I like to pride myself in not being very subtle, wearing my feelings on my face and being a terrible liar. When I wrote about the end of this last year, there was no doubt I’d figure out a way to say hello to the new one.
On New Years Day, I already had come up with what I wanted to share and then I was surprised with what happened and how it sweetly reinforced my idea. The night before, I managed to fall asleep in the war zone of endless fireworks, a ritual that puzzles me. I can’t say I even give a shit about its history. I feel exactly the opposite about this time of year and I always have. It has been a time for quiet introspection, a gentle kind of celebration, looking at where I’ve come from, with all its surprises. Simultaneously, I wonder about what’s ahead. It has everything to do with time and vision, each year building on the next.
I woke up on this first day with nothing to do. I did my daily Zen sit in the darkness of the new dawn. In the gentleness of these moments, I thought about 2020 and how I would choose to embrace it. I completed the rest of my obsessive trifecta, my yoga practice, an unchanged sequence of poses for the last 30 years. I closed out the routine with a half hour on the stationary bike, which I actually initiated this last year, replacing my decades old running regimen, in deference to an unhappy leg. After inhaling my yogurt and granola, then quickly swallowing my dozen or so morning pills, guaranteed to insure immortality, my world abruptly . stopped moving. I had come to the end of my rote.
Today felt like a bonus. In the game show called Life, I had won the grand prize of a perfect day on Kauai. I didn’t need Vanna White to help me spell Flaming Lips, quietly waiting for me to remove her sheet, straddle the engine, kick up the stand and bring her to life. We were going for a ride on January 1, 2020!
I wheeled over to the 7/11 in Lihue, thinking I couldn’t possibly be the only one of the Sons of Kauai to ride today, because it was too close to perfect. Well, I waited, but no one showed up. I suddenly realized how happy I was to share this ride with myself, just me and my thoughts. The motorcycle is my mechanical metaphor, a powerful, poetic experience, my two-wheeled muse. I spent the day gliding through my mind and knew for certain what I wanted to share with you about the coming year. Sitting off by myself, right next to the green, water tank, up at Kokee’s “first lookout”, I knew the day’s ride would have to start the internal journey I wanted to share.
I am not sure exactly how to put my finger on when my view of virtually everything turned what feels like a sharp corner. It’s like the accumulation of the years finally shifted the scale of time, the past dropping down low, the future becoming the present. Looking inside became the prism through which I viewed the world around me. I thought of the third eye as the way I wanted to describe this altered sensibility. I know the term has a long history and belongs to many of the Eastern traditions. Even though I have a very deep affinity for the Zen practice, its use is not encumbered by anything other than the idea of looking inside one’s self, in order to have a clearer view of what is going on around you.
Helplessness and hopelessness are feeling epidemic as we head into this new year.
The truth is, every damn one of us has dominion over our thoughts, emotions and actions. We own who we are, kind of like an eminent domain that can only be taken from us if we give it away. There are storms brewing all around us and we can easily get blown off course if we lose our grip on the tiller of our path. It is the third eye that maps our future course.
These days, I am aware of being more thoughtful. If you had asked me in the 50’s what I imagined 2020 would be like, I probably would have imagined some distant, science fiction world. Orwell’s 1984 was first published a few years after my birth, when I was a mere 5 years old. Today, scientists are predicting a world akin to the futurist bleakness of 1984, but they are only talking about 2030, a blink of 10 years from today.
I feel a bit like the beret wearing, Edward G. Robinson character in Soylent Green. I want my voice to reflect what can only be seen through the third eye. We have to try and not become victims of the storm. Our humanity is at risk and without it, we are lost, the tiller to our higher self snapped in half, drowning us all. Cover both eyes and see clearly.
