I came to this cityat the edge of the continentas so many dreamers before mefollowing the westward winds of timelike the gold-glinting eyesof greedy men who mistook the ocean’s endless horizonfor a promise made only to them.I was destined by a different orenot yet hardened but still molten to the core,something older than the veinstorn open for profit by 49ers.After the gold rush came the god rush. In this city, east met west, past, future,and the modern world began, at least, to meet its end.
The sky was winking at mewhen I first made my home in the foggy hills of San Francisco.The planet Neptunelord of oceans, dreams, and boundary dissolving dives into the divine,was floating through Aquarius across my natal Jupiter,opening the gates of vision,47 square miles wide.The transit was initiatory:a widening of my psychic estuarywhere consciousness, cosmology, and philosophyran together as sulfur and salt meeting mercury.Everything was shimmering.
Eighteen years I’ve apprenticed here,in this vale of soul-making and school for the spirit,this heir of the counterculture,of dharma bums and Beat poets,of tree hugging hand holding hippieswho smuggled East into Westand tried to make the world sing together in harmony.I learned that matter is a metaphor,that mind bends with the tides,that the voices of the prophets still echo in the Paiute desert,and that names like vows are fluid as the Tao.
The city was my teacher,a temple of tech and aftershocksfull of silicon sannyasins and coding yogis, psychedelic polycules, mystic runaways,Zen masters and Jungian analysts,CEOs quoting koans,and cybernetic Sufis.My Sun is setting on this Bay,like lovers trading fluids,forever changing as we part ways.
My rose here has unfolded. Another wave rises.My classroom now vaporized,sangha dissolved into screens,the school that once rooted mehas become an atmosphere I can inhale anywhere.
Waking again from my westward dream,waking again,I now turn south, toward the wide belly of the earth,toward forests older than progress,toward rivers more ancient than empire.
Above mePluto, lord of underworlds—prowls across my Aquarius stellium,melting to transformmy conscious self,transmute my intellect, temper my senses and deepen my relations.The god of metamorphosis, Pan placing his hand on the heart of my lifeand whispering in my ear: no more hedging,no more waiting for life to begin,Live dangerously, or die in safety.
I stood at the edge as the sun sankand watched a swimmer in the Bay beneath the Golden Gate.A lone figure moving through the straitcarving a quiet path through time.Gold rush ghosts danced atop the skylineas I reflected on my long pilgrimagefrom student to teacher to wanderer again.
The sacred swimmer passed under the vast red ribsof the bridge, that big metallic Bodhisattva,compassionate carrier of all our silicon sins,sacrificial site of suicide sojourns,Every new birth leaves youwith saltwater in your mouth.Any wisdom worth lovingrequires learning how to swim.And learning to swimrequires jumping in.
The swimmer swam on,as the city released me. The tide loosened its grip on the shore.I will carry the wisdom work with me into new waters.What I’ve learned here is portable,potable, tended by devotional attention, nourishing enough to shepherd me abroad.
The Western imagination has reached its end,the Pacific swallowed its Solar ego.It is time to go down, southward, soul-ward, ‘When that fat old sun in the sky is falling,Summer evening birds are calling,The last sunlight disappears,And if you see, don’ t make a sound, Pick your feet up off the ground, And if you hear as the warm night falls, the silver sound from a time so strange,sing to me, sing to me.’
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