Divine free wet secrets,

or, how I love Mark Morford.

See http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/a/2007/07/25/notes072507.DTL for today’s prickly column about the chaos of love & relationships.

Also from him, from a while back, one of the most inspiring things I read in the past decade. He calls it a “spiritual perspective frappé”:

1. Choose not to believe much of the disinformation spinning forth from the White House at this time. Look at Donald Rumsfeld’s shockingly beady and pitch-black eyes and realize this man, these people, they are deeply convoluted and power blinded and do not have your best interests at heart.

2. Choose, furthermore, not to believe the world is really full of these vile power-mad slugs and lizards and prevaricators and fools and Rumsfelds. Stop thinking this is all there is, war and suffering and apparently very pale and egomaniacal and spiritless men running the world into the ground.

Realize that for every ongoing war and religious outrage and environmental devastation and bogus Iraqi attack plan, there are a thousand counterbalancing acts of staggering generosity and humanity and art and beauty happening all over the world, right now, on a breathtaking scale, from flower box to cathedral.

3. Resist the great surges toward nihilism about the media, in seeing them all as either a bunch of depressing snickering pansy-assed gol-dang liberal scum or corporate-controlled sensationalistic J-school lackeys all parroting the same old pro-Shrub war stories and beating the same thudding pro-violence drum.

Seek out nuance and counterargument and subtle irony and contrarianism and balance and perspective. Realize it’s never as one-sided as they want you to believe. Read more outside your normal box of viewpoints and interests. Find out for yourself.

4. Remember the world does not consist of simpleminded and reductive good/evil polarities, but, rather, is a living organism, interconnected and breathing and dying and renewing in constant flux, religions interflowing, beliefs inbreeding, crammed full of ecstatically bejeweled people who are just as contradictory and confused and gorgeous and kaleidoscopic and baffled and sleepy and horny and lost and desperately craving of juicy unfiltered spiritual nourishment as you are, in this very moment, as you read these words.

5. Resist the temptation to drown in fatalism, to shake your head and sigh and just throw in the karmic towel and head for the mountains with a case of Grey Goose and a box of Scharffenberger chocolates and the entire DeLillo collection and “Baraka” on DVD. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing.

And instead you can more fully engage, openly celebrate and share the items you happen to love — vodka, chocolate or otherwise — as tools of knowledge and power and luscious imbibing of life, throw them right smack in the face of all the Ashcroftian scowling and limpness, upping the vibration instead of merely enduring it, thus countering the urgent federal mandate to please live in a constant state of shuddering obedient paranoia and fear.

6. Realize the divine is not quite what you think it might be, that old methods of imploring, say, a cantankerous bearded patriarchal figure to please please please let you win the lottery and help you have better orgasms and oh yes smite your enemies might be a bit antiquated and prohibitive and just slightly lacking in vital ancient sordid chthonic feminine power.

Realize, further, that it is just these very outmoded and fervid mind-sets that are fueling a great many current hatreds and arming a great many warheads, and that maybe, just maybe, blind devouring adherence to any narrow doctrine — Christian, Muslim, Jew — is potentially fatal to the soul, bad for the skin and also just no fun at all.

7. Change the way you pray. Choose to believe in true orgiastic, energetic, self-realized divinity inside the self and emanating out, as opposed to an angry vengeful righteous God out there, one who demands that everyone must pay and suffer and kill and die, in His name, same as it ever was.

After all, it is your intention that sends the energy into play, that directly affects the world, every single person and every single soul, and your hate and fear and self-righteous belief does nothing to up the patriotism not just for country but for the entire planet. You have so much power. More than you know.

8. Realize that this is the perfect moment to change the energy of the world, to step right up and crank your personal volume, right when it all seems dark and bitter and offensive and acrimonious and conflicted and bilious, right when the snakes and pit vipers and squinting finger-pointing cowboy wanna-bes are all distracted — there’s your opening.

9. Remember magic.

10. And, finally, believe you are a part of a groundswell, a resistance, a seemingly small but actually very, very large impending karmic overhaul, a great shift, the beginning of something important and potent and unstoppable. You can breathe like this is the most lucid thing there is to believe. You can walk down the street like you are full of divine free wet secrets.

Where I’ve Been

I was sixteen in junior year of high school. My English teacher was Eleanor “Ellie” Heginbotham, a willowy devotee of Emily Dickinson who dressed in dark ankle-length skirts and high-collared silk blouses, the daughter of a preacher.

One day, in response to an assignment from her, I turned in a poem called “The Poet’s Candle.”

Here it is.

How glorious it is to see the good of life, which previously
Was shadowed by the constant view of grey sobriety. It’s new
For me to dwell upon the light—this flow of ink could only cite
Love’s misfortunes, in the past, or cloudiness in life’s forecast.
Unjust laws or unwed virgins, unhealed wounds or unfed urchins…
Enough of that! The only way to deal with grief is smile and say:
Though cursed arrows drop like flies or fly like drops of venomous lies,
Infest the kelly of the green with a festering olive sheen
And curdle milky whites of souls to seething, wicked, empty holes,
My belly-laughter is the cure through which I gaily glimpse the pure.
Armed with toothed and spiraled giggles I force grave men to grin and wriggle.
Technology’s left me unharmed—this fanciful poet now is charmed
By all of god’s great emerald earth: plush colors in the pinks of birth,
The golds of grain, the browns of soil. And these are common! With some toil
One sees the parchment of the moon, saffron poppies, sand’s amber dunes,
Whole spectra caught by dryads few in iridescent drops of dew.
My pair of shades now laid aside, I settle fuschia ones with pride
Upon my nose. I am assailed By nuances freshly unveiled:
Coy winks from wet grass, strangers’ gaits, dimpled elbows, waves from plaits,
Cryptic cobwebs, velvet toadstools, sea-ground stones in boisterous pools,
Toothless smiles of extreme ages— such pleasures grace all my pages.
With rhymes and rainbows I will weave joy. Of woe I take my leave.
Enough persons observe the grim. I hold a candle to the dim instead.

Reading it now, it rings indulgent and melodramatic—in a word, juvenile. But back then Ellie thought it was Just Wonderful and asked whether I’d heard of Edna St. Vincent Millay. When I said no, Ellie read my class the poem that made Millay famous before she’d turned twenty, entitled Renascence.

It was a formative moment. Ellie’s voice cantered along the lyrical lines as the finger of some celestial being poked at me: you—you there. I felt the ground drop beneath me, with Ellie’s voice descending from a long way above me. Here is the closing stanza; it cemented the poet’s grip on my heart that day:

The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky,—
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat—the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.

It wouldn’t be the last time I felt the sensation of collapsing inward downward, stolen away by a piece of writing, but it was the first.

Still in Ellie’s class, I learned a bit more about “Edna,” as I lovingly called her: chiefly, that she engaged politically, particularly around the unjust death sentence of two Italian immigrants named Sacco and Vanzetti. And that she was bisexual.

I’d mostly forgotten my youthful obsession with the out-of-vogue Vincent when Nancy Milford’s 2001 biography “Savage Beauty” refreshed it. My life seemed to be following her lead in some ways. Except that my writing was stifled. I’d stopped writing with any focus in 1995, the last year of college.

On December 26, 2006, my divorce was finalized. June 9, 2007 would have been my fifth wedding anniversary, but it turned out to be something far better. On June 8, I had dinner with my friend Philo to talk about life and writing. Philo told me about Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, her book containing a 12-week program for regaining contact with your creativity. We agreed to embark on it together. As soon as Philo and I left the restaurant, I bought the book.

Reading the introduction brought back that feeling I was sinking. Tremors—literal convulsions, like I’ve had when my body’s fought with a hallucinogen for control of my mind—rippled through me. A little after midnight, early on the ninth, I signed the contract in the book committing to embrace my calling as a writer. In essence, I married my, well, destiny. I’m happy to report that I’m still very much in love with myself.

Philo and I are nearly halfway through The Artist’s Way now. I took last week off to deepen my commitment by attending the Tin House writers’ workshop up in Portland OR, where, against a rolling green campus studded with neo-gothic university buildings, I communed with writers. Endlessly we discussed Craft and favorite authors and the Interestingness of things all around us. I’ve been having that relinquishing feeling nearly continuously, like I’ve accepted that I’m supposed to be a Writer: it’s not self-indulgent, and it can make a difference, and yes, it’s what I’m here for.

I’m full of gratitude—for my awe-inspiring workshop leader Colson Whitehead and the others at Tin House, for the encouragement of my brilliant writer friend Philo, and for Vincent’s hand in things.