What if the simplest action is the most radical?

Being in the Now is radical: you no longer create pain for yourself and others. You no longer contaminate the earth, your inner space, and the collective human psyche with negativity. Being present breaks mind patterns that have dominated life for ages. It is a quantum leap in the evolution of consciousness.
(Eckhart Tolle)

Full moon poems

you laugh
flowers burst into bloom
they fade and die
you cry
your tears water the seeds
we grow again

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send me thoughts like thunder
rolling
    soothing and strong
power in bunches
and empty in between

feel my lightning heart-flash
ecstatic
     pure white energy
power of presence
illuminating the edges

The Witch's Lipstick

           Raul, Ivonne, Joaquin, Carraya (age 5 months, Ivonne still carrying her safely in her womb), and I are returning from errands in the valley below their mountain home in central Puerto Rico, an hour’s drive south of the seaside capital of San Juan. It’s dark as we wind our way up the mountain. In the backseat, 3-year old Joaquin has his little warm hand wrapped around one of my fingers and the hard plastic of his carseat digs into my shoulder.

            “Hay una fiesta en Casas de la Selva. Quieren ir?” Ivonne asks into the silence. We are tired but all agree to at least stop into the party at Casas de la Selva (Houses of the Rainforest), a sustainable forestry organization started by John Allen and his team of genius hippy-adventurer-scientists in the early 70s. The same team birthed the enormous glass-domed Biosphere 2, an enclosed, self-sustaining mini-earth plunked in the middle of the Arizona desert that was inhabited in the early 90s by eight courageous humans and thousands of other plant and animal species.

            My Puerto Rican host family lives in trailers they rent from Casas de la Selva in this hot and humid tropical forest. There’s not enough rain here to be a proper rainforest but the Coquí frogs are noisily abundant, their exuberant calls of “Coquí! Coquí!” growing to deafening levels in enclosed spaces such as our 4x6 concrete bathroom, making my quick cold showers even quicker. Little lizards, butterflies, scorpions, and a large assortment of bugs also inhabit this land along with plenty of tropical greenery, groves of bamboo, and of course tropical fruit trees—mango, guava, soursop, orange.

            We drive down the long gravel road to Casas, park, and Joaquin squirms for freedom from his restrictive car seat. I’m not much feeling the party mood and I’m reluctant to socialize with 3T’s friends but she tells me one of them is a witch so I’m curious. We climb down three steps into a sheltered space lit by glowing Christmas lights, open on one side to the graywater garden and forest beyond and built into the hillside on the opposite. The food table rich with chips, dips, and fresh-baked bread beckons me so I wander over and fill a plate. For the past month my family and I have been eating the majority of our food directly from the garden we nurture. Eating has risen to a spiritual level as I start to feel an intimate connection with my food—each day we water, weed, save seed, plant, harvest. We carry onions, peppers, carrots, herbs, potatoes, lettuce, spinach, tomatoes directly from the garden to the makeshift kitchen in the trailer. There’s a sink, a nice new stove and oven, a couple of feet of counter space, and metal racks above the sink where we like to place clean silverware even though we already know it will fall through the cracks and become dirty again. The small, round plastic table covered in a flowery tablecloth sits on the hand-constructed plywood porch outside the main trailer and serves as an extension of the kitchen counter, where I work at chopping veggies and making salads. When combined with store-bought rice, quinoa, cornmeal, or pasta, our vegetables and herbs become feasts to savor. Sometimes over dinner Ivonne explains the physiological parallels between humans and plants—when we rip a full melon from the vine, she says, we are allowing the plant to give birth and it experiences the same pain and joy that we humans do.

            Maintaining the gardens and manifesting three meals a day from its bounty gets exhausting though, however rewarding, especially when trying to earn an income. This is why I sometimes get giddily happy at the sight of junk food or when invited to a restaurant where I don’t have to pick and wash and chop and sautee and cook and clean up afterwards. Cut-up potatoes in a bag with oil and salt. Just waiting to be opened and eaten and the bag disposed of—what a strange, wicked, and enticing idea.

            As I’m munching away contentedly I’m forced to notice a large, full-bosomed, middle-aged woman in a wheelchair spilling her glass of red wine little by little as she sloppily yells in the direction of a hesitant young Casas volunteer with “please help me” eyes. Curious, I wander over and immediately get sucked into her vortex of drunken blabber. She hollers for another glass of wine, sparking a debate between 3T and her friend. Her bright red lipstick is prominent on her fleshy face, she is full of life and lavishing her time in the spotlight. “You are from Wisconsin!” she declares to the bewildered girl standing above her. “And you, your grandfather, a loss really, and you have problems with your kidneys, the moon is above us so bright, your kidneys yes…” I soon realize she is mixing up the girl with me but she gets the facts right: I am from Wisconsin, did have kidney trouble, and recently learned my grandfather has Parkinson’s. Finally her sloshy brain registers that she’s never met me and she asks my name and says I’m from Delaware and may experience heart failure. The volunteer, her face now panicky, confirms that she is indeed from Delaware.

      I tell the witch that my name is Avalon. “Avalon,” she repeats, “Avalon…AVALON...AVALON!” her voice grows louder and louder and now she is stuck on repeat, her whole body chanting my name over and over. I start to get nervous and a bit dizzy, and now the whole party is suddenly dead silent and Joaquin is still swinging on the hammock and starts calling my name as well. Now they are both going “Avalon” “Avalon” and I’m being called to slip back, so easily and quickly back, back to my old reality where my path is obscured and chaos prevails. Suddenly the odd thought occurs to me that unseen forces are trying to entice me and I am a bit fearful. All I know how to do is stay present, so I watch, I notice the Christmas lights glowing in the darkness and I go over to Joaquin and push him on the hammock and watch him swinging up and down and he stops calling my name, satisfied to be hanging free in the air again. Now the witch stops too. Conversation resumes as if nothing ever happened and I can almost convince myself that nothing out of the ordinary just took place...except for those fleeting moments where I felt spirits calling me from some other side and I felt the somehow familiar dark pull, a slipping into a timeless swirling darkness, a silky blackness calling,

            “are you sure you want to stay here? it’s muchhh nicer, easier to come back here….all you have to do is close your eyes and when you open them all will return to normal…”

               As I try to leave the party the witch stops me, her wheelchair stationed firmly at the bottom of the stairs. She tries to pull me back into conversation but I say “sorry, I’m really tired, I’m going home now.” Out of her purse she pulls her bright red lipstick, uncaps it and pushes it close to my face. “I’d like to put some lipstick on you, I think you could be beautiful,” she says forcefully. For a split second I giggle and almost comply, but I snap into focus just in time, lifting my left hand in front of the approaching tube, feeling the red slick smear across my skin. As she tries to apply more I draw back and make my escape up the stairs. Back home before I crawl into my tent I wash the lipstick off, shivering a bit as red water runs down the drain.