then I remember; awaken again. I forgive, and I learn, and I blossom anew. And I wake up every morning and face the same choice, the same question, again and again and again…