Praise for Billionaire Buddha...

Our reviewers have been deeply moved:
"Rivera Sun has written a work of inspirational and transformational fiction! Instead of a "rags to riches" story -Billionaire Buddha is a "riches to renewal" journey - reminding us that great wealth doesn't buy happiness -and is also a barrier to deeper meaning, human connection, and personal liberation. An enjoyable read for one's heart and soul."
--Chuck Collins, senior scholar, Institute for Policy Studies, co-founder, Wealth for the Common Good & Patriotic Millionaires; co-author with Bill Gates Sr. of 'Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Inherited Fortunes'

"...inspiring a skeptic is no easy task and Rivera Sun manages to do so, as much because of her writing talent as because of her message. To be able to phrase the urges we each have to break through the confines of the selves we have constructed and so thoroughly defended over the course of our lives is no minor accomplishment... and Rivera Sun does so gracefully, convincingly, and admirably."
--Casey Dorman, Author, Editor-in-Chief, Lost Coast Review

"I highly recommend Rivera Sun's Billionaire Buddha. It takes us through the story of a rich man's redemption of soul. I cannot find adequate words to describe the beauty of this story, nor will I attempt to, as the book stands on its own merits, and not any endorsement that any other writer can give."
--Michael Veloff, poet

"People, if you haven't gotten your copy of Billionaire Buddha yet, you are letting a rare opportunity slip through your fingers, It's that good. "
--Burt Kempner, screenwriter, producer and author of children's books

Excerpts from the book...

Billionaire Buddha Excerpts

 

The hills lay golden, ancient in their stillness, cracked with drought.  Crisp grass stems stubbed the contoured cheeks of hillsides. Cattle lipped the blades with caution as the sun baked their black hides. Twisted oaks, gray and gasping, withered under the relentless assault of unbroken sky. Tired clusters of leaves dotted the fingertips of their branches, offering one last breath to the earth before they toppled. The crumbled bodies of their brothers lay sprawled across the California foothills.

The dirge of the cicadas sharpened. Tension quivered in the hills. The haze of dust froze. Tears of crusty sap ached from an old tree. A groan wracked its wooden torso. The roots surrendered their tenacious grip on the bone-dry soil. The oak fell in a retort of snapping, brittle limbs. The thunder of its trunk exploded across the hillsides.

"You missed," the man said.

Inches from the crushing weight, he spoke the words simply, without rancor. It had been a valiant act, a desperate sacrifice by the tree.

The man sat down beside the fallen trunk, leaning his back against the armored bark. The fall reverberated in the tree. The man waited. The air stilled. He watched the dust settle back to earth. The trunk trembled. The man placed a hand upon a limb.

This was not the first time a tree had tried to kill him. The man's eyes swung the length of the foothills, falling beyond the oaks and cattle to the seam of a once great river, now dry. The winding curves muttered and glinted, but there was no water there. Instead, a line of cars rushed up the canyon, flashing metallic. The engines mimicked the tumult of the river as they defied gravity to scale the slopes.

The man spoke.

"Look at them," he said. His voice slid out soft and quiet, muffled by the expanse of hills and endless sky. "Rushing, always racing, spending the hourglass of their lives in pursuit of phantoms, sucking the lifeblood of the future to gain speed in the present, climbing highways desperately, trying to get to the top."

A sting of bitterness laced his tongue and he paused to swallow it. He stared at the cleft where the road passed between the slopes and vanished. Beyond the rising foothills lay Gold Mountain.

The man bent and removed his cracked and dust-lined shoe. He peeled off a sweaty sock and poked ruefully at the holes. His second shoe had split; its sole flapped like the tongue of a thirsty dog.

A cow lowed resentfully at him. The man looked up.

"This mess began in haste," he said. "It will not end by rushing."

A branch splintered as if to reply that every day the trees were falling; time was of the essence. The man nodded in agreement, gazing at the glinting thread of cars below.

"The view from the top is not what they think," the man said to trees and cows that had never dreamed of Gold Mountain; never yearned to climb it; never begged, borrowed, lied, or stolen. Yet, the oaks were dying from those that had sought its luxury . . . including him. He had not built the road, but he had sung the praises of Gold Mountain. Yes, he had lured the never-ending stream of pleasure-seekers with his siren's call.

"You were right to try to kill me," he said, patting the lifeless bark. He pushed himself to standing. His bare toes splayed in the bone-dry dust. His shoes hung from his hand. He bowed his head to the fallen oak. Then he turned and started walking.

 

 

 

 

"Look at them," he said. His voice slid out soft and quiet, muffled by the expanse of hills and endless sky. "Rushing, always racing, spending the hourglass of their lives in pursuit of phantoms, sucking the lifeblood of the future to gain speed in the present, climbing highways desperately, trying to get to the top."

 

"The view from the top is not what they think," the man said to trees and cows that had never dreamed of Gold Mountain; never yearned to climb it; never begged, borrowed, lied, or stolen. Yet, the oaks were dying from those that had sought its luxury . . . including him. He had not built the road, but he had sung the praises of Gold Mountain. Yes, he had lured the never-ending stream of pleasure-seekers with his siren's call.

 

Her bare back turned on the stars that gleamed like diamonds, but twinkled out of reach; stars that could not be bought or sold; stars that would never touch a human finger; stars that belonged to no one, but blazed equally for all.

 

"And now they want to see the stars!" the congressman burst out. "Imagine! Suing me for negligence over those smog regulations - they say they have a right to see the stars!" The Senator delivered the words with the perfect touch of patronizing arrogance and indignation. He had rehearsed the line all day, polishing it through repetition. He waited expectantly for the sympathetic burst of laughter at the preposterousness of the situation.

Susan Grant regarded him impassively.

"Well, don't they?" the short, formidable woman asked.

"My house in Los Angeles is just as smoggy as theirs - "

Susan's lips twitched. That might be a good reason to pass smog regulations.

" - but you don't see me whining about the right to see the stars!" the Senator concluded with an aggrieved air.

"The urban poor, Senator, don't have second homes in the High Sierras. Technically, the smog is denying them the right to see the stars."

"They have national and state parks," the Senator replied sternly. "They can visit just like I do. Stars, Mrs. Grant, are not a right. They are a privilege in the modern world, a reward for hard work and diligence."

 

 

Strange, he thought, that he had come so close to death and still missed the point of life. It took years of near misses and close encounters for him to understand the simple truth . . . life is the point unto itself: to live, to sense, to see the golden slant of light, to watch the dance of lengthening shadows, to hear the solitary lowing cow, to catch a scent of night in your nostrils, to be the conscious eye of the Universe, the mirror of the world.

Oh human, look beyond your limbs. Your body is the looking glass of the One. Self knowing Self, loving what Self sees.

There is more to life than vanity, Dave gently chided the Universe. He settled down in the grass as shadow conquered light. There is suffering, pain, and ignorance. We're here to ease our agony and end the causes of poverty, sickness, and destruction. We're not just here for navel-gazing narcissism -

Who says? the Universe mocked him.

I do, he replied, and that's good enough for me.

 

If love is madness, hate is insanity.

 

 

He breathed deeply as the silken caress of wind traced his body, carrying the vast coolness of the sky and the warm heat of the valley. The somber outlines of the hills stretched for miles in all directions, but he was not lonely. Loneliness is being untouchable on the top of the world. Loneliness is lying invisible as you starve on the streets.  Humanity was a master chef in the flavors of loneliness. He counted his blessing not to have tasted them all. He had never swallowed the loss of a motherless child, or the ache of an old man by the grave of a fresh-buried wife, or the desperate aloneness of a destitute woman as she submits to the thrusts of a stranger.

 

He knew only his own nuances of the vast tragedy called loneliness: the isolation of wealth, the subtle space carved around him by power, and the hesitancy of connection under the pressure of prestige. He should have kept a calendar, he realized belatedly, a notched stick of days like a man marooned on an island, one tick for each time the sun set without a single touch from a human.

 

Life is creation. Life is destruction. Our footsteps annihilate the existence of others. Our actions ripple the web of connection. We cause harm even as we eat to survive. Around and around the cycle goes, but what is needed? What is not? How much destruction must come to pay the cost of our lives? Do no harm sounds noble, but do less harm is more practical. Our lives are borrowed for a moment - that is all.

"You'll have me one day, worms," Dave promised.

He stretched and stepped forward. The last foothills lay before him. In a few days, he would be climbing Gold Mountain. A swarm of misgivings rose inside him. He sighed. Calculating the cycles of suffering caused by one's actions was a tricky business. After a lifetime as a serial entrepreneur, Dave dreamed in the second language of cost-benefit analysis, but capitalism's clumsy dialect lacked the vocabulary for analyzing the economy of the heart.  It had no words for externalities like love and regret.

A poetics was required, Dave thought, a song of the world to describe the causes and conditions of the heart, soul, and emotions. How else can we calculate the risks of one action, the benefits of another, the cascades of reactions, and the ripples of change?

Trust, the wind whispered. When the fledgling leaps, the wind catches.

The song of the world is not something to calculate. Economics and science will never speak in this language. The song of the world is not an equation or explanation; it is something you join into and lose yourself in. You leap and it catches. You ride in its current. Right and wrong are but two strands of the stream. Humans were not born to live outside this song, rationally calculating its twists and its turns, trying to fathom economics and budgets.

Give it up! the wind laughed.

Dave smiled in response. Just give it up, he echoed, give up wanting to know all the gears and the cogs. Surrender to your place in the whole. He climbed the hills, a small solitary figure outlined against the curve of earth and sky. Seven years of giving it up had emptied his pockets, his bank accounts, and his mind. No baggage, no illusion of safety; just a raw flesh-and-blood figure walking the Earth, empty even of his concepts of that.  He had given up fear, desire, anger, hatred, the urge to control, and the longing to know.

How much more must I give up? Dave asked silently. He squinted into the expanse. The weather lines on his face splintered like cracks in dry earth. The blue of the sky met his eyes. The answer returned from the unblinking Universe.

Everything.

 

 

The fear of having nothing hurts worse than the reality, Dave reflected as he slipped his ragged shoes back onto his leathered feet and scrambled up an embankment toward a gas station. Broken glass and the treacherous tongues of sardine cans glinted in the noonday light, threatening his soles. Grimy plastic bags waved weakly from their tangled positions in the weeds. Mysteries of human stories lined the slope. Dave paused beside a teddy bear that bore the marks of a child's love along with its weather-matted fur and sun-bleached hairs. He stared at it, humbled by the unknown tragedies that sweep the lives of billions. The bear's leg sank halfway into the dust, paying tribute to the duration of time it had lain forgotten on this slope. The child that once clutched its stubby body might have grown into a teenager now, clutching a cellphone for comfort instead of a bear. That awkward adolescent might be eyeing his parents suspiciously, haunted by murky childhood memories of tears and loss and his parents' refusal to turn the car around, resentful of the inherent injustice that scarred his capacity to trust and love.

Then again, the arc of the Universe is long. Dave crouched down by the bear and pulled it from the dust. He tenderly brushed the lumpy fur. Perhaps this battered bear was a great sacrifice in the Universe's grand design. Perhaps that boy, imprinted early in the aching pain of injustice, did not accept it as humankind's fate. Perhaps that boy, now churning hormonally through his rebellious teenage years, was wearing black and soaking up anarchist philosophy, playing hooky from the tyranny of teachers and public school dictatorships. Perhaps he is, at this very moment, trembling in a fifteen-year-old blend of desire and awe as the radical college girl cries revolution and justice at the local cafe. In his yearning, perhaps he dares to love, dares to believe in what she says, dares to think that tyranny and dominance are not the fate of humankind, dares to imagine that cruelty and violence are not inherent to human nature, but inimical to our souls. That boy - despaired of by his parents - was probably failing in his courses for refusing to memorize the litany of wars that pass for history and demanding to know why they were being taught the supremacy of capitalism when he and his generation would be chained to debt for life.

Somewhere, Dave encouraged the forlorn bear, your boy might be growing into a courageous spark of change.

Dave set the bear upright among the weeds and gathered up the other sacrificial losses that had been tossed out from car windows: a baby's shoe, an illegibly wrinkled notebook, a set of earphones, a lottery ticket stub. He loaded his hands with remnants of broken hopes and dreams abandoned on the littered slope. Each carried the echoes of a thousand stories and too many possibilities to discern. Dave knelt before his roadside shrine and murmured words to all the gods and spirits that might be listening: May the losses of these people give rise to great awakenings, may we grow stronger despite our suffering, and may our painful moments lay the foundation for courage in our future.

 

 

"Where's the rest - "

"They're for customers only," the cashier snapped at him, cutting off his question.

Dave looked around. Sodas, candy, a poisonous-looking apple that could have been straight out of Snow White: there was nothing to eat in the whole place. He bought a newspaper. He tucked it under his arm and held out his hand for the men's room key.

"Gas customers only," she qualified.

"I don't have a car," he told her.

"Then I don't have a restroom."

"You're joking," he exclaimed.

She pointed to a sign in the window: Hitchhiking is strictly prohibited on this highway.

"I'm not hitchhiking. I'm walking," he explained.

She raised her penciled eyebrows in her puffy face.

"We don't serve vagrants," she informed him.

"I'm not a vagrant," he answered.

"You look like it," she retorted.

"Look," he sighed, "water and bathrooms are human rights - "

"Go talk with the United Nations," she snapped back unsympathetically.

"Couldn't you just - "

"No."

"Ma'am, I'm not going to graffiti the walls, shit on the floor, shoot up heroin, plug up the toilet, leave the water running, or spend all day in your restroom - "

She craned her neck and looked past him.

"Can I help the next person in line?"

Dave pivoted. Four people glanced away in an mixture of embarrassment, pity, and irritation. He stepped back from the counter.

"The dignity of all human beings," he began softly, "resides in our kindness to one another. The refusal of common decency does not lower my dignity; it lowers yours."

"Next!" the cashier barked, blushing red.

"The same is true for all who witness cruelty and stay silent. Your honor falters when you remain neutral toward unnecessary suffering. It would be easier for me to leave, shame-faced, and go defecate in the bushes then to cause a stir in our well-ordered world. But who will speak up for the next person in line? If I don't say something, how long will culturally-approved cruelty continue to mire this gas station in shame - "

"I'll call the police," the cashier threatened, tired of his sermonizing.

"You would use law enforcement officers to deny my basic human rights?" he questioned.

"Go shit in the bushes," she snarled back.

The line of customers stirred uncomfortably. Dave looked sadly at the cashier. She glared angrily back at him. Beneath her scowl, he could see the flush of embarrassment intermingling with her irritation, and also worry. Her eyes glanced at the security camera, wondering what her boss would think. She scowled at him, just wanting him gone.

A thick hand fell on the counter.

"Give me the key to the john," a trucker muttered.

The cashier hesitated.

"I ain't got time for this crap," the man growled. "I gotta take a piss and get back on the road."

She handed him the key. He gave it to Dave.

"Get in there and be quick," the trucker warned.

The cashier started to object.

"Shut up," the trucker snapped. "You'd probably make Jesus go shit in the bushes."

He stalked toward the restroom, jerking his head at Dave to follow.

Dave pissed, shit, washed and dried his hands in record time and handed the key to the trucker with a sigh of thanks.

"Don't mention it," the guy said as he shut the restroom door.

 

 

The TV news station at the bus terminal blared out that the Supreme Court had ruled that waterboarding wasn't torture. Dave, the bums, and the Guantanamo prisoners all lifted bleary eyes and dared the judges to try it out for themselves. The prisoners went on hunger strike; the bums just went hungry. The torture didn't stop for either group. Cold laced his marrow until he stopped bothering to shiver. He could chatter his teeth into pulverized bits before he warmed up in this downpour. Cheap alcohol worked better, but even that ran out.

He stood in the gloom of the rain under a tree downtown, cursing Gautama Buddha for his bourgeois privilege of living in tropical India. The Buddha didn't awaken in the monsoon season, Dave thought belligerently. No one gets enlightened in the rain . . . they just get wet.

 

 

His eyes wept rain as he scanned the storefronts trying not to envy the mannequins poised inside the windows or the yapping shop-dog that lived inside the boutique across the street, growing fat on treats from wealthy women who made him dance and beg. The little bastard had bitten Dave once. It ran out and snapped off a chunk of his leg as he admired the window display. He kicked the vicious beast and the shopkeeper screamed bloody murder as if he were the menace to society! The monster had drawn blood!  It could have rabies!  The cop who came running shoved him down the street and told him to get lost.

Dave flipped the middle finger across the street to where the red-eyed little devil was curled up in a dog bed in the windowsill. He couldn't read it through the rain, but he knew there was a greeting card taped to the window with a Gandhi quote in gold embossed typeface.

"The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated."

 The boutique sold those cards at twelve dollars a pop to women who carried Chihuahuas in their designer handbags and walked stiffly past the panhandlers on the street. Dave had heard one woman mutter something about lazy bums who wouldn't work - to which her companion had shrilly laughed.

"But darling," she exclaimed, "you've never worked a day in your life, either!"

"True," the first woman replied, "but I'm rich."

As if that explained everything. Laziness is a sin of the poor. The wealthy call it leisure.

 

 

 

"Ah," Edna sighed knowingly. She folded her hands in her lap and waited. A man can't help but want to rattle on about the woman he loves, even if she's whipping his sorry rump into shape. 'Course, Edna amended her thoughts as she snuck a glance at Dave Grant, she would bet her winning bingo ticket that those two were like blacksmiths at the forge: anvil, fire, steel, hammer, smith, and smithy all at once.

"So, who is she?" Edna asked.

"Joan’s like drowning in the well of truth."

"She'll kill you if you don't learn to swim?" Edna chuckled with familiarity.

"Oh, so you know," Dave replied.

"Oh yes, I know," Edna said, pursing her papery lips together.

They drove quietly for a moment as the sun touched down on the peaks of the hills, spilled its golden farewell, then ducked out of sight, leaving them in shadows. Dave flicked on the headlights. When Edna spoke, her voice was thick with the past and her eyes saw memories invisible to Dave.

"You're just sitting there talking," she murmured, "when the eye of the Universe opens and sees itself looking back."

He nodded. Swallowed. Nodded again.

"Yes," he agreed.

"And you're not sure whether to be terrified," she said, "or fall desperately, madly in love with yourself in ways Echo and Narcissus could never even imagine."

"Yes," he whispered.

"Rumi and Shams, words of the beloved, Ram and Sita: it all makes sudden sense, but you can't find the words to explain it."

"Yes," he agreed.

"You want to shout your discovery from the rooftops, shake people in the street, and say hello! Hello, my beloved self, hello!"

"No," he shook his head. "That part comes later. At the moment your eyes meet, you can't bear to look away. You fall into the grace of seeing through her body, through yours, as if eyes and flesh were but ungainly telescopes and you are seeing the face of God mirroring your own because she is the mirror, polished, empty, quietly serving to reflect the truth - and in her eyes, you see - "

" - that you are the mirror, too," Edna finished. "God seeing God, seeing God seeing God."

"But there is nothing there - not you, not her, not God as something other than that reflection of what is."

"The paradox that annihilates us all," Edna whispered.

"And then you fuck," Dave concluded.

Shocked laughter shot out of Edna.

Dave grinned.

"What else is there to do," he said, "except reignite the cosmic spark of creation that turns this whole Universe around?"

Edna wheezed with laughter. Tears trembled in the gutters of her wrinkles.

"What else is there to do?" Dave repeated. "Wash the dishes? Take out the garbage? Get into petty arguments with your neighbors?  Come on," he rolled his eyes. "The Universe just said hello . . . the only logical response is to give her a tremendous welcome!"

Edna howled until laughter shook the rattling car. Her gnarled hand patted his arm over and over. Her other hand curled its pale fist to her mouth trying to hold the laughter in, but every time she looked at Dave it exploded from the narrow birdcage of her chest.

"You'd better stop," he chuckled. "You'll have a heart attack."

She cackled harder.

"What a way to go!" she gasped.  "I always told this world, sex or laughter, that's how I want to die, but at my age . . . " she trailed off.

His grin crinkled up the corners of his eyes.

"It would be a great inconvenience to me if you kicked the bucket at the moment," he mentioned.

"Me too," she wheezed. "The story just got interesting. Too bad you didn't meet this Joan back in your Gold Mountain days. I like her already."

 

"We're all the eye of the Universe - just some of us have our eyelids squeezed shut. The trees never blink, you know, nor the stars, or the rivers. Seems like humans are the only ones telling lies to mask the plain and simple truth. I used to go around with my eyes wide open like a submarine periscope, a spy of the divine, undercover in ordinary life."

 

Up in the mountains, thirty miles east of town, he lived in a tiny Japanese teahouse complete with tatami mats. He had rented it on a whim, intending to live in the main house on the property, but he had rolled a futon out one day to take a nap and that moment of quiet ease became an obsession. Tucked under the towering redwood trees, surrounded by a giant bamboo grove, the Japanese teahouse was a gem hidden from the world. The owner let him rent it for a living space, along with the nearby wooden deck with an outdoor bathtub and a little toolshed converted into a kitchen. He cooked on a hot plate, showered under the stars, ate at the wooden picnic table when the weather turned warm, and shivered under three down comforters when the winter rains came.

It was as if he had never lived before. Years of luxury had dulled his senses, but the cold nip of winter rains and the hot breath of summer awakened his sensuality. The crack of a twig underfoot, the crunch of pebbles, the scrape of dry, papery leaves, the silent settling of the dust - these revived him. He crackled with aliveness. He breathed in the sharp cleansing tang of the redwoods. He watched the ripple of daylight shift through the bamboo grove. He listened to the evening lullabies of blue jays roosting and the soft hush of leaves scraping stone.

Then there were the buddhas.

Thirty carved stone statues stood silently throughout the property, some standing, some reclining, one kneeling; all life-size, six foot tall, imposing figures that watched him mutely, hands raised in mudras, palms outstretched, one up, one down, the old chant on their immobile lips: Fear not, I shall not transition without you.

 

"So," Joan said, returning him to the present, "you read Buddhist sutras?"

Her casual tone was laced with intense curiosity. He glanced up and caught the dark stare of her eyes searching his face. A frown furrowed her eyebrows as if this information had caused her to suddenly reconsider every aspect of the man who had appeared in the teahouse this afternoon.

"I read them every night," Dave joked to break the tension. "They put me right to sleep."

 

 

"Joan," he said calmly, "you do know why all the bodhisattvas come back from the edge of enlightenment, don't you?"

"To liberate all beings and end suffering," she replied confidently.

"No," he made a face. "That's just propaganda for the Buddhist temples."

She blinked. He drank his tea and smacked his lips as he waited for her to ask . . .

"So, why do they come back?" she challenged him.

He smirked.

"Sex and chocolate."

She rolled her eyes at him.

"It's true," he insisted.

"That's ridiculous," she retorted.

"Think about it," he urged. "Why else would they come back?"

"To end suffering," Joan answered indignantly.

"Exactly. Sex and chocolate equals no suffering."

"No," she argued, "no suffering equals no suffering."

"Are you saying sex is suffering?" he teased. "Sounds awfully Roman Catholic to me. Have you ever had an orgasm?"

"That is none of your business!" she burst out, shocked.

Not yet, anyway, he amended silently. He drank his tea nonchalantly and put his cup out for more.

"Maybe," he drawled slowly, teasing her with his eyes, "I was meant to come here today and save you from the cloister."

She raised one skeptical eyebrow.

He stretched his hands behind his head and smiled winningly.

"Tell me, Joan, if all beings are liberated already, what good does it do to lock yourself up in the temple?"

"Where do you get this notion of self that's locked up?" she shot back.

"I don't," he laughed. "My notion of Joan doesn't involve cloisters and locks."

"Your notion of Joan is an illusion."

"Ah, but so is yours," he countered.

Her eyes pinned him sharply.

"Who are you?" she asked him with an intense frown.

He froze. The look in her eyes broke the confines of time and space. Lifetimes unraveled threads of connections. He had known her before - once, twice, a thousand times over. Their fates had spiraled through the centuries. Who was he? Woken before dawn to read the perfection of wisdom, drawn to a red door that said pull, brought to this teahouse to meet her at this moment . . .

"Perhaps," he said softly, "you should think about that before joining a monastery."

 

"The rich are only viewed as job creators because they hold all the capital," she pointed out. "If their massive fortunes were dispersed among the people, every Tom, Dick, and Harry would be popping out small businesses, jobs, and stimulus to the economy. The wealthy and their mega-corporations are not - and never have been - job creators. They tend to be poverty-inducing, minimum wage-producing, part-time job-inflicting, union-busting, healthcare-eroding, worker rights-violating, democracy-destroying monsters."

She heaved for breath and the man stole an advantage.

"Well, without those jobs no one would have any work."

"Are you insane?" Joan shot back. "The wealthy elite are sucking up money like water and the whole nation is cracking with drought. The dam of their fortunes is amassing into a huge reservoir that no one has access to, except for the rich. Break the dam, I say! Turn the water into the desert and you'll be amazed at the vibrant economies that will grow."

"You're hardly an economist -"

"No, I'm a Buddhist," Joan retorted. "Which simply means that I observe things as they are."

"I think you're overestimating the size of the dam," the man argued.

"Actually," Dave interjected, "she's underestimating it."

She raised an eyebrow at him, picked up the neglected tea pitcher, and refilled all the cups as he spoke.

"The richest handful of individuals in this country owns more than the poorest forty percent of the populace. How much do you make a year?" he asked the youth sitting next to the college student who had started the conversation.

"On a good year?" the young man pondered, thinking about his three, post-college, part-time jobs. "I'd say about thirty thousand dollars - but only if I get a sweet summer gig with good tips."

Dave calculated rapidly.

"The wealthy make that much in an hour and fifteen minutes," he pointed out.

"You're making that up," the man objected.

Dave smiled grimly.

"No, I can assure you, I'm not."

The number was based on his Gold Mountain income, not including investments or interest from his offshore account.

"You're just parroting the protestors," the man grumbled.

Dave folded his arms across his chest and stared steadily back.

"I have been a serial entrepreneur for over three decades," he stated. "I know more about business and economics than this entire room put together. I have been a multi-millionaire since the age of thirty and I built the most exclusive resort in the western United States. If you knew what I know about the wealthy, you wouldn't be arguing about those protestors . . . you'd be joining them in the streets."

 

 

He folded his hands in a steeple against his lips, staring up at the ceiling. Wealth in this country was inseparable from capitalism. Fortunes grew from the brutal history of stolen capital, first the land of the continent, then the resources, the labor of the enslaved and immigrants, and most recently, the robbery of their potential bound up in loans and crushing debts.

Dave's expression fell into deep shadows as he grappled with the parasitical nature of capitalism. The spine-shuddering vision of a massive beast haunted his thought; he watched capitalism sink its talons into living creatures and suck their blood and sinew until the emptied sack of bones and skin collapsed. In the New World, capitalism had unleashed its seething violence to massacre a continent of civilizations that objected to its parasitic invasion. The coasts of the east, the farmlands, the Appalachia’s fell to the all-devourer. No more! the natives cried, but the Spanish conquered Mexico at sword point and sucked up the California coast. The French trappers wormed into the tall forests. The English, the Irish, the German, the Dutch: the hordes continued to advance as greedy European elites consumed wealth, food, equality, and justice, thrusting thousands more into desperation, and ultimately, onto the ships departing for the Americas. Manifest Destiny delivered divine rule to white-skinned masses; opposition was plowed under, along with the arrowheads and blood of massacres and battles. Darwin broke onto the scene and out of a hundred pages of cooperation, collaboration, and compassion, the marketing racket caught the line "survival of the fittest" and trumpeted it from the rooftops of the burgeoning city skyscrapers. Adam Smith's invisible hand met a similar fate as the Wall Street robber barons reached eagerly to strike a deal with a hand that was mentioned only once in the economic treatise. John Locke's theory of the right to private property was truncated at the clause " . . . so long as the well being and good of the commoners is assured." A heartless novelist capitalized on the ill-founded myths and a well-funded foundation ensured her books were read. A thousand false premises paraded around in the psyche of a nation without a single courageous child to cry out, "Look Mommy, the Empire has no clothes!"

It had no clothes, no heart, no decency, no shame, no foundation in truth, no reality. Capitalism was Greed unleashed like Satan's right hand man, justified by convenient misinterpretations of the Bible, and rationalized by sciences that failed to account for the reality of the world. Capitalism had the gall to proclaim its superiority to all other economic systems when Europe lay in crumbled ruins and bombed-out cities after two world wars had tromped across its back. Capitalism dared to vilify its main competition in a twist of bitter irony - the system that lauds competition as its main insignia would not duel fairly with communism or socialism, but instead fought dirty and aimed low. Never has a day risen or set upon an equal opportunity capitalist economy. Never has competition proved survival of the fittest. Instead, the lowest, vilest, meanest, cruelest, most heartless villains who hold nothing sacred and will stoop to anything for a profit have risen and risen and risen.

Including him.

Dave Grant bore no illusions about his former life. From personal experience, he knew capitalism in practice was a vampire wearing the historic cape of colonization and imperialism. Its success was built on others' ruin. Predatory, voracious, insatiable, it devours lives as resources and then moves on to greener pastures, leaving the emaciated in its wake along with toxic wastes, birth defects, poverty, and devastated landscapes. It crunches down the rocks and licks the minerals. It drinks the water. It sucks the air. Then it collapses and finally lies forgotten in the dust of human extinction on a barren, empty planet spinning through the lonely void of space.

All this and more pounded through Dave as his temples throbbed with thought. Capitalism ends in collapse, lives in a state of collapse, and preys on collapse. It is the accountant for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It is the all-devourer of the ancient spiritual prophecies. Capitalism builds up value, then destroys it, buys it up cheap, resells it for a profit, and builds something new. But in this tidy equation lie billions of lives thrown into ruin. Disaster, debt, imprisonment, and despair: it's all just par for the course on capitalism's green.

As for socialism, communism, he could not say. He could only speak for a system he knew with great intimacy, one he had excelled at, witnessed first hand, manipulated, perverted, dominated, succumbed to, escaped from and been chained to again. He could only speak for himself and perhaps for the creatures without voices, those who were resources or externalities to capitalism's eyes.

"Capitalism will destroy us unless we destroy capitalism," he said, half in a trance.

 

 

When the groove works, it sings, Dave reflected. You can go on playing the same beautiful song through your whole life, occasionally flipping the record for variation, or resetting the needle to the beginning.

 

 

"There's no such thing as a rut that heads nowhere," she declared, crossing her arms and giving him a hawk-eyed glare. "Ancient cultures rooted in the feminine understand that, in an impermanent world, the new horizon is the same one we look at every day. The world is, in fact, recreating itself anew, right before our eyes. We cannot step in the same river twice, and a groove changes with each revolution."

 

 

"And is the feminine - the yin - any less destructive? Everyone thinks of nurturing mothers and Kwan Yins, but water is the most corrosive force on earth. Rot, decay, darkness, death, autumn, winter, these are all yin elements."

"I think they're both destructive in the excess," Dave replied carefully.

"Yes," she agreed before emphasizing her point again, "but is it right to think our lives are about growth? Or is that just a left-over concept from the patriarchal invade and conquer mentality: clear the forest, kill the natives, set up the homestead, build a town, develop a city, raise the skyscrapers, consume the world's resources . . . "

"That's just one model of growth," he replied, latching onto the firmer footing of economic models and development plans. "And, if you oppose the global industrial growth society, you ought to stop drinking tea shipped from China."

"I know, it's a moral conundrum, isn't it?" she replied seriously. "Everyone has their indulgences. I wash my plastic bags and reuse them, bucket the gray water into the garden; support local, organic agriculture; I became a vegetarian because of climate change; I don't drink alcohol because the grain should be used to end world hunger first; I bike around town and never travel on airplanes . . . but I drink tea from China." She frowned. "I suppose shipping tea to the United States is more fuel efficient than flying there to drink it."

Dave groaned.

"There's a lot you don't know about me, Dave Grant," she warned him.

And even more you don't know about me, he countered silently, thinking of champagne Jacuzzi baths, daily massages, and truffles flown in overnight from France. He considered telling her, but quickly decided she would shun him for being the epitome of the self-absorbed, greedy billionaire who had left his wife for a young blonde and drove a red sports car at reckless speeds through school zones. He pictured her bailing out her bathtub and lugging a five-gallon bucket to water the plants, doing her small part to help the ecology in the drought-prone central California coast.

His golf course had guzzled a million gallons of water a day.

From the perspective of his former business and political associates, her lifestyle activism was not only pointless; it was downright pathetic. With a flick of a wrist, legislators could subsidize renewable energy, end fossil fuel use, and free up the billions of gallons of water consumed by coal plants. Wealthy billionaires could write a check to put solar panels on every home and business in the nation, thereby ending the cause of the climate crisis. And here was Joan, bucketing her gray water.

That's how the system works, though, he thought. The powerful do nothing; the powerless labor and sweat and beg and plead for change; using every bit of time, energy, resources, and skills they possess; exhausting all possibilities while the powerful rake in millions of dollars on systems of destruction, sitting in their chaise lounges, sipping bourbon by the pool, criticizing the lazy, drunk, good-for-nothing poor.

 

 

He wandered into the forest, stumbling over roots until, exhausted, he leaned his head against an oak - the property of god-knows-who - and wept into the Spanish moss that climbed its bark.

"You," he informed the tree, "are a slave."

He pushed away from the trunk and pointed his finger at the other silent, gnarled trees.

"You . . . and you . . . and all of you are slaves. The earth - the soil - that your roots curl into is a slave. The water that runs in creeks is enslaved. All of earth is enslaved to humans!"

He climbed onto the toppled body of a fallen oak, carved by chainsaws into sections and limbs and then forgotten by the loggers. The dampness of the coast enveloped them. A dreary bank of rain clouds made the branches shiver and the moss droop forlornly like rags across the thin arms of the trees. Dave tripped drunkenly on his tongue as he addressed the silent oaks.

"Property - hic! - property," he paused, shaking his head. "You live out your days, thinking you are free. Then, one day, you discover you are not. The whole lot of you belong to your owner."

He waited for their gasp of horror, but the oaks stood stoically, barely rustling their tiny leaves. He was, after all, a mere human, drunk on the madness of his species. But, Dave warned them silently, he was a human who had made his first fortune butchering their brothers to the north.

"Ah," he continued, eyeing them shrewdly. "Property is all delusion, you say, but whose? Humanity writes its claim to you on the backs of your parents who were toppled and pulverized into paper."

Again, no answer. Perhaps a sigh of wind slipped through the hanging moss. Dave scratched his head. He examined the grime of his scalp that clung beneath his fingernails. He tottered on the fallen log, grabbing a twisted limb for balance.

"Isn't it wrong," he cried, "to be enslaved to anyone?"

The hubris and debate over slavery merely exempted humans from the definition of property . . . what a failure of vision to have stopped our logical examination. An African should not be enslaved because an African is not an animal, but should an animal be enslaved? Captured, domesticated, kept as house servants or locked in pens, bred not by natural attraction but by the genetic selection of human owners, sent to slaughter by decree of the master: all these are objectionable when applied to fellow human beings, but are they any less objectionable when applied to other species? It defies logic.

Dave's audience stood silent, weighing his words or ignoring his ranting. He could not tell. He did not care. Thoughts burned like fire in his chest and rose in flaming outbursts. Words have made humans more ferocious than dragons - those mythic beasts could only scorch and burn, but with words, humanity has touched the moon and scraped the sky with towers and spanned the ocean with wires and sent satellites into space where once only gods and angels dared to fly.

With words, humanity raises up a single man to rule all others. With words, the ruler kills entire populaces. With a word, the bombs begin to fall. With a word, the nuclear warheads could annihilate the world. They say dark mages are only legend, yet the spells of words still bind us all. Orders, commands, legal words on paper . . .

"And you," Dave said to the oaks, "are caught by words - paper words backed by chainsaws, protected by guns of state, bought by paper money and electronic transfers. You are slaves! The mighty oak has masters! Your worth is calculated by weight and length. You have no value as a living creature. Only your death will turn a profit for your owner, so you live on borrowed time, thinking you are free. You are like cows in a vast range that never see the fence. Or like humans in the modern world who never wonder about these things!"

He wept. The rain drizzled and choked his words. The corpse of the oak grew slick. He slipped, falling painfully on the hard wood, banging his ribs and collapsing in the loam, muddy and moaning, shivering against the decaying bark.

You are not free until all are free. Equality is not a half measure. While the animals cower in the feedlots, and the dogs yap behind the fences, and the trees, rocks, rivers, and valleys are owned by human beings, our species is no better than the plantation slave owner loftily claiming that without him, his negroes would degenerate into wild beasts.

Dave groaned on the ground. The wilds - that which we called the wilds - was nothing more than a perfectly content ecosystem going about its business until our fear came along and choked on it. The wilds once humbled humanity, keeping our species into the natural system of check and balances. They cast the arrogance of human beings into the democracy of the species, the round table in which elephants and ants are all created equal. And for this reason, humanity holds nature's egalitarianism with deep disdain and lauds the hierarchies of man. But as the slow quest for equality between the human races, genders, and classes begins to bear fruit; humans are also starting to wonder . . . what is humanity doing on a pedestal of our own construction?

The meadowlark, the sequoia, the humpback whale . . . how can humankind maintain its arrogant delusion of superiority when confronted with the truth of every species' beauty? Our scientists prove the language of the birds, the intelligence of the dolphins, the social structures of the bees, the use of tools by primates, the emotions of the elephants, the alteration of environment by beavers. Nothing sets humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom - except our penchant for folly. At that, our species exceeds all others.

No, we can claim no superiority to other species. Our desire to tame the wilds is nothing but the lust for domination, an attempt to escape the inherent equality of Earth.

Dave laid his head against the damp bark of the fallen tree. The scent of loam swelled up from the disturbed earth. In the aroma of wood, rot, and soil lay the scent of Joan - dark, inscrutable, and woman. In the woman lies the wilds - not the lofty peaks or rocky, windswept summits, but the hollow places twisted with bracken, damp with hidden streams and fertile with life.

The western man sets out to conquer that, to clear the nonsense, establish order, raze the bushes, plow rows, plant fields, and sit on his porch, the master of it all.

And yet, she seethes. Beneath the surface, the woman pulses with resentment, strapped into corsets that bind her as tightly as the property lines that encircle the Earth, ordered to obey her master-husband's beck and call. The woman erodes him, rots him, pulls him back from lofty quests, clings and burrows into him. The man thrusts out, raises structures, towns, and cities. She holds him back, pulls him down and in, wraps him between her legs, and never lets him go.

Go where, my love? the woman asks. Where are you going without me? The barren moon? The flaming sun? The mountain peaks that hold no seeds of life?

Progress! He shouts. Onward!

Onward where? She taunts him. There is only one place that you and I are headed.

He sees in her the beginning, the end, the womb, the grave, the endless cycles, the net, the trap - and he struggles to break free. He seeks to fly, to excel, to shine, to live forever, to be omnipotent like the gods. She folds her arms across her breasts and closes her legs to him. He has missed the point completely.

I'm here, she whispers. Immortality, resurrection, birth beyond death, the emptiness that births your form, embraces your form, gives meaning to your exclamation point of existence.

And still, the man rages. He shaves the forests as severely as his culture insists that women shave their legs, armpits, pubis. He blows up mountains in brutal rapes for coal. He pisses his sewage into oceans as if defecating on his lover. He cruelly exhales toxic smoke into her face. He sprays her with disfiguring, cancerous substances. Then he kicks her in disgust, saying she is old, worn out, useless, ugly; her vagina stretches wider than a whore's; her breasts hang like an old sow's.

In her brokenness, she mocks him. Missing a tooth, she sneers at him. Go find yourself a virgin, fool! She is the wilds, the woods; the Earth. She says to humankind: in this entire Universe, I dare you to find another planet as hospitable as I. She stands on rickety knees, naked and hideous. She waggles her flabby hips.

I was beautiful, once, she reminds man. He groans, remembering. She was beautiful once, beyond belief, beyond compare. The very memory of Earth stirs his loins and quickens his pulse.

Dave wept into the forest floor. His mouth grew chalky on the crunch of loam. The musk filled his nostrils. She is there; the maiden, mother, crone; every woman he's ever known, the friends, adversaries, ex-wife, fantasies, lovers . . . and Joan.

Joan with her half smile at the old cosmic joke and with eyes that had seen life and death a thousand times. Joan who hid her softness behind gates of fire. Joan who floundered in the modern world, trying to make sense of womanhood in a landscape built by men. Who was Joan with her hair undone, with the sisterhood of the wilds around her?

He rolled over on his back, staring at the dark swallow of the storm. Suddenly, he stilled. His eyes swept the sodden clouds. His ears tensed. His skin crawled with the sense that something moved through the dark, leaving no footsteps. The mists whispered and swayed in curtains. Pinprick droplets landed on his skin.

"Who's there?" he asked bluntly.

The night stilled.

Dave froze.

Something was out there. If it had been nothing, the mists would have kept moving, brushing, hissing and sliding onward, inland. Yet, at the sound of his voice, the mists hung, static.

Dave clamped down on a shiver. He felt the presence of the unseen growing thicker around him. The sense of invisible forces was not completely unfamiliar. He had felt them during the construction of Gold Mountain, swirling around synchronicities and unusual events. But these were potent, strong, and present. He could feel them rustling out of sight. Beyond the stillness, he sensed the great bank of storm clouds swirling. Images of migrations ghosted in his mind: peoples on the move, armies, peasants, ranchers herding cattle, protesters marching with streaming banners.

Dave breathed in a thread, barely moving. There are layers to life that we cannot see, masked by our focus on reality. The madman's consciousness grows blurred and he stumbles into streams of ghosts, demons, invisible adversaries, seraphim, and angels. Western man tried to conquer the sages, druids, shamans, ghost walkers, spirit intermediaries with the singular dogma of Christianity, but they still lurk beyond our sight, hidden.

It's all true, Dave thought. His eyes darted to the unseen that hung in the night. Every story of ghosts and spirits is all out there in some layer of the Universe, like waves of infrared or sound outside our normal range of sensing.

I'm going mad, he thought. His chest constricted in a fit of panic. I'm unhinging from reality, he worried. He lurched, lunged, and smacked his head against the tree trunk.

"Ooh," he moaned, clapping his hand to the spot and leaning back against the solidness of the trunk to stop the spinning sensation. He squinted into the rain, but he saw nothing otherworldly - only the bulky shapes of oaks.

He sat for hours, listening, but nothing extraordinary occurred, just the sigh of wind through oak leaves and the tap of rain. An occasional animal rustled through the forest. The tang of the sea rode the storm. Salt hid in the low clouds.

Yet, he could not shake the sense of movements, as if out of mortal sight the angels marched and the spirits embarked on great migrations. He listened, wakeful, until he sensed that he sat at an invisible crossroads, leaning against the great oak as if it were a signpost. His arrival here was no mistake, Dave realized with a chill. He had stood at the crossroads of the realms and delivered a speech. He scrambled to remember his drunken rant. His thoughts skittered and dodged beyond his grasp, disappearing into the mists and the night, taking on a life of their own. He remembered only vague concepts of oaks, trees, slaves, property, and the ultimate emancipation of them all.

 

 

He stood. The sinews in his legs protested. He carried his damp clothes to a sunny patch and laid them out to dry. Glancing left and right in case of wayward hikers, he returned to the grove of oaks, hesitated, then spoke.

"Naked as the day I was born," he told the trees. "Naked as you stand right now."

The oaks said nothing, but seemed to watch him curiously as he scrambled up the side of the fallen oak and sat cross legged on its back. He pivoted to look around at the ring of trees.

"I wish to tell you a story," Dave began uncertainly. "A true story, and an uncomfortable one . . . a tale that has no easy answers, and may be long in telling, but our fates are twined together as deeply as the air we breathe. My exhale is the inhale of your lungs . . . and without your breath, my species will crumble into dust."

Dave trembled at the madness of addressing trees! Now, when he was no longer drunk, but stark and serious, not in the depth of night, but in the morning's clarity and light! He took a breath and plunged deeper into insanity.

"And I will say this at the crossroads," he declared, "inviting all the realms to listen."

The forest halted. The buzzing insects stilled. The wind hung in place. Not a single leaf rustled. A shiver ran down Dave's spine, for this was real; he was not imagining the reaction of the woods. Sunlight touched his back with its warm encouragement to continue. He swallowed, a pale, naked human being, hairless and defenseless, without fire, knife, or clan to back him up.

"If I tell this story right," he murmured, "perhaps it will help you understand."

And perhaps, it would help them all - oaks, humans, animals, and Dave - find the freedom that they sought.

 

"My first memory of a tree is a whipping stick smacking across my back."

He must have seen a tree before then, but the red welts of abuse drove all other memories from his mind. He remembered crying - and being whipped again for the cry-baby tears. He remembered hating the willow from which his father cut the switch.

"My second memory of a tree," he confessed to the silent grove of oaks, "was hiding in the branches as my older brother lobbed rocks at me."

He swallowed. The memories ached raw and red, swollen with bruises and unspoken words of childhood anger. He had known the taste of hatred long before the taste of love. Even now, the flavor returned to sting his mouth. He winced and continued.

"My third memory of a tree," he told the forest, "is the shaved and sawn up body of a hardwood board of lumber. My father sent me to pick a whipping switch. Fat or thin, stinging or smacking, I was to choose the method of my punishment."

Instead, he had hauled a two-by-four board into the kitchen. Barely six years old, he had struggled with the awkward length, throwing it at his father's feet.

"Why don't you use this, Dad?" he spat out angrily.

His father's face crumpled in dismay.

"My father never beat me after that," Dave said, "so my mother took on the task."

He closed his eyes to the gentle sunlight. His lips tensed and trembled. Mothers are meant to be nurturing, comforting; his screamed with fury, hustled her wayward sons into line, set her mouth in a line thinner than a switch and attempted to beat the impudence out of her younger child.

"I hated her," he whispered.

He hated them all: mother, father, brother, their house with the white picket fence, the dog he was allergic to - that dog received more gentle pats, treats, and cooing words than he did.

"I studied forestry in college," he told the trees. "I applied early, and at the age of sixteen, I was reading instruction manuals on how to murder forests. I read profit spreadsheets printed on the backs of your brothers. At the age of twenty, I wrote my thesis on your mother's skin. The study covered how to take the sapling youths and scrub brushes, grind them into chips, and make a fortune off the paperboard. By the next year, I was verging on making my first million off of flaying trees alive. At twenty-one, I could legally drown the last scraps of my conscience in alcohol."

He could not count the acres he had razed.

"I remember the first time I cut a chainsaw into a redwood trunk," he told the oaks. A primal rage had pulsed in his veins; a sense of power and victory crashed through him as the giant trunk thunderously toppled. "I felt no remorse. No guilt. No twinge of sorrow that I had ended eight hundred years of life." Dave forced himself to be honest with the oaks. The wind shifted uneasily, almost angrily. His naked flesh rose in goose bumps. He held up his hands.

"Hear me out!" he cried. "If my story ended there, I would not be here today."

He had been raised with hatred, whipped and weaned with violence. His mother's accusatory eyes cursed the weakness of his father for refusing to whip their son. He learned at his mother's hand that real men were expected to beat this world. Strength lay in conquering. Little boys must mow the lawn and beat the bushes back from the edge of the house and lift the heavy loads. Men must work and earn good wages, providing amply for the family. No standing in solidarity with those striking for better wages could supersede the importance of a roof over her family's head. No moral quandary must threaten the bread upon their table. Principles were a luxury of the successful or the foolish. His mother was neither. His father worked for the oil company until they fired him six months before he could retire with a pension.

"Pay attention!" she barked at her youngest son. "This world is survival of the fittest. It's dog-eat-dog out there. Work hard, but act smart. A man's got to be on his toes to get ahead."

She laughed when his older brother tortured him, telling Dave to buck up and be a man. She snapped at him to stop being a crybaby when his brother's taunt cut him to his heart. He grew iron armor around his soul. He learned to fight and win.

"You were always an odd child," his mother had murmured as she lay dying. Her eyes had searched his face, hazy with pain medications for the cancer, seeing double visions of the child-son and the man-Dave.

"You were a stoic, remember?" she said.

He had slept on the floor and trained as a warrior, lifting weights and doing pushups, taking vows of silence, jumping in ice cold showers.

I was a child in a warzone, Dave realized all these years later. Given the circumstances, there was nothing odd about imitating Spartans in a suburban San Francisco house.

"Will you be alright after I'm gone?" she asked him anxiously.

"Ma," he said hesitatingly. Perhaps she didn't know . . . "I'm a millionaire."

"Are you?" she murmured, biting her lips in pain.

He nodded.

She closed her eyes for a moment.

"That wasn't what I meant," she whispered.

"There is a point to all of this," Dave reassured the listening forest. "When my mother asked if I would be alright, she echoed the concern of a million mothers in this country. In her eyes welled the sorrow of generations of broken women who came to this continent hoping for a better world, but found hardships and misery stretched from coast to coast. In her heart burned the remorse of all women who learn cruelty to survive. Her determination to succeed came at the price of her compassion. We are the children of these women, all of us in America."

His mother came from the lineage of the New World, a saga of greed and lust, murder, backstabbing lies and avarice, broken hopes and shattered dreams, and worst of all the myth of survival of the fittest in which failure is the fault of personal shortcomings, not the result of systemic oppression. If you fail, his mother told him in a thousand silent ways, good riddance. May your faulty genes rot in the grave, and may only the best perpetuate the species.

So Dave had plundered, robbed, and cheated his way to the top. Forests built his first fortune; computers supplied the second. From there money begat more money. The resort was simply the icing on top of the cake. He strove to prove himself a survivor, to escape beatings and his mother's scorn. He built fortunes to buy access to the golden club of the survivors, the champions of domination.

Then one day, he looked around. On top of the world, part of the elite, he had won - he had surpassed most men of fortune, he owned hundreds of millions to their mere millions.

"Ten thousand years of human evolution," Dave told the trees, "has given rise to this: the socially successful are a set of psychopaths. The richest victors - with few exceptions - are broken human beings. Not one of us had happy families; not one of us understands how to love. We were barbarians on top of the world, cruel and avaricious. Our human hearts had been encased in lead. Our minds were poisoned by profits. Yet, the whole world strives to emulate us. Everyone wants access to the elite. But we are not human beings - we are rotten husks without any hearts. We drown our emotions in alcohol. We numb sympathy and close our hearts to stay at the top. It is insanity! Yet, humanity persists in holding such sickened individuals aloft."

Dave shuddered on the fallen oak. The consequences of this cultural insanity were dire. As long as humanity believed in the colonizing lie that survival came by destroying others, nothing on this planet would survive. The forests would be clear cut, the indigenous mowed down in genocide and wars, the earth torn open in search of minerals, the oil burned into the skies, the people devoured by a machine of greed that knows no bounds or limitations.

"Somehow," he told the oaks, "we must stop the madness of these beliefs."

 

 

He built a small fire awkwardly, fumbling with half-forgotten methods he had learned in boyhood, cursing his own incompetence until a tendril of smoke finally sparked to flames.

"Do you mind?" he asked the oaks, listening carefully for their reply.

Do you mind, the forest whispered, if the birds build their nests from the hair that falls from your head?

"No," he answered, "only if they pluck it from my scalp."

And so it is, the oaks replied, thus it is so for us.

 

 

He squinted at the flames. A furrow creased between his eyebrows. For a moment . . . he swore he had . . . no, there! Dave dragged his palm across his eyes. When he looked back in the fire, the images remained: a dark haired woman, a twisted hedge of briars, and behind the brambles, him. Dave held his breath as the hairs on the back of his neck raised. The dark haired woman - Joan - pivoted and spun, seeking passage through the bracken, calling out to him in words that made no sound. In the flames, his figure wandered aimlessly - as if sleepwalking - and did not appear to hear Joan's cries. At every twist, the briars scratched her and raked their spines through her clothes. She frowned and her soundless voice repeated the same phrase over and over. Dave leaned toward the fire, desperate to read the words on her lips.

Wake up!

The fire crackled. Sparks shot off like fireworks. He flinched. The flames curled into thick vines; each bramble held dark images inside it. Dave's eyes watered and ached as he tried to make out the forms. The images in the fire reflected on the burning blue of his eyes.

He gasped.

His life twisted in those thorny brambles, every story, memory, assumption, myth, fact, thought, belief, or idea he'd ever conceived. The briars sprouted in his footsteps as he sleepwalked through his days. In the fire, his figure's breath hissed spells of words that clung to the dark vines. Joan struggled to break through, but he spun his stories faster than she could move.

Wake up! her soundless lips cried. Wake up!

And still he continued muttering the stories of his past, throwing them up like stinging barriers between them.

The coals of the fire suddenly collapsed. The flames lurched. The images vanished. Dave furiously rubbed his eyes and glanced around at the darkness. He shivered.

"So, my stories are getting in our way," he murmured, thinking of Joan and the twisted brambles keeping them apart. In his hands, he gripped a thin stick - a perfect switch, he thought. The kind of switch his mother preferred for beatings. His knuckles clenched white around it.

Laughter rang like bells through the dark outlines of the oak grove. He spun. Nothing. He recognized that laugh - Joan's laugh.

You're the one holding onto the stories.

"Who spoke?" he demanded.

The trees refused to answer. The night hid itself in silence. He looked down at the switch in his clenched hands.

What would it be like to put the stories down . . . and never pick them up again?

The voice whispering in his mind sounded like his own. He pondered this, staring at the stick, seeing in it all the beatings he had received, his mother's scorn, his brother's abuses, his father's silence.

Why not let it go? he thought.

He threw the stick into the fire. It smoked, fizzled, curled and ignited into flames. He watched it burn and saw his memories char and vanish into ashes.

He sat back.

Why not let everything go?

He reached for another stick, a knobby branch with a whorl that sneered like his brother's face. He dredged up memories - fire ants dumped in his bed, the time he had unzipped his fly and pissed on his brother in retaliation, the day his brother locked him in the closet and told his parents Dave had run away. He let the painful memories roll out and lodge inside the stick. Then he chucked it in the fire, watching the whorl's expression scream and collapse into coals.

He threw his father in the fire, his former girlfriends, and treacherous business partners; all that was a part of his past, every gesture, every thought, every twitch of expression, every sentiment and cliché statement, every slogan, tagline, business motto; every memory of his actions, every motivation, every rationalization for his behaviors both good and bad. Into the flames he tossed the drunkard on the street. The playboy writhed in hot coals. A smoldering fat branch burned up the weight of his former obesity. He threw it all in the fire. Twigs, branches, sticks: a small blaze mounted. He thought of Indian cremations, pyres of logs burning bodies into ashes by the river. In utter clarity, he knew what he had embarked upon: he was incinerating his self, conducting a cremation in reverse. His body remained seated by the fire while flames consumed his inner world.

Time stretched in ancient patience. Those who gathered at the crossroads stood witness. His actions echoed rituals and rites of passage. He evoked older times and civilizations now crumbled into dust. He sat on the ground and stared at the fire like countless generations of human beings who had walked this earth before him.

The flames twisted into shapes and figures. His memories danced for brief moments before vanishing. Long forgotten times and places emerged in the twisting curls of the fire. He saw battles and ceremonies, lovers and bitter enemies. Ten thousand years of human history swirled in the flames, only to fall as still and silent as his own meager past. 

Lightness filled his being. A sense of vastness stretched in the silence between his ears. His mind expanded like the night, empty as space with stars of thought scattered across his awareness. One by one, he plucked them from the sky of his mind, turning them like diamonds in his fingers before tossing them into the fire.

Long bouts began to pass between his feeding of the fire. He sat quietly, watching the coals settle in the white ashes. The stillness grew profound. The coals burned down into nothing until only one ember remained, a tiny spark in a vast pool of night, no bigger to his eyes than the stars overhead.

What happens when we let it all go?

The thought streaked across the vastness of his mind like a shooting star. On its heels, the Universe replied.

Everything. Something. Nothing.

The ember flickered. Dave waited. It sputtered. He fixed his eyes on the last spark of existence. The night crept closer. Darkness stretched its fingertips toward the void. The coal blinked. Dave froze.

It died and his self extinguished with the light.

 

 

Darkness loses meaning in the total absence of light. Nothing becomes something when that is all that seems to exist. This place would terrify the mind, except there is no mind to experience terror. There is no one to sense the vast eternal stillness. There is nothing to worry, rejoice, or think.

Here, eternity is presence; the present is eternal. Time ticks out the meter of human memory and cognition. When the grip of the mind releases, time dissolves into sheer illusion.

 

 

 

The world is dead until it learns to love.

 

"Where have you been?"

In her tone of voice he heard the dangerous riptides of the past threatening to drown the waters of the present.

"Quiet," Dave answered as if quiet was a place. Then, with a sigh, he slowed his pace.

"Lost," he replied truthfully. "I have been lost."

For fifty years, he had wandered through life, sleeping on silks and lying in gutters, absolutely confused about where he was and why. He had built houses without finding a home and traveled the world without knowing where he started. He had bumbled around inside his skin and flesh and bone container all his life, utterly and totally lost.

 

 

"I came," he said softly, "to end the delusions of separation and permanence that cause people to long for money, wealth, and property; the delusions that cause them to amass fortunes in defense of change; the delusions that allow them to pretend that the suffering of others is not hurting them, as well. I came to teach my wealthy colleagues to unclench the fists of grasping, to release the grip that harms so many, and to trust the nature of reality. To let go and be embraced; to release and find companionship; to rest in the ever-changing, interconnected web that is us all."

 

 

They burst out laughing in a shock of sound that reverberated around the kitchen. It is ludicrous - outrageous - to teach such truths, to intend to say such things to the madness of humanity's delusions. It is audacious to think awakening is possible for the world's wealthiest elite . . . and yet, the Buddha smiles slightly. Because all things are always possible and the audacity of the awakened ones truly knows no bounds.

 

 

"Why join a monastery when you can live your enlightenment on the street?" Dave asked.

 

 

At the root lay an ancient unfairness that had embedded itself in the psyche of generations, passed from father to son like blonde hair and blue eyes. For millenniums, humankind had believed that one man could rule another, own another, or set himself above another. According to the rule of law, a cop could snatch a man off the sidewalk and press him into servitude. Dave saw his freedom gone forever, stolen by the iron weight of convictions. The cop had stolen his ability to live as he pleased and forced him to bend his labor to the will of society. He had stepped into a cycle as old as Viking ships and galley slaves chained to oars to provide manpower for the captain's voyages. It was as old as conquerors and kings; as old as the abolishing of the Commons. It was as old as the Great Enclosure that kicked the people off the land. It was as old as Columbus claiming the New World for the Old. It was as old as the genocides of native tribes. It was as old as the conscripted labor that built the Great Wall of China. It was as old as slavery on the Nile, Russian gulags, plantations in the South, and the warring tribes of Africa.

Dave traced the threads of imprisonment and enslavement back through history, pondering each era like a bead on a meditation mala. He saw bodies stretched in bunks, in rows, shoulder-to-shoulder tight, three layers high in chains, the dead rotting above the dying, the living sickened and terrified. He saw bodies thrown in graves, lining the ditches of every war. He saw pale bodies emaciated into bones, the white snow of the German winter tight around them, the smoke of incinerators black and churning. He saw mounds of Jewish hair, heaped like bodies in the ditches, stacked like bison skulls, piled up in mountains. He saw the heaps of bison bodies, dead across the plains; the bodies of the people who held them sacred, dead across the continent. He saw the herding of human beings in long lines, on the Trail of Tears, into ghettos, into camps, into gulags; train loads to Siberia, busloads across America.

He saw rare emancipations sparking moments of freedom in this world: Moses raining down God's plagues, parting waters, leading Jews from slavery; Frederick Douglass revolting from chains and death; Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman racing through the darkened woods; indigenous uprisings, the Levelers and the Diggers, the workers' movements for cooperatives, the cry to occupy for equality in wealth. On and on, the recitation went, one prayer bead recollection at a time. The mala stretched longer than the night without scratching more than just the surface of the truth.

There were the women standing throughout history, thin-lipped, frowning, subjugated to the men, imprisoned in obedience.

There were the slave-wage workers chained to a paycheck, selling their labor to the owners, their sovereignty and dignity eroded by the economic grind of titans who forced generations into poverty.

There were the masses of animal species, locked into pens and pastures, driven off cliffs, chained to plows to labor for human beings, caught in nets to be devoured.

There were invisible ropes of property lines, binding up the planet, this great round orb of Earth which existed long before humanity walked the surface, which will exist long after the last human falls extinct, upon which the mightiest man of wealth and power is but a flea in the circus of humanity . . . a flea devouring the globe's skin, sucking the blood, leaving poison, itching this great mother to no end.

And there was himself, imprisoned for existing in a society gone insane, locked up to labor for a lifetime because he would not own another being. He had been locked up for refusing to own property, a home, or rent one from a richer man. He walked the Earth and slept in forests, performed small tasks to buy some bread. But freedom is an illusion in a world bound up in chains. The flea upon the slave's back becomes the property of the master, as does the child in the slave's womb, the knowledge in the slave's head, the songs in the slave's mouth. The worker is a slave to the business owner; the prisoner is a slave to the jail.

"We are not free until all are free," Dave murmured, thinking of animals, land, forests, fields, women, children, and planets.

A set of eyes flew open in the bunk nearby. The breath of a man without a name paused. His muscles tingled. His eyes rolled to the side, wondering. The silence stretched long as he waited for the next word to be spoken.

But Dave lay quiet, his mind spiraling through the ages, watching empires rise and fall. Over and over, the old cycle of enslavement continues, taking freedom from the people and forcing their muscles to labor for the profit of another. With wealth, humans buy power; with power comes authority; with authority comes law; with law comes control; with control comes more profit, more power, more authority, more law, more control, more profit.

So rise the kings, the tyrants, the presidents, the Pope, the tycoon, the billionaire, the chief, the Queen, the Empress, the noble, the nouveau riche . . . they are lifted on the backs of the masses. Both willingly and through coercion, populaces raise one man above another and surrender themselves to be ruled. Some people fawn like lapdogs, groveling, and unashamed. Others conduct themselves like dignified hounds and offer unquestioning loyalty to authority. But a third set are wolves, imprisoned and starved, viewed as dangerous because they yearn for freedom. 

Freedom is ferocious, wild and uncivilized. It will never be part of respectable society. Freedom cannot be controlled or forced to build fortunes for others. Freedom will not die for another man's profit. Freedom will not starve children to put feasts on the tables of the wealthy. Freedom will not tolerate classism, racism, sexism, or discrimination of any kind. It will ever advance the concept of radical equality, for one who is free cannot condemn others to slavery - to chattel, debt, work, marriage, or prison - no form of enslavement is tolerable to the free.

Freedom is not a concept that swears allegiance to any flag! It defies nationalism! Patriotism! Boundaries and borders! The wild birds are free! The wild fish are free! But the wild human? Such creatures have gone extinct. Out of seven billion humans, not one knows the meaning of freedom. Humankind enslaves their species by culture, society, history, and law. In blind ignorance, they utter the word, freedom, to launch wars, spend money, make laws, and imprison others. Freedom is not free, their bumper stickers read . . . but such a twisted convolution of logic baffles the brightest thinkers.

Freedom is free, you fools! It is war that is costly, that takes your sons' lives. It is protecting the empires of the rich that is expensive to the people. It is the fortunes of the few that enslave the lives of the many. It is the imprisonment of your mind that bankrupts your freedom.

As such thoughts rolled through Dave, a sense of ancient injustice opened its maw and swallowed him whole. He sat in the cold prison while he fell into the hell of human history that stretched back through thousands of cultures. What was the point of hiring a lawyer to argue a mere technicality of an unjust law when the entire system of law, order, nations, and ownership of other humans, animals, plants, land, or the planet was fundamentally unjust. The notion of property was nothing more than a euphemism for ownership and enslavement.

Dave began to laugh in silent consternation as the construct of his society collapsed like an imploding building. His eyes darted around the jail as if the solidity of concrete might dissolve along with his delusions. The concept of a jail to imprison wandering human beings lost its moral authority. The system of government that imprisoned a man who had caused no harm to others fractured its legitimacy. The society that blindly obeyed and upheld the laws of such a government toppled from the grace of his respect.

The people of the nation fell from his esteem. One by one, they would have to redeem themselves in his eyes. One by one, they would need to decry the injustice of their society. One by one, they would have to take action to undo it. Only then would his respect for his nation return. The fire of conviction stirred in his guts. He slapped the mattress with the flat of his palm and heard a few bodies shift in the semi-darkness. He glanced around. A pair of eyes stared blearily at him, lost in the hell realms of delusion and injustice, so deeply entangled that Dave nearly lost the courage to attempt to speak truth.

What did Moses say to the Jews who argued that they would never be free of the Pharaoh? What did the African mothers whisper to their sons and daughters who had been born into slavery? How did they convince their children that they were not property even though the slash of the whip, the gunshots of the masters, the fearful obedience of even their own mothers told the children they were slaves? What did Mother Jones say to the laborers who deserved more than misery in the workplace? What did Gandhi say to the naysayers who believed the British would rule India forever?

Dave sighed. It is one thing to realize truth . . . it is another to help others awaken.

"We are not free until all are free," he repeated in the barest whisper of breath.

 

 

They released him through the south gate. He stared at the road for a long time before slowly, achingly walking northeast toward the county line.

"Get out of the area," the Warden had warned him. "The local kids beat up the homeless. Get a cab, stay in hotels, don't play any of your games around here."

Dave didn't have a dime to his name.

"Money, money, everywhere and not a dime to spend," he chanted as he crossed the county line on foot. He walked bone-weary along the rural road until he came to a busy intersection on the outskirts of a town. He leaned against a metal street lamp and put out his hand to beg.

A car stopped, the window rolled open, and a hand passed out a to-go container of soup and a plastic spoon. Dave fumbled his fingers around the warmth of the container, bowing his head gratefully to the couple in the car, and opened his mouth to speak. Too late! The light changed, they drove forward and never heard his thanks. Dave stepped away from the intersection and sat on the mowed shoulder of the road. The trucks and cars roared past. The air tasted of the black grit that clings to the undercarriage of semi-trucks.

Basho meditated under a bridge, Dave thought, remembering the old Japanese tea seller who chose to practice in the worst of conditions. Unattached to form, he let the traffic and bustle rush over him with absolute equanimity. Dave bowed his head over the container of soup. The heat licked the bones of his hands and slowly spread into his wrists. He opened the lid.

The aroma brought tears to his eyes. The scent of fresh rosemary and thyme added to boiling broth, the undercurrent of potatoes, a hint of carrots - a whole world pulsed in his nostrils, reminding him of soil and moist leaves, determined plants reaching for the sun, the myriad insects hanging onto dangling fronds, bees resting on green stems as they searched for pollen, the rustling of human hands harvesting, the way they paused around the fibrous stems of a carrot clump, the tensing of sunburned arms yanking carrots free of the earth, orange and audacious.

He couldn't speak. He could barely breathe. A whiff of soup brought him to utter humility and transformed his blood into gratitude.

"Thank you," he whispered to the world.

As the first touch of warmth touched his tongue, he wept. He heaved with messy, ugly sobs as the pain of the past weeks screeched through his limbs and wracked his body with agony. His mind watched these reactions with curiosity as the biological memory of his body protested the pain it had endured. Grimaces twisted over his face; the mortal human being named Dave Grant shuddered at the suffering he had endured.

Then he ate. Slowly, spoonful-by-spoonful, with lengthy pauses when his throat closed and his eyes shadowed with emotion, he swallowed the soup. In between mouthfuls, he sat for long periods of stillness as the beauty of life overwhelmed him. Common things like soup and the kindness of strangers touched his heart. It was not just herbs he tasted in the soup; he chewed on the flavors of the world. He let the sensation of nourishment linger on his tongue along with the bitter twinge of human cruelty. Guilt twanged metallically in his mouth as he thought of his fellow prisoners, waiting for some sign of justice dawning on the horizon.

And, as he licked the last traces of the soup with his finger, he thought of Joan.

"You were right, Joan," he said out loud, "the bodhisattvas don't come back for sex and chocolate."

He started laughing on the slope beside the road.

Soup and kindness were good enough for him.

 

 

 

With a deep breath, Dave Grant entered the belly of the beast.

He scoured endless stacks of plates and cutlery until the caustic stench of disinfectants curled his nose hairs. The hot steam and spray soaked into his sweat. The crashes and bangs and hollering of the kitchen filled his ears. His arms ached. His back screamed obscenities. He mopped his brow on the shoulder of his sopping shirt and plunged back in.

On the first day, he saw only dishes. Heaps of plates flew down the line like rubble from a gold mine. He bent his whole body to the stream that poured from the narrow shaft. He swiped the crystal wine glasses from certain shattering and placed them in the customized dishwasher installed by order of the sommeliers. No trace of soap ever touched these goblets. Boiling water scoured them inside the state-of-the-art machine that cost more than a decent car. No lowly dish boy’s hands ever left smudges where a wealthy debutante brought her lips to shining glass.

The plates and bowls received cursory scrapes and rinses before being piled into crates that slid roughly into the industrial dishwasher. Dave dove head first into the enormous cooking cauldrons, wielding the long-necked spraying hose like a fireman as he attacked grease and soot.

He pulled clean dishes from the dishwasher, hot as buns from the baker's oven. The plates and bowls hissed steam as he sorted them into place on the shelves. That evening, after the dinner shift concluded, he looked soberly at the glistening stacks. Tomorrow it would all begin again. Every plate scraped today would return the next, smeared with crème brulé and béchamel sauce. The thought of the endless rounds exhausted him.

Dave slid down the stainless steel counter and laid his head in his hands, knees tucked close to tired ribs. His eyes darted around the empty kitchen as he calculated how many dishes he had sent down the line to unknown dishwashers when he dined in the luxury of Gold Mountain. Six? Ten? Twelve per meal? Several meals a day, most days of the week, fifty-two weeks of the year . . . plus the chef's equipment, knives, chopping boards, pots, frying pans, graters, ladles.

Dave ran his reddened hands through his hair, laying his head back against the cool steel cabinet. There was no grace to this work, no pride or satisfaction. His humanity was chained to the pace of the constant stream of dishes. The pores of his skin felt sullied by the grease and bits of discarded food. His spine wept from the day of bending to servitude.

Dave stilled. It was servitude, there was no other word for it. Like the early laborers of the Industrial Revolution, his heart railed at the injustice of wage-slavery. The lie of capitalism shattered like a crystal wine glass smacked against the hard cast iron of a frying pan. The lords and ladies of the twenty-first century sat out in front, dining in luxury while he sweated and wracked his body laboring for them. Wages were nothing but a cover-up for servitude.

Dave shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. As a worker, he could find pride in those stacks of glistening dishes, go home, sleep soundly, return the next day, pocket a paycheck, save up, buy a home, become the master of his own little property . . . but he'd still be a servant to the masters - not a tradesman, a householder, a craftsman, or an artist - he would be a servant washing dishes in the estate of the lord.

Does the hypocrisy of America know any bounds? he wondered.

The nation built on the promise of equality and opportunity gave rise to one of the greatest wealth divides on the planet. There was nothing egalitarian about capitalism. The rich got richer; the poor grew poorer. Capital flowed to those who already had it; power followed capital. Upward mobility in the United States was a standing joke. Downward mobility was a statistical reality.

 

 

He had once owned it all: mansion, resort, golf course, billions, jewelry, art, servants, sports cars. Everything that money could buy, he'd had and lost and now he couldn't care less. He'd slept in the gutter. He'd soaked in champagne. Poverty did not frighten him. Opulence did not entice him.

 

 

The Second World War echoed the machinations of the first. By the end of it, capitalists had packaged up the vision of equality and opportunity promoted by the workers, and added a white picket fence, a dog, and a brand new car. The American Dream was now for sale, with a price tag on every piece: the lawn, the clothes, the toaster, the kids, Mom's white smile and pearl necklace, Dad's rolled up shirt sleeves-

Ah, those rolled-up sleeves, a touch of brilliance in the painting of the dream. If Dad's cuffs had closed neatly at the wrists, he would have fallen into a different class - the class of servants of the wealthy: the managers, the bureaucrats, the clerks and the lawyers; all those whose shift cuffs buttoned neatly under jackets, paired with clean fingernails and obsequious smiles.

But no, Dad's shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows; he was a workingman who labored and sweated and by some miracle still had energy to flex his worker's muscles as he tussled with his son on the weekend.

This is the dream, the vision of the worker: that at the end of the day, he has more than when he started; that he'll get home in time to see his kids; that he won't grow old and thin from working overtime to pay the bills; that the kids won't be sent to work instead of school; that the house will be warm and the food will be nourishing; that his wife will be smiling; that the dog will be more than a snarling set of ribs - these are the dreams of the worker. He dreams of them because he does not have them. He joins the struggle to wrest such humble visions from the grip of other men's greed. He is beaten, arrested, fired, persecuted, hunted, hounded, shipped off to war . . . and if by some miracle, he survives decades of that misery, he comes home to a slap in the face.

The Dream has been plastered on billboards and is still out of reach, packaged up by the same capitalists who broke up the worker strikes; the same rich men who enclosed the commons, the same upper class that took the land of Europe and replaced peasants with sheep; the same millionaires who manipulated poverty in America; the same merchants and nobles who impressed starving men into indentured servitude; the same elites who whipped up the poor to massacre the natives; the same ambitious ruling class who rallied the colonists to fight a revolution so the wealthy could seize the Crown's stolen land; the same businessmen who chained desperate immigrants to fifteen-hour work days . . . this self-same lineage has now bottled up the visions of the people and rolled out the advertisements to sell it.

In the stainless steel kitchen of his high-class resort, Dave Grant rubbed his red, aching hands and noted his rolled-up shirtsleeves. History swept over him, swirled, and eddied around him. He thought of the women in skirts singing for bread and roses, children marching with a little old lady to demand school instead of a lifetime in factories. He thought of the daydreams of laborers: living wages, safe work places, healthcare, eight-hour workdays.

Slowly, incredulously, he shook his head. They shortchanged themselves with even the best of those demands. The laborers had struggled and suffered, but in the end, they were still slaves asking for better conditions.

Freedom is what the enslaved cry for, not shorter workdays!

Emancipation is the demand, not better rations!

If we ask for anything less, it is a compromise for the sake of survival. The real vision - if we dare to demand it - is to abolish all forms and causes of wage-slavery.

We sold our labor because we were starving, landless, evicted, foreclosed on, run out of the trades, uneducated, lost. The Earth spreads mightily in every direction . . . but in every direction stretch fences. Property, ownership, control of the common resources by individuals instead of peoples: in a thousand pinpricks of greed seven billion human beings die. Whole populaces are shut off the land, shoved off, locked up in cities, and starved.

If we had dared, Dave thought with ferocity, we should have torn up the fences, the deeds, laws, courts, charters, constitutions, and all notions that carved up the land and gave it to private individuals.

 

 

And, Dave added thoughtfully, some of the rich were notorious cheapskates. Give them a price tag and they'd argue it down. Hesitate due to moral principles, and the money would come pouring out in bribes. Dave had dealt with multi-millionaires who dickered for a lower price on a luxury suite. Many of the wealthy made their fortunes by shortchanging everyone else through outrageously high percentages and interest rates, illegal mortgage scams, tax evasions, overseas labor, sub-minimum wage salaries, part-time jobs without benefits; there were a thousand ways to skim the cream off the milk of economy and industry.

Dave had once scanned a packed opera hall and could not find an honest man or woman in it. A whole society of high-class crooks, raising toasts to each other's swindling, scathingly derisive of the recent crime wave of petty thefts that were wrought by the widespread poverty their business practices induced.

He had yet to stumble upon a stockpile of wealth that had not been amassed through misery and suffering. The trust funds of the past were tainted by unspeakable atrocities. The fortunes of the present were laced with the blood of illegal wars for oil. The speculations of the future rested in the financial enslavement of third world countries.

"I suppose the rich are all very nice people," Joan had once said doubtfully.

"They're not, " he had answered bluntly. "A lot of them are sociopaths, absolutely insane. A few are very nice people when they want something from you."

"But you're not a sociopath," Joan had protested.

"Maybe I was, then," Dave had replied. "Everyone can change."

 

 

He scanned the faces subtly as he walked. Kindness is a thirst that no amount of extravagance can quench. The yearning for simple, human connection makes the rich and powerful wake up crying in the night. Their hearts grow parched and dry as dust, aching with the cracks that split inside them. All-devouring, the wealthy consume to assuage their desperate thirst for kindness. Their material obesity threatens to kill them, but they cannot stop. It's not enough, they wail, and irony binds their words to the desperate cries of the poor. They are dying men gasping for a shave of ice to be placed upon their burning tongues. Their bodies scorch with unseen fevers. Hell is nothing more than life without a touch of kindness.

Dave walked among them, a recovering addict shaken by sobriety. He passed by alcoholics drunk on wealth, druggies, whores, pimps and pushers. The ultra-rich perch on the shoulders of the semi-rich who are hoisted up by the upper middle class who sneer at the lower middle class who accuse the poor of being lazy who in turn crush the abjectly miserable in an immense, invisible socioeconomic human pyramid, a circus act of the tallest order, a whole society of clowns and back benders in the greatest freak show on Earth.

 

 

"If you're going to put gold on the top of a mountain, the bodies of the poor will be buried in the mines."

Dave swallowed, seeing visions of pharaohs and pyramids built on slave labor, skyscrapers that rose on immigrants' backs, fortunes amassed on the genocides of natives, and estates stolen through wars of aggression. Under the gilded facade of Gold Mountain lay an Earth full of suffering. Under the jewel on the crown of the richest man in the world lay the sordid truth of squalor and oppression.

"You cannot be free until all are free," he murmured.

 

 

 

"Can you be a billionaire and a buddha?" Joan had asked him, once.

Serving caviar to gold-decked hands, he answered silently.

My love, the question is not 'can you?' but 'why would you?'

Anything is possible in the realms of the enlightened, but why would an enlightened being perpetuate the delusions of riches, money, ego, and wealth?

It is all nonsense, Dave thought, and worse than nonsense. Delusions of grandeur were often bought at the price of another person's suffering. Every penny of the wealthy has been taken from the poor.

If the Buddha ran a business, it would not turn a profit. The workers would earn a living wage, the suppliers' children would be well fed, the products would be affordable, and the Earth would not be devastated and destroyed for the sake of profits.

And if even one of these wealthy benefactors understood this concept, lived by it, ran their business by this concept, it would be more beneficial than all the charitable donations of all the rich people in the world.

After all, what is charity but a cruel joke? It's a mockery of the masses - the powerful take all the wealth and hand a penny back to the people. They chastise the poor for fighting tooth-and-nail over scraps from the rich man's banquet table. What is charity but the snobbery of those who have taken more than they need? They give to operas and theatres, art museums, and private schools. They fund a culture of devotion to the wealthy. They support Cinderella stories in which the hero's quest centers on becoming a rich man by hoarding money from the poor. They endow scientific institutions that generate convenient facts. They finance research for technology that serves their profits. That's not charity; it's investment, and tax-deductible at that. They fund education for the specialists their companies will need. They give money to the non-profits of sons-in-laws of influential politicians.

The charity of the wealthy, Dave scowled, is not charity.

It's greed.

 

 

"I know something of the art of charity. I have given small fortunes to single mothers in rolls of hundred dollar bills. I have received a handful of pocket change and wept with gratitude. I have walked in the ranks of the rich and the poor, and there is one thing I have learned.

"The poor do not need your charity. They need equality and justice. They do not need to be robbed of a decent life so that you can give back mere shreds of their survival. Our wealth devours dignity. Their children's future lies in the mortar of our mansions. Their parents' hard work formed the bricks of our success. We hand out trinkets, baubles, pittances; we throw coins from carriages lined with gold. What we give away is nothing to us; what we take away is everything to them."

The wealthy were balking like sheep that sense the wolf circling their pen. They could smell danger in the night. Dave grasped command of the room with a bark of his voice.

"We have taken hope and turned it into golf courses! We have taken small joys and filled our pools with them. We have taken elements of their survival and served them up as delicacies on our silver platters."

He moved. They were twitching nervously, ready to bolt. He stretched one foot forward and took a step. When the sheep begin to stir, the master must steer them in a direction. He circled the main hall, slowly. Their eyes followed his every move.

"This is what I saw with my own eyes when I descended from Gold Mountain. But there is more and listen closely, for this pertains to you."

He aligned himself with them, with wealth. He clasped his hands behind his back in a gesture they recognized from the Dave Grant of old, the owner of resorts and privileges, the man who had paced their homes that way.

"The masses are stirring."

They flinched at the words all elites fear.

"The people are roiling, rumbling."

Heart rates quickened. Fingernails bit into palms.

"They cry for bread; we stock the shelves with cake." He pointed to the silent auction. "Heads will roll because of this."

Massaged backs stiffened. Mouths pulled into scowls.

"The ingrates," someone muttered.

Dave laughed in a sound as dry as desert sand.

"Why should they be grateful? Their mothers work three jobs. Their schools are crumbling and overcrowded. Their sons are sent to die in wars. Their daughters are forced into prostitution to pay the rent. Their children's fathers are locked in prisons. Their sisters and brothers are looking for work. Drug dealers are the only employers hiring. And they're supposed to thank us for all of this?"

His voice rumbled like thunder, unstoppable, saying words that no one had ever dared to speak in cathedrals of the wealthy. On the street corners, the prophets cried of the coming apocalypse. In the ranks of the poor, the revolutionaries foretold the fall of empires. But in a world of seven billion souls, only one man was poised to deliver this warning to the rich.

"We sit in their halls of power. We own their land. We hold their wealth. We can move mountains or blow them up. We can buy up the stars and name them after ourselves. We can launch wars of utter annihilation. We have the power to make change."

He paced as he spoke, striding rhythmically, circling, mesmerizing, forcing them to turn, turn around the room, turn around themselves, turn in a full revolution, turn and return to the place where everything began.

"They will rise up and take it back. They have to if they are to survive. They may riot. They may organize. But, either way, it is only a matter of time. All our preparations: armies, strategies, surveillance, police, prisons - these are nothing to a father's love for the dying child in his arms. They will not stop determined mothers who see your children growing fat. They will not restrain the righteous youths whose innate sense of equality and justice rebels against oppression. There is only one thing that will save us."

He stilled, suddenly, absolutely, exactly at the starting point framed by the arches of the entrance.

"Give it back to them."

Those diamond eyes swept the room, leaving not one of them exempt.

"Rebuild equality and justice, pour the profits into the people, restore the public schools and services, pay your taxes, honor debts, take no profit from your work. Pay yourself a living wage and nothing more. Live simply. Be humble. Become one among the many.

"In return, you will receive security in equality; brotherhood in justice; companionship in solidarity; community in mutual prosperity. You will lose your fear of those in poverty. You will lose the unbearable loneliness of our lives."

He stood then as a human being, one who had suffered and struggled, a Dave Grant who had nearly died of loneliness and separation, a man who knew the pain of isolation. He stood as a mere mortal who had lived and lost and learned to love, who had been touched by kindness and restored by soup, who had walked miles in many shoes until he wore all shoes off his footsteps. He stood as one among the many, humbled by them all.

Those diamond-eyes blazed with sharp compassion. The blue ached for the hard words he had delivered. He had stirred uneasy feelings and resentments. He had shattered the evening for them all. The charity would flounder - who could bid on the auction after this? They would stand around awkwardly for a short while then leave as swiftly as they could. He released the power of commanding presence; shock would hold them now. He spoke as gently as he started, beginning with charity again.

"I have learned something about charity in these seven years. We don't need charity, any of us, rich or poor. What we all need is equality, so we can stand side by side again. So we can look each other in the eyes. So we can live and love once more."

But, there was more to say, Dave realized, for the wisdom of the buddhas began to hum inside his chest. There is the perfection of charity and he must speak to this before they left.

"I want to make a gift tonight," he said. Speeches alone would not suffice. "A perfect gift, an unexcelled gift, one that is unsurpassed."

He walked now to the center of the hall, looking up and around as if pondering which piece of art or statue or gold leafed trim or beams of Mayan temple wood he would sacrifice to show his generosity. They pivoted to watch him, fascinated despite themselves. As in the folktales, some choices might bring disaster; others could shower riches, but only one answer would end all suffering.

What would Dave Grant give?

"I have urged us all to give everything away," he told them. "And now I should practice what I preach."

The breaths caught sharply in throats and chests. Whispered phrases shot out.

"My god!"

"He's insane!"

"He won't do it."

"He's going to give Gold Mountain to charity!"

"Not to charity," he corrected, smiling. "To the perfection of charity."

He paused, for he could feel the buddhas and bhagavans, tathagatas, and fully enlightened ones amassing. The crossroads gathered and surrounded him in all directions like a thousand roads conjoining in a great intersection of the realms.

"Liberation is the greatest gift, but I cannot give what I do not own," he said. "And what I claimed to own was never mine. For the mountains and the forest do not belong to humans. The rivers, birds, and beasts are no more our slaves than our fellow man. And if all of these are, by rights, already free . . . then to whom can I give the gift of liberation? I cannot say to the stars or the sky that I, Dave Grant, now release you. I cannot say to the trees that I, a human with this notion of property, now tear up this paper written on your father's back."

He chuckled to himself, for there was only one thing he could give.

"I give up my delusion of ownership, and give everything back to itself: the rivers to the rivers; the trees to the trees; the minerals of Gold Mountain to themselves." His eyes crinkled in an inexpressible burst of laughter. "And though I say, I give everything back to itself, that is not exactly true. There is only one thing I give back to itself . . . and that, of course, is me."

The slave owner emancipates himself from the shame of enslaving other men. He releases the cause of his own confusion, his own suffering, his own agony and living hell. Thus, though he liberates hundreds of beings, he, in truth, emancipates himself.

The same is true for all property, trees, land, objects, wealth. Not one being belongs to another.  We belong together, side by side, in a brotherhood of all the species, in the equality of Earth.

Dave Grant closed his eyes. The room stood silent, shocked. But the realms of the invisible crossroads roared with thunder, for the Billionaire Buddha had finally awakened.

 

 

People balked in utter terror at the idea of liberated land. A senator belligerently threatened to invade and conquer the only patch of free land in the entire world, to take it back into possession of the United States of America.

 

 

"So, why does the Buddha make poverty?" the woman interjected.

Joan tilted her chin up and quickly fired back a retort.

"You tell me, oh Buddha," she challenged the woman, "and you and you and you," she pointed around the crowd. "Why do you make poverty and starvation, hunger, sickness, wars and prisons?"

Dave put his hand on Joan's arm.

"Forgive them, love," he murmured, quoting Jesus, "for they know not what they do. We've been crucifying ourselves in ignorance."

He hesitated . . . then grinned.

"But now you know. So, stop it."

 

 

"It just seems to me that what we did up here - " Larry broke off, staring at the peaked roofs of the resort. "It's a thing of the past," he said finally. "Like lords and ladies. Like dinosaurs and dodo birds. I watch my sons - and all the kids - and whether they grow up rich or poor, they've got a world of trouble. Nobody on this earth has time to waste knocking little white balls around golf courses."

Larry spat onto the green. Dave remained silent, letting the other man talk.

"The young folks are different from us," Larry declared. "They're chatting with people all over the world. A fly sneezes in Hong Kong and my son gets a text message about the chain of events that led up to the hurricane in Cancun. Can you imagine? It's a different world. I'm not sure it has a place for Gold Mountains - not when the kids know that half of the Appalachia Mountains have been blown into smithereens. They want to do something about that, not ignore it."

 

 

A band of sunrise bathed his face in gold. There he was, neither old nor young, neither handsome nor hideous, just a man who wore his life in his lines.

 

His mystic understandings dissolved like soggy cereal the moment he turned the corner into the alley. His carefully constructed strategies fled his mind like farm-boy foot soldiers. He barked at them to hold their ground. They vanished. He stood in front of the red door, abandoned by last night's confidence

 

 

He watched her. Some women would play the role of the hostess with a heavy dose of syrupy mothering, but Joan fulfilled her role like a determined bird kicking the chicks out of the nest just for the joy of seeing them fly. She teased the teahouse irregulars, snapped back retorts to their philosophic challenges, shot out piercing questions, and tore apart assumptions like a defender of the realm of truth. All the while, Joan's hands danced, pouring hot water and laying out fresh cups as more irregulars arrived.

 

"The wealthy don't pay taxes," he informed them, speaking from experience, "unless they have a lousy tax accountant. The rich hire lawyers and experts. If that doesn't cover it, they buy a change in the tax code."

 

"Do you know how the lottery works?" she asked. "Most people lose a little, one person makes a little, and the lottery owner makes a lot.  It's rigged. The whole game is rigged . . . same with money, wealth, and poverty. We can't win by perpetuating it. We have to stop hoping to be the lucky winner and recognize that the whole game is corrupt."

 

*********  XX second video*****

"The rich are only viewed as job creators because they hold all the capital," she pointed out. "If their massive fortunes were dispersed among the people, every Tom, Dick, and Harry would be popping out small businesses, jobs, and stimulus to the economy. The wealthy and their mega-corporations are not - and never have been - job creators. They tend to be poverty-inducing, minimum wage-producing, part-time job-inflicting, union-busting, healthcare-eroding, worker rights-violating, democracy-destroying monsters."

She heaved for breath and the man stole an advantage.

"Well, without those jobs no one would have any work."

"Are you insane?" Joan shot back. "The wealthy elite are sucking up money like water and the whole nation is cracking with drought. The dam of their fortunes is amassing into a huge reservoir that no one has access to, except for the rich. Break the dam, I say! Turn the water into the desert and you'll be amazed at the vibrant economies that will grow."

"You're hardly an economist -"

"No, I'm a Buddhist," Joan retorted. "Which simply means that I observe things as they are."

"I think you're overestimating the size of the dam," the man argued.

"Actually," Dave interjected, "she's underestimating it."

She raised an eyebrow at him, picked up the neglected tea pitcher, and refilled all the cups as he spoke.

"The richest handful of individuals in this country owns more than the poorest forty percent of the populace. How much do you make a year?" he asked the youth sitting next to the college student who had started the conversation.

"On a good year?" the young man pondered, thinking about his three, post-college, part-time jobs. "I'd say about thirty thousand dollars - but only if I get a sweet summer gig with good tips."

Dave calculated rapidly.

"The wealthy make that much in an hour and fifteen minutes," he pointed out.

"You're making that up," the man objected.

Dave smiled grimly.

"No, I can assure you, I'm not."

The number was based on his Gold Mountain income, not including investments or interest from his offshore account.

"You're just parroting the protestors," the man grumbled.

Dave folded his arms across his chest and stared steadily back.

"I have been a serial entrepreneur for over three decades," he stated. "I know more about business and economics than this entire room put together. I have been a multi-millionaire since the age of thirty and I built the most exclusive resort in the western United States. If you knew what I know about the wealthy, you wouldn't be arguing about those protestors . . . you'd be joining them in the streets."

A stunned silence hung on the room. The egalitarian camaraderie vanished. Dave winced. The student's eyes narrowed suspiciously. The other youth's round-as-saucers eyes gazed at him above the dropped oval of his mouth. The white elephant of class and money stood awkwardly in the room. He was rich; they were poor. The emperor had been discovered.

The argumentative man fumed and glowered across the table until a triumphant gleam touched his expression.

"If that's true," he accused Dave, "then why don't you go join the protests?"

Dave stared back steadily.

"That," he replied slowly, "is a very good question."

 

 

 

. Wealth in this country was inseparable from capitalism. Fortunes grew from the brutal history of stolen capital, first the land of the continent, then the resources, the labor of the enslaved and immigrants, and most recently, the robbery of their potential bound up in loans and crushing debts.

Dave's expression fell into deep shadows as he grappled with the parasitical nature of capitalism. The spine-shuddering vision of a massive beast haunted his thought; he watched capitalism sink its talons into living creatures and suck their blood and sinew until the emptied sack of bones and skin collapsed. In the New World, capitalism had unleashed its seething violence to massacre a continent of civilizations that objected to its parasitic invasion. The coasts of the east, the farmlands, the Appalachia’s fell to the all-devourer. No more! the natives cried, but the Spanish conquered Mexico at sword point and sucked up the California coast. The French trappers wormed into the tall forests. The English, the Irish, the German, the Dutch: the hordes continued to advance as greedy European elites consumed wealth, food, equality, and justice, thrusting thousands more into desperation, and ultimately, onto the ships departing for the Americas. Manifest Destiny delivered divine rule to white-skinned masses; opposition was plowed under, along with the arrowheads and blood of massacres and battles. Darwin broke onto the scene and out of a hundred pages of cooperation, collaboration, and compassion, the marketing racket caught the line "survival of the fittest" and trumpeted it from the rooftops of the burgeoning city skyscrapers. Adam Smith's invisible hand met a similar fate as the Wall Street robber barons reached eagerly to strike a deal with a hand that was mentioned only once in the economic treatise. John Locke's theory of the right to private property was truncated at the clause " . . . so long as the well being and good of the commoners is assured." A heartless novelist capitalized on the ill-founded myths and a well-funded foundation ensured her books were read. A thousand false premises paraded around in the psyche of a nation without a single courageous child to cry out, "Look Mommy, the Empire has no clothes!"

It had no clothes, no heart, no decency, no shame, no foundation in truth, no reality. Capitalism was Greed unleashed like Satan's right hand man, justified by convenient misinterpretations of the Bible, and rationalized by sciences that failed to account for the reality of the world. Capitalism had the gall to proclaim its superiority to all other economic systems when Europe lay in crumbled ruins and bombed-out cities after two world wars had tromped across its back. Capitalism dared to vilify its main competition in a twist of bitter irony - the system that lauds competition as its main insignia would not duel fairly with communism or socialism, but instead fought dirty and aimed low. Never has a day risen or set upon an equal opportunity capitalist economy. Never has competition proved survival of the fittest. Instead, the lowest, vilest, meanest, cruelest, most heartless villains who hold nothing sacred and will stoop to anything for a profit have risen and risen and risen.

Including him.

Dave Grant bore no illusions about his former life. From personal experience, he knew capitalism in practice was a vampire wearing the historic cape of colonization and imperialism. Its success was built on others' ruin. Predatory, voracious, insatiable, it devours lives as resources and then moves on to greener pastures, leaving the emaciated in its wake along with toxic wastes, birth defects, poverty, and devastated landscapes. It crunches down the rocks and licks the minerals. It drinks the water. It sucks the air. Then it collapses and finally lies forgotten in the dust of human extinction on a barren, empty planet spinning through the lonely void of space.

All this and more pounded through Dave as his temples throbbed with thought. Capitalism ends in collapse, lives in a state of collapse, and preys on collapse. It is the accountant for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It is the all-devourer of the ancient spiritual prophecies. Capitalism builds up value, then destroys it, buys it up cheap, resells it for a profit, and builds something new. But in this tidy equation lie billions of lives thrown into ruin. Disaster, debt, imprisonment, and despair: it's all just par for the course on capitalism's green.

As for socialism, communism, he could not say. He could only speak for a system he knew with great intimacy, one he had excelled at, witnessed first hand, manipulated, perverted, dominated, succumbed to, escaped from and been chained to again. He could only speak for himself and perhaps for the creatures without voices, those who were resources or externalities to capitalism's eyes.

"Capitalism will destroy us unless we destroy capitalism," he said, half in a trance.

 

 

"Yes, and while I went to bed hungry and missed out on my overworked, underpaid parents, the rich kids rode their yachts around exclusive reservoir lakes. You probably built one," she accused him.

"Metaphorically, yes," he agreed, not bothering to deny the truth.

"Didn't you know what you were doing?" Joan demanded. "Didn't you know that somewhere, children were suffering while you built a playground for the wealthy?"

He shifted uncomfortably.

"The vistas of the rich are designed to mask those realities," he explained slowly. "They hire a legion of staff to maintain the complete facade of their splendor.  Sure, some read the statistics and the economic reports, but that's just numbers on a page."

"I was a number," Joan said quietly.

"Yes," he answered, almost harshly, "and so were your parents, your playmates and everyone else you knew."

"And numbers don't suffer," she murmured.

"No," he agreed. "Numbers don't cry at night."

"The people behind those statistics do," Joan told him.

"Did you?" he asked.

"Of course."

Dave sighed.

"I suppose," he mused, "even Cinderella and Prince Charming had class and wealth discussions."

"No," Joan retorted, pursing her lips in irritation. "Cinderella was a disgraced noblewoman clawing her way back up into comfort. She bought the whole wealth concept hook, line, and sinker. Fairytales are almost always a sickening propaganda campaign for the upper class."

"Have you ever been to Disney World?" Dave asked curiously.

"No, we could never afford it."

"I spent a couple of weeks there after the divorce," Dave reflected.

"What'd you do?" Joan snorted. "Ride the rollercoaster for therapy?"

"No, I watched people buying into the illusion that happiness and wealth go hand-and-hand." His tone turned bitter. "You see, I had the real life Disney World - castles, magic, money, princesses, the whole nine yards, but money doesn't bring happiness."

"Then why didn't you stop stealing it from people who didn't want to buy happiness, they just wanted survival," she cried. "Bread, rice, a roof over their heads!"

"Because I lived in a Disney World where poverty doesn't exist."

She frowned at him.

"Did you know," he asked her, "that they repaint the railings at Disney World every night to make sure the illusion of perfection is absolute? Like Siddhartha Buddha before he left the palace of a prince, the rich are sheltered from the sight of poverty by the fortresses of wealth and class. We just don't see it."

"So who has more opportunity to awaken?" Joan asked. "The prince in the palace who never sees suffering? Or the pauper who drowns in the river of life?"

"Neither - both - everyone has a chance," Dave suggested.

"The Buddha was a prince," Joan pointed out.

"But he had only a robe and much knowledge of hunger by the time he awakened," Dave commented.

 "Hui-neng, the Sixth Patriarch of the Zen School was poor and illiterate," Joan told him. "His father was a banished bureaucrat, and after he died, Hui-neng had to gather firewood to sell in the market to support his mother."

"Vimalakirti was a wealthy businessman," Dave said. "I always liked him."

Joan raised an eyebrow.

"Trying to have your wealth and get enlightened, too?"

"Some people say the wealthy have more opportunity to reach enlightenment," he said slowly. "But I disagree. They can buy gurus, but most of the spiritual teachers they meet are charlatans who are just after their money. These fakes tell the rich some version of manifest destiny or God's chosen rulers or good karma and fortunate rebirths and that enlightenment can be gained by supporting a temple, but even Jesus said it's easier for a rich man to pass through the eye of a camel than enter the Kingdom of God."

"Needle," Joan corrected. "Camel is a mistranslation."

"Regardless, the wealthy have too much baggage."

"Why don't they put it down?" Joan sighed.

"Some would rather be fat and wealthy here on earth than go through life thin and poor to get into heaven," Dave tried to explain.

Joan put her head in her hands.

"It's all such idiocy," she groaned. "Religion, eyes of needles, kingdoms of God, heaven.  Look," she argued, lifting her head and pounding her fist into her hand. "Jesus taught that the Kingdom of God is within.  It's not a place in the sky. It's a living awareness. The reason it's so hard for rich people to enter is because their minds are caught up in a fabricated reality that has nothing to do with God, or enlightenment, or any sort of spiritual understanding. You've got to drop all the nonsense of riches, status, prestige, indulgence, being better than anyone else, and holding onto wealth. In the Kingdom of God, there are no rich and no poor."

"As they say, you can't take it with you," Dave chimed in.

"Exactly!" she cried. "But that's not just about death . . . it's about life. You don't need the Porsche, the pool, the mansion - "

"Nor a beat-up Volvo, a cold shower, or a rundown apartment, either," he countered.

"Yes!" her eyes shone with excitement. "The phrase, you can't take it with you, is a reminder to let go of the nonsense of stuff - no matter if you're rich or poor."

She looked at him, hawk-eyed.

"That includes bank accounts," she pointed out.

"It includes collections of rare teas," he shot back, pointing at the teapot.

"It includes living in a replica Japanese teahouse," she argued.

"It includes your self-righteous notion that a rundown apartment is more spiritual than my Japanese teahouse," he retorted.

"It includes your compulsion to 'make it all back'," she claimed.

His finger leapt up to point at her.

"It includes your judgment about my former wealth."

Her mouth dropped open. She shut it. Her eyes narrowed.

"It includes your masculine superiority complex that always has to have the last word."

He burst out laughing.

"Truce?" he offered with an apologetic smile.

"Truce," she agreed.

Her eyes glinted with another thought. Her lips twitched up. She glanced at Dave and he caught the hint of a challenge. Joan rose to flip the record. It was closing time, but she made no move to throw him out.

"So, do you think," she asked him as she examined the black disc in her hands, "that the changes in our lives are inscribed in fate like grooves in a record?"

"No," he answered. "Somebody makes the record, the music, the record player."

"And who is that somebody?"

"Me, of course," he replied. "Why let someone else botch up my life?"

 

"Mess?" he protested, indignantly. "I'm not a mess. I consider myself a work of art, a masterpiece, a great epic equal to the Ramayana or the Iliad, thank you very much!"

"In Buddhism, there is a parable that says Hell is a sumptuous banquet at which everyone has spoons that are so long they cannot put the food in their mouths. Heaven is when everyone finally learns to feed each other."

 

 

When the groove works, it sings, Dave reflected. You can go on playing the same beautiful song through your whole life, occasionally flipping the record for variation, or resetting the needle to the beginning.

 

"There's no such thing as a rut that heads nowhere," she declared, crossing her arms and giving him a hawk-eyed glare. "Ancient cultures rooted in the feminine understand that, in an impermanent world, the new horizon is the same one we look at every day. The world is, in fact, recreating itself anew, right before our eyes. We cannot step in the same river twice, and a groove changes with each revolution."

 

 

"And is the feminine - the yin - any less destructive? Everyone thinks of nurturing mothers and Kwan Yins, but water is the most corrosive force on earth. Rot, decay, darkness, death, autumn, winter, these are all yin elements."

"I think they're both destructive in the excess," Dave replied carefully.

"Yes," she agreed before emphasizing her point again, "but is it right to think our lives are about growth? Or is that just a left-over concept from the patriarchal invade and conquer mentality: clear the forest, kill the natives, set up the homestead, build a town, develop a city, raise the skyscrapers, consume the world's resources . . . "

"That's just one model of growth," he replied, latching onto the firmer footing of economic models and development plans. "And, if you oppose the global industrial growth society, you ought to stop drinking tea shipped from China."

"I know, it's a moral conundrum, isn't it?" she replied seriously. "Everyone has their indulgences. I wash my plastic bags and reuse them, bucket the gray water into the garden; support local, organic agriculture; I became a vegetarian because of climate change; I don't drink alcohol because the grain should be used to end world hunger first; I bike around town and never travel on airplanes . . . but I drink tea from China." She frowned. "I suppose shipping tea to the United States is more fuel efficient than flying there to drink it."

Dave groaned.

"There's a lot you don't know about me, Dave Grant," she warned him.

And even more you don't know about me, he countered silently, thinking of champagne Jacuzzi baths, daily massages, and truffles flown in overnight from France. He considered telling her, but quickly decided she would shun him for being the epitome of the self-absorbed, greedy billionaire who had left his wife for a young blonde and drove a red sports car at reckless speeds through school zones. He pictured her bailing out her bathtub and lugging a five-gallon bucket to water the plants, doing her small part to help the ecology in the drought-prone central California coast.

His golf course had guzzled a million gallons of water a day.

From the perspective of his former business and political associates, her lifestyle activism was not only pointless; it was downright pathetic. With a flick of a wrist, legislators could subsidize renewable energy, end fossil fuel use, and free up the billions of gallons of water consumed by coal plants. Wealthy billionaires could write a check to put solar panels on every home and business in the nation, thereby ending the cause of the climate crisis. And here was Joan, bucketing her gray water.

That's how the system works, though, he thought. The powerful do nothing; the powerless labor and sweat and beg and plead for change; using every bit of time, energy, resources, and skills they possess; exhausting all possibilities while the powerful rake in millions of dollars on systems of destruction, sitting in their chaise lounges, sipping bourbon by the pool, criticizing the lazy, drunk, good-for-nothing poor.

"We live in an imperfect world," Joan stated, startling him from his thoughts," a world built on thousands of years of violent domination and exploitation. Our current civilization is laced with the poison of countless rounds of suffering."

 

 

"Form is emptiness; emptiness is form," Joan quoted from the Heart Sutra. "Everything we perceive - including our perception - has no fixed, permanent, or separate existence. Thus it is said that form is empty. The same is true for sight, sound, taste, touch, scent, thought, memories, concepts, and even the Buddhist teachings of liberation, paths, and enlightenment. If it changes; if it can be perceived differently from viewer-to-viewer; if it relies on air, light, eyes, or anything else for its existence . . . then that object or being is said to be empty of any intrinsic nature of its own. But," she warned, "this does not mean non-existence! Emptiness describes the phenomenon underlying the ever-changing, interconnected somethingness of reality."

 

 

"The first time I read the sutra," she told him, touching the cover of the book, "it was as if I had heard the words a thousand times. The meaning unfolded like a lotus, my notions of reality lurched abruptly, and nothing has ever been the same since."

 

 

"Love," he answered, finally. He rubbed his sweaty palms on his thighs and swallowed his nervousness. "I gave it up for love."

Her eyes darted away and she bit her lower lip. A sudden hint of hurt crossed her expression and Dave saw quick thoughts and hidden secrets flash past in a rapid succession that left him wide-eyed.

"Wait," he said quickly, "let me explain. I'm giving up wealth in search of love."

A sharp, curious look crossed across her face.

"On a stormy, windswept night on top of a cliff overlooking the ocean," he began, laughing to himself at the memory, "I realized my life was a disaster. So, I struck a bargain with Fate. I promised to give up all my money if the Universe would show me to the doorstep of true love."

He glanced at her expectantly, but she sat still as a statue. Her eyes locked gazes with his and the world around them slowed as he spoke.

They froze. In their voices, they heard the echoes of a hundred lives, each one chasing the other in and out of marriages and monastic vows, laymen's follies and spiritual austerities

 

In the quiet, everything settled like the low dip of the sun. Gold slid through the husky blue-green leaves of the rustling bamboo. The blue jays chattered warnings of the lengthening afternoon. The air stilled to a timeless calm. Joan and Dave hung suspended in an eternity, staring at each other as time slowly poured like honey off the spoon of the afternoon. The wind spied on them and whispered gossip to the high branches of the giant redwoods. The bamboo leaves murmured secrets to each other.

A twig cracked.

The murmuring whispers paused.

 

Their lips touched in a pose that would make sculptors roil in envy - the arch of her bent neck, the yearning of his rising chest, the delicate lift of her hand mid-air - all hung poised, resisting the tumbling surrender to gravity.

 

 

"You're going to get to the monastery and realize you can't live without me!" he shouted after her retreating back.

Her laughter mocked him as she called back.

"You," she yelled, "are going to get down to nothing but the clothes on your back and wish you had joined me in the temple!"

In the woods, the stone buddhas exchanged glances. With one hand raised, and the other lowered, they silently echoed the couple's words, infusing them with prophecy.

 

 

It seemed so unfair, cutting down those thin, little trees. Felt like I was bulldozing the high school graduating class, all those young saplings with nothing but promise ahead of them. And for what? A golf course?

 

He camped in his car until it was repossessed, then in the woods with a pathetic thrift store tent with a broken pole. One night, the cops raided and threw his gear in the garbage. Dave curled up on cardboard and got drunk with the other bums. He slurred to them that this wasn't possible, he was a billionaire, he was Dave Grant, his luck was all going to change soon, this was some cosmic joke - hah hah hic!

Poverty is a grind, a sinkhole that traps entire families for generations, but at times, Dave could not shake the sense that his poverty was the most self-indulgent act he'd ever committed. It was right up there with commissioning a fourteen-foot tall portrait of himself to hang in the wing of the modern art museum that bore his name. Or the time he tried to persuade the state legislators to create a black hole in the county ordinances so he could fly private jets in and out of the resort while still receiving a tax break for building a "municipal airport" that only the wealthy could use.

His slide onto the street brought him to a new height of egotistic self-centeredness. He wasn't trying to lift himself out of poverty. He believed it was fate and told the homeless shelter's social worker as much. He had condemned himself to pennilessness by making bargains on that wind-swept night on the glass balcony of the cliff-top mansion. His money or his love, the contract stated. He found his love, but he could not keep her until he had rid himself of every penny.

The social worker told him that was nonsense. She berated him for his dramatics. She said he made a mockery of the people scrambling to get out of adverse situations: the mentally ill, the single moms, the struggling addicts, the people on parole caught in the endless cycles of conviction, unemployment, crimes to survive, and more convictions. He was living proof of the conservative nightmare that government welfare turned able-bodied men into ticks on the backs of hard-working citizens.

Dave laughed until he cried and then he wept in disgust. A bed at the homeless shelter, food stamps, panhandling - even added altogether, it didn't break even with a single year's subsidy of rich people's oil, gas, corn, or sugar industries. All the poor people combined couldn't consume more of the taxpayers' money than the military contractors. The conservatives screamed about welfare until they were red in the face as they swilled vintage wines and dined on fine aged beef. Every dollar they earned came from the sweat of the people, from corners cut and healthcare benefits shortchanged. Their profit margins were collected by dumping costs on the public - pollution, health care, research, education, wars to secure economic dominance of the global market - and privatizing the profits.

Dave's body started to shake. He sat down on the curb of the main street of town, even though the city ordinances made it illegal for the poor to stand on the corner, sit on the sidewalk, lie in the bushes, carry a blanket, wash in public, or piss in the back lots. Yet, the public restrooms were closed, the shelters were full or shut down, and the benches had been removed. Tourists and shoppers sat in cafes, never dreaming that they had to pay for the right to sit down. They sipped café lattes while the poor who could not afford coffee or tacos were swept out of sight from a city that denied them their right to exist.

Dave broke the law when he fell to his haunches. He'd broken so many laws in his life: tax codes, zoning ordinances, monopoly and antitrust laws, speed limits, investments in stocks. The wealthy break laws because the laws don't apply to them. The poor break the law because their survival has been outlawed. Dave added loitering to his litany of crimes when he crumbled to the curb, shocked by a memory that symbolized the height of his conceit.

 

Five hundred thousand children were in the process of starving to death. A city would be in rubble the next day. Appalled ministers were practically begging, "there are no weapons of mass destruction here, please!" The two men playing golf raked in millions of profit with each swing. Soldiers' bodies exploded in the desert far away.

 

 

War is the greatest horror that exists, and one's silence on the subject is the second. For the profits of the wealthy, millions of bodies fall into graves. White phosphorus and depleted uranium disfigure civilians. Women are raped by soldiers from both sides. Young men's minds are destroyed by the brutal acts they commit and witness. Whole populaces are crippled inside and out, the shell-shocked survivors left living, but dead. Hollow expressions haunt their eyes. The people are fed lies to fill their blood with hatred and fear. And for what?

For the sake of men's profits, that's what.

Dave choked on the truth as he sat on the curb. The only ideology great enough to launch wars is that of profit and wealth. Religion and politics are nothing but smokescreens. The chains of the dogs of war aren't released unless personal gain for the owners lies in sight. Offense and defense can be summarized thus: can the rich get richer by invading? Do they have fortunes to protect from attack?

Dave put his head in his hands. A downtown hospitality guide - doublespeak for privatized police - nudged him with the tip of her shoe.

"You can't sit on the curb. Get moving."

He looked blearily up at her.

"You're drunk," she said in disgust.

He pointed to the people stumbling out of the bar across the street.

"So are they," he replied. "Everybody's drunk - on war, money, blood, alcohol. We're all drunkards, louts, winos, beasts, vampires, suckers, ticks - "

"Get out of here," she ordered.

"Where do you want me to go?" he cried.

"I don't care as long as I don't see you."

He rose and gave her a mocking bow.

"Invisibility is not one of my magic tricks."

He walked away before she called the police. Dave was sick of her, sick of them, sick of society, sick of drinking, sick of life, sick of death, sick of dying, sick of hating, sick of loving, sick of caring: sick.

 

He drifted. He begged for a buck. He took the bus up the coast. He hung out on the sandstone bluffs where the whales spouted in the deep ocean channel that brushed the shore as it skirted the broad bay.  He rolled up under a cypress and slept. He mocked Kerouac as he hitched rides to nowhere. He got chased out of state parks by peach-fuzz rangers who couldn't be convinced that public lands belonged to the people - not to the cash-wielding tourists or starched-shirted administrators or salivating, lease-hungry oil, gas, and timber companies. Public lands were held in trust for the lost and as a place for the destitute to rest their feet, he argued. On a continent carved up into private postage stamps, a poor man deserves to take a break on the back of his own country.

"Tell that to the governor," one ranger snarled. "He's going to sell this park off to pay for the roads in the more popular parks."

Dave opened his mouth to disillusion the kid about politics and money - the governor probably had a buddy in real estate who would make a fortune on this ocean-side property - but the kid clenched his fist and told Dave to get moving or he would forcibly evict him from the park.

Dave left. He stumbled through the bushes, haunted by a millennium of conquest and colonization. The belligerent eyes of the strong, pale-faced youth unnerved him. There stood the shadow of Columbus and Coronado, conquistadors, colonists, and countless waves of invaders and immigrants propelled by greed and cycles of injustice. In this new millennium, the genetic and cultural descendants of conquest were using instant communication to repeat the same old story of 'you cannot stand here, you cannot use this land, it does not belong to the common people, it is not yours, it is mine, now get lost!'

Way back in human history, who threw the first stone of property and control? What prophet could predict the enduring ripples of the unknown human who first claimed land, people, and power over both? Beyond the Bible or the Upanishads, further back into the unwritten songs of oral histories, a seed of domination had been planted. From the murky depths of history to Viking ships crashing on Briton's shore, to the arrival of William the Conqueror, to the growth of the British crown, to the rise and fall of an empire, to the eruption of American colonies into independent states, to the evolution of conquest into capitalism . . . the invasive weed grew and grew until it threatened total annihilation of the earth. 

The hungry ghost of conquest, forefather to the lusty greed of capitalism, leapt the ocean to North America, unleashing genocide and land theft, privatizing a world that was not owned, but inhabited by the native peoples. And behind the textbook history of the rise of a nation of immigrants lies the less-told story of tyranny that evicted millions from their homelands. We are told of the huddled masses yearning to be free. We are told of the massacres of natives perpetrated by newcomers looking for a bit of land. Yet, who speaks of the robbers of Europe? Who mentions those greedy souls who held the purse strings tight and forced peasants off their land, enclosed the commons, outlawed vagrancy, and loaded the greed-created homeless onto ships to be dumped on America's shores? Hundreds of years of history, dozens of countries, many languages and peoples are swept into this lineage; they all share a tyrant class, one that continues to this day.

"Around and around the old story goes, encircling the globe until civilization implodes!" Dave cackled madly at the rhyme.

He walked out of the public lands and squatted on the vast acreage of an absentee landowner who would never find him sleeping under the branches of a massive oak. Private jets hummed faintly far overhead, traversing from Los Angeles to the High Sierras.

Heave ho! Onward! Dave rose in the morning and set sail for unfamiliar territory, feeling indentured to the hunger that propelled him to hitchhike northward seeking alms. He labored for the wealthy alongside brown-skinned men who lined up outside the hardware store, carrying the heavy loads for lily-white ladies and hopping in the flatbeds of landscapers' trucks.

For six hours of labor, Dave was promised forty bucks. He received twenty and no ride back into town. He walked from the gated community along the highway, speaking Spanish with his fellow migrants, getting drunk on swigs of cheap tequila.

What else can a man do with the tragedy of this world? The land of plenty starves the people so the wealthy can enjoy pristine vistas from their second homes.

"Pristine, my asshole," muttered one of Dave's companions. "Their mansion overlooks a mass grave of the indigenous and the submerged ruins of Spanish missions and the long-crumbled beams of whorehouses."

"Pristine, my ass," Dave agreed, pointing to the towering eucalyptus trees. "Those invaders from Australia are devouring the coast. Where are the indigenous and the redwoods? Gone, rotted into buried bones and roots of three hundred foot giants."

 

 

He felt like a stock actor in Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, playing all the roles in the world: men, women, rich, poor, servants, nobles, fools, sages, dogs, witches, villains, and star-crossed lovers - Joan. She flashed like lightning through his mind, electric, then gone - bitter enemies, demons, and demigods. He had played all the characters in the canon of the world. He was weary of strutting and fretting across the stage in the endless repetitions of humanity's folly.

 

 

 

The police came to pay a visit. They rode up in their cruiser, knights of the modern times, as chivalrous as the mead-drunk, bosom grabbing, louse-ridden swine of medieval ages, wrapped in myths and uniforms.

 

 

*************

 

The officers drove south and dumped him out. He wandered into the forest, stumbling over roots until, exhausted, he leaned his head against an oak - the property of god-knows-who - and wept into the Spanish moss that climbed its bark.

"You," he informed the tree, "are a slave."

He pushed away from the trunk and pointed his finger at the other silent, gnarled trees.

"You . . . and you . . . and all of you are slaves. The earth - the soil - that your roots curl into is a slave. The water that runs in creeks is enslaved. All of earth is enslaved to humans!"

He climbed onto the toppled body of a fallen oak, carved by chainsaws into sections and limbs and then forgotten by the loggers. The dampness of the coast enveloped them. A dreary bank of rain clouds made the branches shiver and the moss droop forlornly like rags across the thin arms of the trees. Dave tripped drunkenly on his tongue as he addressed the silent oaks.

"Property - hic! - property," he paused, shaking his head. "You live out your days, thinking you are free. Then, one day, you discover you are not. The whole lot of you belong to your owner."

He waited for their gasp of horror, but the oaks stood stoically, barely rustling their tiny leaves. He was, after all, a mere human, drunk on the madness of his species. But, Dave warned them silently, he was a human who had made his first fortune butchering their brothers to the north.

"Ah," he continued, eyeing them shrewdly. "Property is all delusion, you say, but whose? Humanity writes its claim to you on the backs of your parents who were toppled and pulverized into paper."

Again, no answer. Perhaps a sigh of wind slipped through the hanging moss. Dave scratched his head. He examined the grime of his scalp that clung beneath his fingernails. He tottered on the fallen log, grabbing a twisted limb for balance.

"Isn't it wrong," he cried, "to be enslaved to anyone?"

The hubris and debate over slavery merely exempted humans from the definition of property . . . what a failure of vision to have stopped our logical examination. An African should not be enslaved because an African is not an animal, but should an animal be enslaved? Captured, domesticated, kept as house servants or locked in pens, bred not by natural attraction but by the genetic selection of human owners, sent to slaughter by decree of the master: all these are objectionable when applied to fellow human beings, but are they any less objectionable when applied to other species? It defies logic.

Dave's audience stood silent, weighing his words or ignoring his ranting. He could not tell. He did not care. Thoughts burned like fire in his chest and rose in flaming outbursts. Words have made humans more ferocious than dragons - those mythic beasts could only scorch and burn, but with words, humanity has touched the moon and scraped the sky with towers and spanned the ocean with wires and sent satellites into space where once only gods and angels dared to fly.

With words, humanity raises up a single man to rule all others. With words, the ruler kills entire populaces. With a word, the bombs begin to fall. With a word, the nuclear warheads could annihilate the world. They say dark mages are only legend, yet the spells of words still bind us all. Orders, commands, legal words on paper . . .

"And you," Dave said to the oaks, "are caught by words - paper words backed by chainsaws, protected by guns of state, bought by paper money and electronic transfers. You are slaves! The mighty oak has masters! Your worth is calculated by weight and length. You have no value as a living creature. Only your death will turn a profit for your owner, so you live on borrowed time, thinking you are free. You are like cows in a vast range that never see the fence. Or like humans in the modern world who never wonder about these things!"

He wept. The rain drizzled and choked his words. The corpse of the oak grew slick. He slipped, falling painfully on the hard wood, banging his ribs and collapsing in the loam, muddy and moaning, shivering against the decaying bark.

You are not free until all are free. Equality is not a half measure. While the animals cower in the feedlots, and the dogs yap behind the fences, and the trees, rocks, rivers, and valleys are owned by human beings, our species is no better than the plantation slave owner loftily claiming that without him, his negroes would degenerate into wild beasts.

Dave groaned on the ground. The wilds - that which we called the wilds - was nothing more than a perfectly content ecosystem going about its business until our fear came along and choked on it. The wilds once humbled humanity, keeping our species into the natural system of checks and balances. They cast the arrogance of human beings into the democracy of the species, the round table in which elephants and ants are all created equal. And for this reason, humanity holds nature's egalitarianism with deep disdain and lauds the hierarchies of man. But as the slow quest for equality between the human races, genders, and classes begins to bear fruit; humans are also starting to wonder . . . what is humanity doing on a pedestal of our own construction?

The meadowlark, the sequoia, the humpback whale . . . how can humankind maintain its arrogant delusion of superiority when confronted with the truth of every species' beauty? Our scientists prove the language of the birds, the intelligence of the dolphins, the social structures of the bees, the use of tools by primates, the emotions of the elephants, the alteration of environment by beavers. Nothing sets humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom - except our penchant for folly. At that, our species exceeds all others.

No, we can claim no superiority to other species. Our desire to tame the wilds is nothing but the lust for domination, an attempt to escape the inherent equality of Earth.

Dave laid his head against the damp bark of the fallen tree. The scent of loam swelled up from the disturbed earth. In the aroma of wood, rot, and soil lay the scent of Joan - dark, inscrutable, and woman. In the woman lies the wilds - not the lofty peaks or rocky, windswept summits, but the hollow places twisted with bracken, damp with hidden streams and fertile with life.

The western man sets out to conquer that, to clear the nonsense, establish order, raze the bushes, plow rows, plant fields, and sit on his porch, the master of it all.

And yet, she seethes. Beneath the surface, the woman pulses with resentment, strapped into corsets that bind her as tightly as the property lines that encircle the Earth, ordered to obey her master-husband's beck and call. The woman erodes him, rots him, pulls him back from lofty quests, clings and burrows into him. The man thrusts out, raises structures, towns, and cities. She holds him back, pulls him down and in, wraps him between her legs, and never lets him go.

Go where, my love? the woman asks. Where are you going without me? The barren moon? The flaming sun? The mountain peaks that hold no seeds of life?

Progress! He shouts. Onward!

Onward where? She taunts him. There is only one place that you and I are headed.

He sees in her the beginning, the end, the womb, the grave, the endless cycles, the net, the trap - and he struggles to break free. He seeks to fly, to excel, to shine, to live forever, to be omnipotent like the gods. She folds her arms across her breasts and closes her legs to him. He has missed the point completely.

I'm here, she whispers. Immortality, resurrection, birth beyond death, the emptiness that births your form, embraces your form, gives meaning to your exclamation point of existence.

And still, the man rages. He shaves the forests as severely as his culture insists that women shave their legs, armpits, pubis. He blows up mountains in brutal rapes for coal. He pisses his sewage into oceans as if defecating on his lover. He cruelly exhales toxic smoke into her face. He sprays her with disfiguring, cancerous substances. Then he kicks her in disgust, saying she is old, worn out, useless, ugly; her vagina stretches wider than a whore's; her breasts hang like an old sow's.

In her brokenness, she mocks him. Missing a tooth, she sneers at him. Go find yourself a virgin, fool! She is the wilds, the woods; the Earth. She says to humankind: in this entire Universe, I dare you to find another planet as hospitable as I. She stands on rickety knees, naked and hideous. She waggles her flabby hips.

I was beautiful, once, she reminds man. He groans, remembering. She was beautiful once, beyond belief, beyond compare. The very memory of Earth stirs his loins and quickens his pulse.

Dave wept into the forest floor. His mouth grew chalky on the crunch of loam. The musk filled his nostrils. She is there; the maiden, mother, crone; every woman he's ever known, the friends, adversaries, ex-wife, fantasies, lovers . . . and Joan.

Joan with her half smile at the old cosmic joke and with eyes that had seen life and death a thousand times. Joan who hid her softness behind gates of fire. Joan who floundered in the modern world, trying to make sense of womanhood in a landscape built by men. Who was Joan with her hair undone, with the sisterhood of the wilds around her?

He rolled over on his back, staring at the dark swallow of the storm. Suddenly, he stilled. His eyes swept the sodden clouds. His ears tensed. His skin crawled with the sense that something moved through the dark, leaving no footsteps. The mists whispered and swayed in curtains. Pinprick droplets landed on his skin.

"Who's there?" he asked bluntly.

The night stilled.

Dave froze.

Something was out there. If it had been nothing, the mists would have kept moving, brushing, hissing and sliding onward, inland. Yet, at the sound of his voice, the mists hung, static.

Dave clamped down on a shiver. He felt the presence of the unseen growing thicker around him. The sense of invisible forces was not completely unfamiliar. He had felt them during the construction of Gold Mountain, swirling around synchronicities and unusual events. But these were potent, strong, and present. He could feel them rustling out of sight. Beyond the stillness, he sensed the great bank of storm clouds swirling. Images of migrations ghosted in his mind: peoples on the move, armies, peasants, ranchers herding cattle, protesters marching with streaming banners.

Dave breathed in a thread, barely moving. There are layers to life that we cannot see, masked by our focus on reality. The madman's consciousness grows blurred and he stumbles into streams of ghosts, demons, invisible adversaries, seraphim, and angels. Western man tried to conquer the sages, druids, shamans, ghost walkers, spirit intermediaries with the singular dogma of Christianity, but they still lurk beyond our sight, hidden.

It's all true, Dave thought. His eyes darted to the unseen that hung in the night. Every story of ghosts and spirits is all out there in some layer of the Universe, like waves of infrared or sound outside our normal range of sensing.

I'm going mad, he thought. His chest constricted in a fit of panic. I'm unhinging from reality, he worried. He lurched, lunged, and smacked his head against the tree trunk.

"Ooh," he moaned, clapping his hand to the spot and leaning back against the solidness of the trunk to stop the spinning sensation. He squinted into the rain, but he saw nothing otherworldly - only the bulky shapes of oaks.

He sat for hours, listening, but nothing extraordinary occurred, just the sigh of wind through oak leaves and the tap of rain. An occasional animal rustled through the forest. The tang of the sea rode the storm. Salt hid in the low clouds.

Yet, he could not shake the sense of movements, as if out of mortal sight the angels marched and the spirits embarked on great migrations. He listened, wakeful, until he sensed that he sat at an invisible crossroads, leaning against the great oak as if it were a signpost. His arrival here was no mistake, Dave realized with a chill. He had stood at the crossroads of the realms and delivered a speech. He scrambled to remember his drunken rant. His thoughts skittered and dodged beyond his grasp, disappearing into the mists and the night, taking on a life of their own. He remembered only vague concepts of oaks, trees, slaves, property, and the ultimate emancipation of them all.

 

"Remember," he warned them. "Remember all my words. The days will pass and the loggers will return. Then you will know you are not free."

 

 

 

*****************************

He stood. The sinews in his legs protested. He carried his damp clothes to a sunny patch and laid them out to dry. Glancing left and right in case of wayward hikers, he returned to the grove of oaks, hesitated, then spoke.

"Naked as the day I was born," he told the trees. "Naked as you stand right now."

The oaks said nothing, but seemed to watch him curiously as he scrambled up the side of the fallen oak and sat cross legged on its back. He pivoted to look around at the ring of trees.

"I wish to tell you a story," Dave began uncertainly. "A true story, and an uncomfortable one . . . a tale that has no easy answers, and may be long in telling, but our fates are twined together as deeply as the air we breathe. My exhale is the inhale of your lungs . . . and without your breath, my species will crumble into dust."

Dave trembled at the madness of addressing trees! Now, when he was no longer drunk, but stark and serious, not in the depth of night, but in the morning's clarity and light! He took a breath and plunged deeper into insanity.

"And I will say this at the crossroads," he declared, "inviting all the realms to listen."

The forest halted. The buzzing insects stilled. The wind hung in place. Not a single leaf rustled. A shiver ran down Dave's spine, for this was real; he was not imagining the reaction of the woods. Sunlight touched his back with its warm encouragement to continue. He swallowed, a pale, naked human being, hairless and defenseless, without fire, knife, or clan to back him up.

"If I tell this story right," he murmured, "perhaps it will help you understand."

And perhaps, it would help them all - oaks, humans, animals, and Dave - find the freedom that they sought.

 

"My first memory of a tree is a whipping stick smacking across my back."

He must have seen a tree before then, but the red welts of abuse drove all other memories from his mind. He remembered crying - and being whipped again for the cry-baby tears. He remembered hating the willow from which his father cut the switch.

"My second memory of a tree," he confessed to the silent grove of oaks, "was hiding in the branches as my older brother lobbed rocks at me."

He swallowed. The memories ached raw and red, swollen with bruises and unspoken words of childhood anger. He had known the taste of hatred long before the taste of love. Even now, the flavor returned to sting his mouth. He winced and continued.

"My third memory of a tree," he told the forest, "is the shaved and sawn up body of a hardwood board of lumber. My father sent me to pick a whipping switch. Fat or thin, stinging or smacking, I was to choose the method of my punishment."

Instead, he had hauled a two-by-four board into the kitchen. Barely six years old, he had struggled with the awkward length, throwing it at his father's feet.

"Why don't you use this, Dad?" he spat out angrily.

His father's face crumpled in dismay.

"My father never beat me after that," Dave said, "so my mother took on the task."

He closed his eyes to the gentle sunlight. His lips tensed and trembled. Mothers are meant to be nurturing, comforting; his screamed with fury, hustled her wayward sons into line, set her mouth in a line thinner than a switch and attempted to beat the impudence out of her younger child.

"I hated her," he whispered.

He hated them all: mother, father, brother, their house with the white picket fence, the dog he was allergic to - that dog received more gentle pats, treats, and cooing words than he did.

"I studied forestry in college," he told the trees. "I applied early, and at the age of sixteen, I was reading instruction manuals on how to murder forests. I read profit spreadsheets printed on the backs of your brothers. At the age of twenty, I wrote my thesis on your mother's skin. The study covered how to take the sapling youths and scrub brushes, grind them into chips, and make a fortune off the paperboard. By the next year, I was verging on making my first million off of flaying trees alive. At twenty-one, I could legally drown the last scraps of my conscience in alcohol."

He could not count the acres he had razed.

"I remember the first time I cut a chainsaw into a redwood trunk," he told the oaks. A primal rage had pulsed in his veins; a sense of power and victory crashed through him as the giant trunk thunderously toppled. "I felt no remorse. No guilt. No twinge of sorrow that I had ended eight hundred years of life." Dave forced himself to be honest with the oaks. The wind shifted uneasily, almost angrily. His naked flesh rose in goose bumps. He held up his hands.

"Hear me out!" he cried. "If my story ended there, I would not be here today."

He had been raised with hatred, whipped and weaned with violence. His mother's accusatory eyes cursed the weakness of his father for refusing to whip their son. He learned at his mother's hand that real men were expected to beat this world. Strength lay in conquering. Little boys must mow the lawn and beat the bushes back from the edge of the house and lift the heavy loads. Men must work and earn good wages, providing amply for the family. No standing in solidarity with those striking for better wages could supersede the importance of a roof over her family's head. No moral quandary must threaten the bread upon their table. Principles were a luxury of the successful or the foolish. His mother was neither. His father worked for the oil company until they fired him six months before he could retire with a pension.

"Pay attention!" she barked at her youngest son. "This world is survival of the fittest. It's dog-eat-dog out there. Work hard, but act smart. A man's got to be on his toes to get ahead."

She laughed when his older brother tortured him, telling Dave to buck up and be a man. She snapped at him to stop being a crybaby when his brother's taunt cut him to his heart. He grew iron armor around his soul. He learned to fight and win.

"You were always an odd child," his mother had murmured as she lay dying. Her eyes had searched his face, hazy with pain medications for the cancer, seeing double visions of the child-son and the man-Dave.

"You were a stoic, remember?" she said.

He had slept on the floor and trained as a warrior, lifting weights and doing pushups, taking vows of silence, jumping in ice cold showers.

I was a child in a warzone, Dave realized all these years later. Given the circumstances, there was nothing odd about imitating Spartans in a suburban San Francisco house.

"Will you be alright after I'm gone?" she asked him anxiously.

"Ma," he said hesitatingly. Perhaps she didn't know . . . "I'm a millionaire."

"Are you?" she murmured, biting her lips in pain.

He nodded.

She closed her eyes for a moment.

"That wasn't what I meant," she whispered.

"There is a point to all of this," Dave reassured the listening forest. "When my mother asked if I would be alright, she echoed the concern of a million mothers in this country. In her eyes welled the sorrow of generations of broken women who came to this continent hoping for a better world, but found hardships and misery stretched from coast to coast. In her heart burned the remorse of all women who learn cruelty to survive. Her determination to succeed came at the price of her compassion. We are the children of these women, all of us in America."

His mother came from the lineage of the New World, a saga of greed and lust, murder, backstabbing lies and avarice, broken hopes and shattered dreams, and worst of all the myth of survival of the fittest in which failure is the fault of personal shortcomings, not the result of systemic oppression. If you fail, his mother told him in a thousand silent ways, good riddance. May your faulty genes rot in the grave, and may only the best perpetuate the species.

So Dave had plundered, robbed, and cheated his way to the top. Forests built his first fortune; computers supplied the second. From there money begat more money. The resort was simply the icing on top of the cake. He strove to prove himself a survivor, to escape beatings and his mother's scorn. He built fortunes to buy access to the golden club of the survivors, the champions of domination.

Then one day, he looked around. On top of the world, part of the elite, he had won - he had surpassed most men of fortune, he owned hundreds of millions to their mere millions.

"Ten thousand years of human evolution," Dave told the trees, "has given rise to this: the socially successful are a set of psychopaths. The richest victors - with few exceptions - are broken human beings. Not one of us had happy families; not one of us understands how to love. We were barbarians on top of the world, cruel and avaricious. Our human hearts had been encased in lead. Our minds were poisoned by profits. Yet, the whole world strives to emulate us. Everyone wants access to the elite. But we are not human beings - we are rotten husks without any hearts. We drown our emotions in alcohol. We numb sympathy and close our hearts to stay at the top. It is insanity! Yet, humanity persists in holding such sickened individuals aloft."

Dave shuddered on the fallen oak. The consequences of this cultural insanity were dire. As long as humanity believed in the colonizing lie that survival came by destroying others, nothing on this planet would survive. The forests would be clear cut, the indigenous mowed down in genocide and wars, the earth torn open in search of minerals, the oil burned into the skies, the people devoured by a machine of greed that knows no bounds or limitations.

"Somehow," he told the oaks, "we must stop the madness of these beliefs."

He fell silent then, for he did not know how to end the delusions of his species. The oaks sat with him, pondering the situation. The morning stretched into the afternoon; the evening rolled toward night. Dave sat like Siddhartha Buddha, naked to the world. His body chilled. His limbs began to shiver. He rose, redressed, and returned, gathering up dry branches. He built a small fire awkwardly, fumbling with half-forgotten methods he had learned in boyhood, cursing his own incompetence until a tendril of smoke finally sparked to flames.

"Do you mind?" he asked the oaks, listening carefully for their reply.

Do you mind, the forest whispered, if the birds build their nests from the hair that falls from your head?

"No," he answered, "only if they pluck it from my scalp."

And so it is, the oaks replied, thus it is so for us.

Dave crouched by the small fire, slowly feeding it branches and twigs. How does humanity change? he wondered, glancing up at the night. His irises adjusted to the darkness and a single oak loomed, illuminated by the brightness of the flames.

Do not ask how an entire forest grows, the tree suggested, ask how a single oak emerges from an acorn. You changed . . . how?

Dave shifted uneasily. His fall from fortune had been propelled by fate and by forces beyond his control.

"I could be up there at the top," he sighed, "except for love. I wanted love, not hard-hearted cruelty and control."

Like a sapling reaching for sunlight, he had begun searching for love, stretching toward the light, strengthening his heart. He had faltered so many times, lost his courage in the thickness of the shadows, but here he was, still reaching.

"I met Joan," he said softly, "and truly understood that there was something I wanted more than money."

He squinted at the flames. A furrow creased between his eyebrows. For a moment . . . he swore he had . . . no, there! Dave dragged his palm across his eyes. When he looked back in the fire, the images remained: a dark haired woman, a twisted hedge of briars, and behind the brambles, him. Dave held his breath as the hairs on the back of his neck raised. The dark haired woman - Joan - pivoted and spun, seeking passage through the bracken, calling out to him in words that made no sound. In the flames, his figure wandered aimlessly - as if sleepwalking - and did not appear to hear Joan's cries. At every twist, the briars scratched her and raked their spines through her clothes. She frowned and her soundless voice repeated the same phrase over and over. Dave leaned toward the fire, desperate to read the words on her lips.

Wake up!

The fire crackled. Sparks shot off like fireworks. He flinched. The flames curled into thick vines; each bramble held dark images inside it. Dave's eyes watered and ached as he tried to make out the forms. The images in the fire reflected on the burning blue of his eyes.

He gasped.

His life twisted in those thorny brambles, every story, memory, assumption, myth, fact, thought, belief, or idea he'd ever conceived. The briars sprouted in his footsteps as he sleepwalked through his days. In the fire, his figure's breath hissed spells of words that clung to the dark vines. Joan struggled to break through, but he spun his stories faster than she could move.

Wake up! her soundless lips cried. Wake up!

And still he continued muttering the stories of his past, throwing them up like stinging barriers between them.

The coals of the fire suddenly collapsed. The flames lurched. The images vanished. Dave furiously rubbed his eyes and glanced around at the darkness. He shivered.

"So, my stories are getting in our way," he murmured, thinking of Joan and the twisted brambles keeping them apart. In his hands, he gripped a thin stick - a perfect switch, he thought. The kind of switch his mother preferred for beatings. His knuckles clenched white around it.

Laughter rang like bells through the dark outlines of the oak grove. He spun. Nothing. He recognized that laugh - Joan's laugh.

You're the one holding onto the stories.

"Who spoke?" he demanded.

The trees refused to answer. The night hid itself in silence. He looked down at the switch in his clenched hands.

What would it be like to put the stories down . . . and never pick them up again?

The voice whispering in his mind sounded like his own. He pondered this, staring at the stick, seeing in it all the beatings he had received, his mother's scorn, his brother's abuses, his father's silence.

Why not let it go? he thought.

He threw the stick into the fire. It smoked, fizzled, curled and ignited into flames. He watched it burn and saw his memories char and vanish into ashes.

He sat back.

Why not let everything go?

He reached for another stick, a knobby branch with a whorl that sneered like his brother's face. He dredged up memories - fire ants dumped in his bed, the time he had unzipped his fly and pissed on his brother in retaliation, the day his brother locked him in the closet and told his parents Dave had run away. He let the painful memories roll out and lodge inside the stick. Then he chucked it in the fire, watching the whorl's expression scream and collapse into coals.

He threw his father in the fire, his former girlfriends, and treacherous business partners; all that was a part of his past, every gesture, every thought, every twitch of expression, every sentiment and cliché statement, every slogan, tagline, business motto; every memory of his actions, every motivation, every rationalization for his behaviors both good and bad. Into the flames he tossed the drunkard on the street. The playboy writhed in hot coals. A smoldering fat branch burned up the weight of his former obesity. He threw it all in the fire. Twigs, branches, sticks: a small blaze mounted. He thought of Indian cremations, pyres of logs burning bodies into ashes by the river. In utter clarity, he knew what he had embarked upon: he was incinerating his self, conducting a cremation in reverse. His body remained seated by the fire while flames consumed his inner world.

Time stretched in ancient patience. Those who gathered at the crossroads stood witness. His actions echoed rituals and rites of passage. He evoked older times and civilizations now crumbled into dust. He sat on the ground and stared at the fire like countless generations of human beings who had walked this earth before him.

The flames twisted into shapes and figures. His memories danced for brief moments before vanishing. Long forgotten times and places emerged in the twisting curls of the fire. He saw battles and ceremonies, lovers and bitter enemies. Ten thousand years of human history swirled in the flames, only to fall as still and silent as his own meager past. 

Lightness filled his being. A sense of vastness stretched in the silence between his ears. His mind expanded like the night, empty as space with stars of thought scattered across his awareness. One by one, he plucked them from the sky of his mind, turning them like diamonds in his fingers before tossing them into the fire.

Long bouts began to pass between his feeding of the fire. He sat quietly, watching the coals settle in the white ashes. The stillness grew profound. The coals burned down into nothing until only one ember remained, a tiny spark in a vast pool of night, no bigger to his eyes than the stars overhead.

What happens when we let it all go?

The thought streaked across the vastness of his mind like a shooting star. On its heels, the Universe replied.

Everything. Something. Nothing.

The ember flickered. Dave waited. It sputtered. He fixed his eyes on the last spark of existence. The night crept closer. Darkness stretched its fingertips toward the void. The coal blinked. Dave froze.

It died and his self extinguished with the light.

 

 

 

Chapter Seventeen

 

Darkness loses meaning in the total absence of light. Nothing becomes something when that is all that seems to exist. This place would terrify the mind, except there is no mind to experience terror. There is no one to sense the vast eternal stillness. There is nothing to worry, rejoice, or think.

Here, eternity is presence; the present is eternal. Time ticks out the meter of human memory and cognition. When the grip of the mind releases, time dissolves into sheer illusion.

How long did Dave hang suspended in that place? There is no answer, for there was no Dave, no thought of time, no measure, no human self to think of such a concept. But when he woke to breath and body with a diver's gasp, resurfacing, the sun burst over the rim of dawn, and his eyes flooded with golden light. The black and green-gray silhouettes of trees emerged upon his retinas. His sense of self lagged behind. He breathed the crisp air of morning. His chest expanded. He glanced down at the rise of his ribs.

I am here, he thought.

But who is here? What survived this baptism by fire? What resurrected after the extinguishing of his self? His eyes stirred cautiously in their sockets, newborn in this dawning day. He saw the ragged cloth of a shirt, the worn knees of jeans, crossed legs and a bare, leathered foot folded up on one thigh. In front of him, a black ring of charred ground held the remnants of a fire. With a hand he did not recognize, he touched the cold, brittle coals and white flakes of ash. With one finger, he stirred the remains of his own cremation. Like a stranger at a funeral, he searched for hints of this unknown person, clues to this extinguished life. The ash clung to his fingertips. A slight breeze flung the lightest bits into the air.

Once, he thought, I was a man named Dave Grant.

But all that was gone on the ashes of yesterday. The past had been buried in the grave. Memories lay dull and lifeless on the furthest peripheries of consciousness.

Who am I without all that? he wondered.

He rose without an answer.

 

 

************8

 

 

*******************************

A true story, and an uncomfortable one . . . a tale that has no easy answers, and may be long in telling, but our fates are twined together as deeply as the air we breathe. My exhale is the inhale of your lungs . . . and without your breath, my species will crumble into dust.

 

His heart had been an open book since the first day at the teahouse. He had only glimpsed the cover of hers and never seen a single word, let alone read between the lines of the book of Joan.

 

 

There is a truth to this kind of love that cannot be watched. Its intensity makes the observer uncomfortable, self-reflective, suddenly aware that they are dead to the world without that passion igniting in their own hearts

 

Go find your love, her body tells the world. We are nothing. We can tell you nothing that will help you in that excruciating moment when you encounter love. For we are each unique, irreproducible, exquisitely perfect snowflakes in the storm of humanity's existence.

 

 

Time is the essence of love. Each moment stretches into an eternity and yet love is greedy for just one second more

 

Closed due to the inevitable.

 

 

"Lost," he replied truthfully. "I have been lost."

For fifty years, he had wandered through life, sleeping on silks and lying in gutters, absolutely confused about where he was and why. He had built houses without finding a home and traveled the world without knowing where he started. He had bumbled around inside his skin and flesh and bone container all his life, utterly and totally lost.

 

 

the real question is not where have I been, but why have I been?"

 

 

Joan smiled the smile of Gandhi's wife, one of great patience and respect crowned with a determined pragmatism, crested with a humble acknowledgement that yes, Mahatma, that is an excellent philosophical question, but what would you like for dinner tonight?

"Where have you been, Dave?" she asked.

"I have been dropping the juggling balls of my life," he said, "one by one, to see if I survive."

 

"I'm not sure I did. What's left of me? A sack of sinew and bone, inhabited by someone other than who I once was." He smiled ruefully down at his body. "These arms, legs, and chest are but a costume. You know, a lot of people go through life pretending they are the same stock actor performing the same role, year after year. They tie a thread of memory between each show and call that thread their self."

He paused.

"But what happens when you cut the thread?"

Joan looked sharply at him.

"The fabric of reality unravels," she replied cautiously, for they were trespassing on the territory of the saints and sages, geniuses, madmen, and giants of philosophy.

For weeks, Dave had sat in the woods and audaciously pulled the woven thread of his mind. There were times when he panicked and rapidly rewove the warp and weft of himself. Yet, the sheer skill of his weaving emboldened him. All of his life, with natural dexterity, he had woven the cloth of himself out of notions and memories. Who is Dave Grant? Where is he going? What is he doing? Opinions, ideas, information, knowledge - he wrapped himself in a shroud of his own construction, woven so tightly it would clothe him all the way to the grave.

 

 

"I came back to love you," he said simply. He had come back to existence with one purpose: to love. To love the woods, his breath, the crackling intensity of life in human form . . . and to love her.

"I had this crazy idea," he mentioned, tracing the soft hairs on her forearm, "that if I dropped all my stories, and you dropped yours, we would love like no others in the history of the Universe."

He glanced up through his eyelashes, almost daring her to accept.

"Just what," Joan drawled, "do you think will happen if we did?"

"I don't know," he chuckled, "but I think the last time such lovers collided was back at the Big Bang."

 

 

"I love you," he confessed.

Her lips twitched in a smile.

"Who is the I that loves the You?" she asked back.

He shivered at the strength of the koan she posited; they could spend their whole lives answering that!

 

 

The modern world may scream for rational explanations, but there are forces beyond the mechanistic model of the Universe. Science knows only the limits of its answers; infinity is vast and fecund with the unknown. Joan dropped the constraints of society and stepped into the lineage of wandering saints and mountain sages, ecstatic nuns alive in God, and singing women who walk naked through the streets, clothed only in wisdom and compassion. Throughout all time, they have leapt for love and reached for knowledge of the divine. Societies have mocked and scorned them, bound these women to husbands, children, chains of propriety and property. But when enlightenment comes knocking, how could they refuse to answer the door? When the divine says, leave this life and leap into the unknown, would you protest that the laundry wasn't done? Joan closed up her house, gave away her sparse belongings, quit her jobs, and left.

 

"Goodbye to all that," she said quietly to the traffic, stores, stoplights, throngs of people, congestion, exhaust; goodbye to routines and three-year plans, to expectations of normal life; goodbye to the mantra of the culture: live, work, consume, die.

She turned and greeted the opening of the unknown.

 

He spoke to her gently, compassionately, in the tones of a tender bridegroom who dearly wishes his beloved to come to love her new home. Look, says the husband, see how the old men gather in the evening? That one is my uncle; that one is my grandfather; and that is my brother's father-in-law

 

For days, they spoke only a little. Words were spells that conjured up other places, times, people, ideas, and thoughts. They had no use for those old stories. The simple act of being here and now was unraveling everything they'd ever known in all their decades on this planet.

 

Without moving, without speaking, she cracked reality in pieces. She dropped all concepts of Joan and Dave and left them nameless, orphaned, and resplendent: two human bodies in a field of grass.

He shook his head.

"Go beyond," he murmured, and he tied the truth of breath to their bodies, their lungs to the air, the oxygen to the trees, the roots to the earth, the planet to the void of space, and on and on, until they were the entire web of creation hung in the infinite moment of now.

"Go beyond," the One urged.

And the web embraced the emptiness that gave rise to it, held it, birthed it, and took it back without a trace in the eons-long seduction of something and nothing that has continued without ceasing beyond the illusion of time.

The human being who sees this is rare. The being who lives this is rarer still. The couple that loves with this knowledge of reality cannot be measured at all. They cannot be called rare, nor can they be called common, for they have been ever-present in the rise of creation. They do not come; do not go. They encompass all things. They do not appear, nor do they vanish, nor walk this earth, nor cease to walk among us. Nor can they be called people, for they are one and the myriad, the ten thousand things all at once.

And if you taste the sting of a paradox in these words: savor it. For truth is a paradox that explodes the mind's logic, yet by the grace of this truth, we can know it.

 

 

They circled like eagles around the wheel of understanding, retracing the contemplations of the Buddha, searching for something permanent to lay a finger on, but finding nothing that did not change. They looked for existence and found nonexistence entwined within it. They looked for individuals and discovered an interconnected web.

"Why are you at Gold Mountain?" the old woman asked again.

"Gold Mountain is the seed of a lesson waiting to unfold," he replied.

 

 

I came," he said softly, "to end the delusions of separation and permanence that cause people to long for money, wealth, and property; the delusions that cause them to amass fortunes in defense of change; the delusions that allow them to pretend that the suffering of others is not hurting them, as well. I came to teach my wealthy colleagues to unclench the fists of grasping, to release the grip that harms so many, and to trust the nature of reality. To let go and be embraced; to release and find companionship; to rest in the ever-changing, interconnected web that is us all."

The old woman bowed again in a slow blink of eyes, and when she raised her wrinkled lids, Edna Lawrence's gaze crinkled in wry amusement.

"Well," she drawled in her creaky voice, "good luck."

They burst out laughing in a shock of sound that reverberated around the kitchen. It is ludicrous - outrageous - to teach such truths, to intend to say such things to the madness of humanity's delusions. It is audacious to think awakening is possible for the world's wealthiest elite . . . and yet, the Buddha smiles slightly. Because all things are always possible and the audacity of the awakened ones truly knows no bounds.

 

 

They stepped down from the golden shoulders of the hills onto the highway, an ordinary man and woman with an extraordinary understanding. They did what all others who have glimpsed the true nature of reality have done: they tried to live this knowledge, tried to inhabit these human bodies, and tried to share a bit of what they'd learned.

 

*******************************

They traveled the coast like a pair of mystics on the frontier of a spiritual wasteland. SUVs hurtled past them. The occupants averted their eyes from what they could only see as a couple of dirty hippies begging on the side of the road, suckers on hardworking people.

"Get a job!" students hollered out the windows of cars their parents had bought them as they headed to college dormitories paid for by their grandparents.

Joan and Dave had a job.

"We exist to elicit compassion," Joan said as she thanked a woman who rolled down her window to hand Joan a dollar and change.

"Good luck with that," the woman snorted cynically. The light turned green and she drove on.

"The opportunity to offer small kindnesses brings great rewards," Dave mentioned to a man who couldn't hear him over the blaring music pounding out lyrics that made Joan blanch.

"It's exhausting," she admitted later, "maintaining a sense of compassion at the filthy intersection of greed and oblivion."

They begged like Buddha, not for their hunger, but to offer their fellow beings an opportunity to be generous, kind, and compassionate.

"Is it kinder," Dave wondered aloud, "to wear ragged old clothes and challenge people to look past appearances . . . or to dress nicely so they offer generosity more often?"

They would circle these themes like koans as they hiked into towns. After a day on the corner, they would split their earnings with other homeless people standing around town holding cardboard signs in grimy hands. Now that they had embarked on the path of the Buddha, holding out the begging bowl in modern America, they could never be certain that winos were just drunkards - a bodhisattva might hide in that body. The jittering meth addict and the tired old veteran could be emanations of the Buddha sent forth to test their compassion and wisdom.

"In truth," Joan mused thoughtfully as they watched a toothless, shuffling woman walk away with a handful of dollar bills, "if the Buddha is the awakened understanding of our interconnected reality, then everything is the Buddha, and we are all bodhisattvas in disguise."

On lean days, they meditated on the practice of non-attachment. On generous days, they passed out handfuls of crumpled bills without a thought of a self, or of a being named Joan separate from the homeless mother who accepted the donation. Dave deepened his understanding of the emptiness of all things as he gave all their earnings to a pair of teenage runaways trying to get home. Sometimes, confusion crossed the weatherworn faces. Occasionally, suspicion flickered in eyes as Joan offered the same money they had just seen her beg. Dave could not catalogue all the different reactions: the rejection of kindness, sudden snatchings and retreats, tears springing into eyes. Once, when they were mugged and shaken down by a brute, Dave gave him every penny they had simply to spare the man the bad karma of robbery and theft.

"No, no, it's a gift, really," Dave insisted to the utterly confused man. "Please, take it all."

Later, they pondered the depth of their practice as they sat on the side of the road.

"Why join a monastery when you can live your enlightenment on the street?" Dave asked.

"Preparation," Joan replied, thinking of her attempt to join a Buddhist temple. Their path was more challenging than Joan had ever imagined. It was one thing to chant no self, no being, no life, and no soul, as one struggled to sit upright among wooden beams polished with age and mindfully swept floors. It was another thing to drill one's mind on that concept while burning with poison oak rashes after tripping into the vines. The story of the Buddha's enlightened perspective on the lifetime when an enraged king had cut off his nose, ears, and limbs was all fine and dandy until a crazed meth addict came after them one night and they discovered certain limits to their non-attachment to their forms.

The practice of forbearance plagued Joan as she corralled her quick temper.

"Patience, forgiveness, refraining from judgment," she chanted to herself when a driver spat in her face, when the coffee shop refused to let her sit down, when a cop smacked her ass to tell her to get moving.

Anger at injustice whipped her.

"Dave," she argued one night as they hiked up the highway into the woods, "don't you think that there's a place for righteous outrage when you see suffering?"

Earlier that afternoon, the cops had been hassling a Hispanic woman and her children, asking them for identification. Joan had intervened, telling the police that this woman had rights, it was illegal for the cops to demand identification from someone just walking down the street, and their claims of probable cause wouldn't hold up in court as anything but racial profiling. Joan had snapped so indignantly and articulately that the police had moved on, but Dave later criticized her fury.

"Why not just stop the suffering," he suggested, "and drop the anger part?"

"Because it's fuel for action," Joan countered.

"It's fossil fuel, then, like dinosaurs. It's obsolete. It combusts and puts out dirty emissions that cause their own forms of suffering," Dave commented. He glanced up at the night sky. "Why not simply act from compassion?"

"But what if it isn't enough?" Joan asked.

"Love more," he said with a shrug. "It's like solar panels in Seattle. The answer to the problem of low solar gain is not to rely on coal plants . . . the solution is to put up twice as many solar panels!"

 

 

****************

 

Long into the night, the rumble of breaths kept him awake. He stared at the mattress above him, listening to the unconscious voices of three hundred men stacked like sardines in the tin can of the jail. Snores reverberated the bunk frames in long rhythmic pulls of breath that sawed impossibly at concrete and iron bars. Muffled snorts, gasps, and moans fell out of men's mouths.  Restless insomniacs tossed on creaking mattresses, rolling one way and then another, searching for the comfort of oblivion.

 

 

If one took all the grains of sand in the Ganges and filled as many Universes full of sand as there are grains of sand in the Ganges . . . such are the heaps of injustices in a world of seven billion people, each perpetrating tiny acts of unfairness until injustice lines the banks of the River of Life, impossible to count.

 

 

 

At the root lay an ancient unfairness that had embedded itself in the psyche of generations, passed from father to son like blonde hair and blue eyes. For millenniums, humankind had believed that one man could rule another, own another, or set himself above another. According to the rule of law, a cop could snatch a man off the sidewalk and press him into servitude. Dave saw his freedom gone forever, stolen by the iron weight of convictions. The cop had stolen his ability to live as he pleased and forced him to bend his labor to the will of society. He had stepped into a cycle as old as Viking ships and galley slaves chained to oars to provide manpower for the captain's voyages. It was as old as conquerors and kings; as old as the abolishing of the Commons. It was as old as the Great Enclosure that kicked the people off the land. It was as old as Columbus claiming the New World for the Old. It was as old as the genocides of native tribes. It was as old as the conscripted labor that built the Great Wall of China. It was as old as slavery on the Nile, Russian gulags, plantations in the South, and the warring tribes of Africa.

Dave traced the threads of imprisonment and enslavement back through history, pondering each era like a bead on a meditation mala. He saw bodies stretched in bunks, in rows, shoulder-to-shoulder tight, three layers high in chains, the dead rotting above the dying, the living sickened and terrified. He saw bodies thrown in graves, lining the ditches of every war. He saw pale bodies emaciated into bones, the white snow of the German winter tight around them, the smoke of incinerators black and churning. He saw mounds of Jewish hair, heaped like bodies in the ditches, stacked like bison skulls, piled up in mountains. He saw the heaps of bison bodies, dead across the plains; the bodies of the people who held them sacred, dead across the continent. He saw the herding of human beings in long lines, on the Trail of Tears, into ghettos, into camps, into gulags; train loads to Siberia, busloads across America.

He saw rare emancipations sparking moments of freedom in this world: Moses raining down God's plagues, parting waters, leading Jews from slavery; Frederick Douglass revolting from chains and death; Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman racing through the darkened woods; indigenous uprisings, the Levelers and the Diggers, the workers' movements for cooperatives, the cry to occupy for equality in wealth. On and on, the recitation went, one prayer bead recollection at a time. The mala stretched longer than the night without scratching more than just the surface of the truth.

There were the women standing throughout history, thin-lipped, frowning, subjugated to the men, imprisoned in obedience.

There were the slave-wage workers chained to a paycheck, selling their labor to the owners, their sovereignty and dignity eroded by the economic grind of titans who forced generations into poverty.

There were the masses of animal species, locked into pens and pastures, driven off cliffs, chained to plows to labor for human beings, caught in nets to be devoured.

There were invisible ropes of property lines, binding up the planet, this great round orb of Earth which existed long before humanity walked the surface, which will exist long after the last human falls extinct, upon which the mightiest man of wealth and power is but a flea in the circus of humanity . . . a flea devouring the globe's skin, sucking the blood, leaving poison, itching this great mother to no end.

And there was himself, imprisoned for existing in a society gone insane, locked up to labor for a lifetime because he would not own another being. He had been locked up for refusing to own property, a home, or rent one from a richer man. He walked the Earth and slept in forests, performed small tasks to buy some bread. But freedom is an illusion in a world bound up in chains. The flea upon the slave's back becomes the property of the master, as does the child in the slave's womb, the knowledge in the slave's head, the songs in the slave's mouth. The worker is a slave to the business owner; the prisoner is a slave to the jail.

"We are not free until all are free," Dave murmured, thinking of animals, land, forests, fields, women, children, and planets.

A set of eyes flew open in the bunk nearby. The breath of a man without a name paused. His muscles tingled. His eyes rolled to the side, wondering. The silence stretched long as he waited for the next word to be spoken.

But Dave lay quiet, his mind spiraling through the ages, watching empires rise and fall. Over and over, the old cycle of enslavement continues, taking freedom from the people and forcing their muscles to labor for the profit of another. With wealth, humans buy power; with power comes authority; with authority comes law; with law comes control; with control comes more profit, more power, more authority, more law, more control, more profit.

So rise the kings, the tyrants, the presidents, the Pope, the tycoon, the billionaire, the chief, the Queen, the Empress, the noble, the nouveau riche . . . they are lifted on the backs of the masses. Both willingly and through coercion, populaces raise one man above another and surrender themselves to be ruled. Some people fawn like lapdogs, groveling, and unashamed. Others conduct themselves like dignified hounds and offer unquestioning loyalty to authority. But a third set are wolves, imprisoned and starved, viewed as dangerous because they yearn for freedom. 

Freedom is ferocious, wild and uncivilized. It will never be part of respectable society. Freedom cannot be controlled or forced to build fortunes for others. Freedom will not die for another man's profit. Freedom will not starve children to put feasts on the tables of the wealthy. Freedom will not tolerate classism, racism, sexism, or discrimination of any kind. It will ever advance the concept of radical equality, for one who is free cannot condemn others to slavery - to chattel, debt, work, marriage, or prison - no form of enslavement is tolerable to the free.

Freedom is not a concept that swears allegiance to any flag! It defies nationalism! Patriotism! Boundaries and borders! The wild birds are free! The wild fish are free! But the wild human? Such creatures have gone extinct. Out of seven billion humans, not one knows the meaning of freedom. Humankind enslaves their species by culture, society, history, and law. In blind ignorance, they utter the word, freedom, to launch wars, spend money, make laws, and imprison others. Freedom is not free, their bumper stickers read . . . but such a twisted convolution of logic baffles the brightest thinkers.

Freedom is free, you fools! It is war that is costly, that takes your sons' lives. It is protecting the empires of the rich that is expensive to the people. It is the fortunes of the few that enslave the lives of the many. It is the imprisonment of your mind that bankrupts your freedom.

As such thoughts rolled through Dave, a sense of ancient injustice opened its maw and swallowed him whole. He sat in the cold prison while he fell into the hell of human history that stretched back through thousands of cultures. What was the point of hiring a lawyer to argue a mere technicality of an unjust law when the entire system of law, order, nations, and ownership of other humans, animals, plants, land, or the planet was fundamentally unjust. The notion of property was nothing more than a euphemism for ownership and enslavement.

Dave began to laugh in silent consternation as the construct of his society collapsed like an imploding building. His eyes darted around the jail as if the solidity of concrete might dissolve along with his delusions. The concept of a jail to imprison wandering human beings lost its moral authority. The system of government that imprisoned a man who had caused no harm to others fractured its legitimacy. The society that blindly obeyed and upheld the laws of such a government toppled from the grace of his respect.

The people of the nation fell from his esteem. One by one, they would have to redeem themselves in his eyes. One by one, they would need to decry the injustice of their society. One by one, they would have to take action to undo it. Only then would his respect for his nation return. The fire of conviction stirred in his guts. He slapped the mattress with the flat of his palm and heard a few bodies shift in the semi-darkness. He glanced around. A pair of eyes stared blearily at him, lost in the hell realms of delusion and injustice, so deeply entangled that Dave nearly lost the courage to attempt to speak truth.

What did Moses say to the Jews who argued that they would never be free of the Pharaoh? What did the African mothers whisper to their sons and daughters who had been born into slavery? How did they convince their children that they were not property even though the slash of the whip, the gunshots of the masters, the fearful obedience of even their own mothers told the children they were slaves? What did Mother Jones say to the laborers who deserved more than misery in the workplace? What did Gandhi say to the naysayers who believed the British would rule India forever?

Dave sighed. It is one thing to realize truth . . . it is another to help others awaken.

"We are not free until all are free," he repeated in the barest whisper of breath.

The ears in the next bunk caught the sigh of the words. The Number's eyes leapt in Dave's direction.

Ah, the thin man thought, he's here.

The Number's heart grew tight inside his chest, bound by hope and fear, sadness, prophecy, and loss. The churning wheel of causes rolled the world forward through the night; old debts unpaid for actions taken lifetimes ago came closer to collection. Long into the night, the Number lay awake. As the breaths of imprisoned men dropped into the slow rhythm of slumber, the two men lay silent, listening.

 

 

*******************************

 

"What is the delusion?" he asked. "The cell in my finger? Or the body to which it belongs?"

I'm being tested, Dave realized with a start. Here in the concrete cafeteria, under the harsh glare of fluorescent lights, surrounded by smudged, whitewashed walls, over a bowl of drug-laden, lumpy oatmeal, a man without a name was testing his Buddhist wisdom.

"What do you think, Dave?" the Number questioned with a wry smile. "Is the cell the delusion? The monastery? Or the prison?"

Dave saw the thoughts teeming behind the Number's eyes like schools of fish beneath the surface of a pond: cells and monasteries, suburban houses, cars, offices; little cells inside a pulsing body of civilization; cells unaware of any identity beyond the scope of walls and membranes; cells inextricably linked to the lifeblood of every other cell throughout the massive body of reality that broke through every barrier of conception; cells, tissues, organs, bodies, humans, home, neighborhood, city, country, continent, planet, solar system, galaxy, universe. Even the infinite, endless Universe became a cell of the unknown.

"The self that has the thought of cell and whole is the delusion," he answered.

The Number's thin lips dropped apart. A flash of perception shot through the black caverns of his eyes. He rubbed his bony fingers across the black stubble of his cheeks. His head bowed. His gaze rose to beseech Dave.

"Really?"

Dave nodded.

"If you have no self, you have no delusion," he added.

 

 

"Did you know," Dave remarked slowly, "that in the Old West, no one fenced the cattle in? If you wanted a garden, you had to put up a fence to keep the cattle out. You penned up your vegetables and your petunias against the wilds and the open range. Just imagine - the vast prairie stretched out hundreds of miles in all directions, teeming with bison and badgers, hawks and antelope, and the settlers lived in tiny patches, enclosing their sod houses behind fences and walls."

He paused for a moment to see if the Number understood. The other man watched him solemnly, saying nothing.

"But nowadays," Dave continued, "the whole country is crisscrossed with fences - wooden ones, barbed wire, visible and invisible - and it is the wild spaces that are hemmed into little postage stamps not much bigger than the homesteads that the settlers fenced off. And freedom? Where does freedom stand? Show me a place where a free man can exist! You can't! He is always trespassing on someone's property. There's no place on Earth that's not fenced in by humanity. You can't go north. You can't go south. You can't go east or west. The only place you might find freedom is within."

 

 

"Our world is a thousand sets of walls and fences, little boxes, jails, and prisons. We've snatched up land and forced others off. We've fenced in our minds with a million barbed-wire thoughts, starting with concepts of me and you, then going right on up to mine, yours, theirs; money, wealth, profit, prisons, work camps."

 

"We’re all so locked up in our delusions," the Number cried, "that we can't think straight. So it makes sense to people that we've got poverty and crime, justice systems and criminals."

"The crime," Dave shot back, "is that the real criminals - the wealthy elites throughout history - have not only gone unprosecuted for creating poverty, homelessness, and starvation; they have been lauded by society for the riches they stole by pushing people off the land and claiming it as their own."

 

 

"But this one jail is not the problem. The problem is the imprisonment of humanity. Those people outside the jail are just as much prisoners as the men and women behind bars. The only difference is that we know it . . . and they don't."

 

 

 

"There will always be jails and corruption as long as the minds of people are bound," he said. "Solitary confinement exists because we lock ourselves up. We imprison our yards with fences, then our neighbor's, and the next neighbor's down the street. The money is locked up by the wealthy, poverty chains the masses, crime becomes the only option for survival, prisons make profit for the wealthy, and our entire economic system turns into a racket where humans equal numbers, bodies equal profit, one man's labor becomes another man's wealth; and eventually the comfortable existence of a powerful class relies on the misery of imprisoning not just the poor, not just whole cultures, but the land, the animals, the trees, the air, the water, the mountains, and the minds of every sentient being in existence."

 

 

 

They released him through the south gate. He stared at the road for a long time before slowly, achingly walking northeast toward the county line.

"Get out of the area," the Warden had warned him. "The local kids beat up the homeless. Get a cab, stay in hotels, don't play any of your games around here."

Dave didn't have a dime to his name.

"Money, money, everywhere and not a dime to spend," he chanted as he crossed the county line on foot. He walked bone-weary along the rural road until he came to a busy intersection on the outskirts of a town. He leaned against a metal street lamp and put out his hand to beg.

A car stopped, the window rolled open, and a hand passed out a to-go container of soup and a plastic spoon. Dave fumbled his fingers around the warmth of the container, bowing his head gratefully to the couple in the car, and opened his mouth to speak. Too late! The light changed, they drove forward and never heard his thanks. Dave stepped away from the intersection and sat on the mowed shoulder of the road. The trucks and cars roared past. The air tasted of the black grit that clings to the undercarriage of semi-trucks.

Basho meditated under a bridge, Dave thought, remembering the old Japanese tea seller who chose to practice in the worst of conditions. Unattached to form, he let the traffic and bustle rush over him with absolute equanimity. Dave bowed his head over the container of soup. The heat licked the bones of his hands and slowly spread into his wrists. He opened the lid.

The aroma brought tears to his eyes. The scent of fresh rosemary and thyme added to boiling broth, the undercurrent of potatoes, a hint of carrots - a whole world pulsed in his nostrils, reminding him of soil and moist leaves, determined plants reaching for the sun, the myriad insects hanging onto dangling fronds, bees resting on green stems as they searched for pollen, the rustling of human hands harvesting, the way they paused around the fibrous stems of a carrot clump, the tensing of sunburned arms yanking carrots free of the earth, orange and audacious.

He couldn't speak. He could barely breathe. A whiff of soup brought him to utter humility and transformed his blood into gratitude.

"Thank you," he whispered to the world.

As the first touch of warmth touched his tongue, he wept. He heaved with messy, ugly sobs as the pain of the past weeks screeched through his limbs and wracked his body with agony. His mind watched these reactions with curiosity as the biological memory of his body protested the pain it had endured. Grimaces twisted over his face; the mortal human being named Dave Grant shuddered at the suffering he had endured.

Then he ate. Slowly, spoonful-by-spoonful, with lengthy pauses when his throat closed and his eyes shadowed with emotion, he swallowed the soup. In between mouthfuls, he sat for long periods of stillness as the beauty of life overwhelmed him. Common things like soup and the kindness of strangers touched his heart. It was not just herbs he tasted in the soup; he chewed on the flavors of the world. He let the sensation of nourishment linger on his tongue along with the bitter twinge of human cruelty. Guilt twanged metallically in his mouth as he thought of his fellow prisoners, waiting for some sign of justice dawning on the horizon.

And, as he licked the last traces of the soup with his finger, he thought of Joan.

"You were right, Joan," he said out loud, "the bodhisattvas don't come back for sex and chocolate."

He started laughing on the slope beside the road.

Soup and kindness were good enough for him.

 

 

**************** A man walked quietly in the foothills of the Sierras. The trees and cows watched him silently. Humanity did not seem to see him. He slipped between realities and walked with one foot hidden in realms the racing drivers could not see. He traveled without asking for rides. The miles were few compared to the thoughts that needed to be considered. He paused often, head tilted as if listening. Quick frowns darted across his face, along with curt nods. An occasional sound escaped his lips.

He traveled long, silent stretches without a word. He sat for a few days in the shadows of a dusty oak. He stood still for an hour, letting the gold seed heads of a meadow read the future in his outstretched palm. The wind told him secrets in the rippling Morse code language of fluttering leaves. A tree tried to kill him with all the violent passion of an assassin, recognizing the billionaire who had spun the wheel of suffering that razed the forests and cracked the hills with drought. He sat with the tree, thinking of causes and effects, ignorance and insight. He saw the world from the eyes of the forests and watched the bodies of their civilization crash to the ground to be loaded onto trucks and carted away to pulp mills and incinerators. He gazed across the continent, remembering the genocide of the native peoples. Six million Jews had died in concentration camps; twenty million natives perished in America; how many billions of trees had fallen to human greed?

He walked slowly, for the Universe is made of a quadrillion moving parts. Each one deserved careful consideration before he moved the butterfly that could affect them all.

He offered a frail, old woman assistance and lost a week of walking and thinking as he drove her up the mountain. The wedge that held back the wheel of change slid out an inch. The mass of the world hung breathlessly on the edge of cataclysm. The old woman could not sense the mounting pressures in all directions. She joked and chattered as humans do before volcanoes explode or earthquakes break or climate change roils the planet in the upheavals of extinction.

Then again, he wondered, perhaps she knew. Like generations of old women throughout human history, perhaps she felt the changes coming. As mothers worry for their children and fathers shore up the house, the old women mutter about simple things like soup, and chocolate, and love.

"Where is Joan?" she had asked as he recounted his story to her late at night.

"On her way, I hope," he answered.

When exhaustion tugged the old woman's wrinkles, he retreated to the quiet of the woods behind Edna's house. She offered him the spare bedroom, but the walls hemmed in his thoughts. The house's electric lights illuminated the hardened edges of tables, bed, refrigerators; too many reasonable definitions of reality, too many points on the human perspective, too many familiar stories that drag people back into the same ruts over and over again. Tonight he wanted to stretch his understanding wider than the sky.

Beyond the frames and boxes of humanity, the planet caressed and curled desperately and deliciously around itself. The creeping vines told stories to the tree trunks. The deer bedded down in the meadows. In the wild raspberry canes, a mother grouse rustled her feathers over the trembling bodies of her chicks. The night air breathed in the scents of a thousand creatures and exhaled a word called nature. Above him lay the night. Around him swirled his questions. Inside him pulsed a silence so strong it would crack the world like thunder when it broke.

 

 

 

 

With a deep breath, Dave Grant entered the belly of the beast.

He scoured endless stacks of plates and cutlery until the caustic stench of disinfectants curled his nose hairs. The hot steam and spray soaked into his sweat. The crashes and bangs and hollering of the kitchen filled his ears. His arms ached. His back screamed obscenities. He mopped his brow on the shoulder of his sopping shirt and plunged back in.

On the first day, he saw only dishes. Heaps of plates flew down the line like rubble from a gold mine. He bent his whole body to the stream that poured from the narrow shaft. He swiped the crystal wine glasses from certain shattering and placed them in the customized dishwasher installed by order of the sommeliers. No trace of soap ever touched these goblets. Boiling water scoured them inside the state-of-the-art machine that cost more than a decent car. No lowly dish boy’s hands ever left smudges where a wealthy debutante brought her lips to shining glass.

The plates and bowls received cursory scrapes and rinses before being piled into crates that slid roughly into the industrial dishwasher. Dave dove head first into the enormous cooking cauldrons, wielding the long-necked spraying hose like a fireman as he attacked grease and soot.

He pulled clean dishes from the dishwasher, hot as buns from the baker's oven. The plates and bowls hissed steam as he sorted them into place on the shelves. That evening, after the dinner shift concluded, he looked soberly at the glistening stacks. Tomorrow it would all begin again. Every plate scraped today would return the next, smeared with crème brulé and béchamel sauce. The thought of the endless rounds exhausted him.

Dave slid down the stainless steel counter and laid his head in his hands, knees tucked close to tired ribs. His eyes darted around the empty kitchen as he calculated how many dishes he had sent down the line to unknown dishwashers when he dined in the luxury of Gold Mountain. Six? Ten? Twelve per meal? Several meals a day, most days of the week, fifty-two weeks of the year . . . plus the chef's equipment, knives, chopping boards, pots, frying pans, graters, ladles.

Dave ran his reddened hands through his hair, laying his head back against the cool steel cabinet. There was no grace to this work, no pride or satisfaction. His humanity was chained to the pace of the constant stream of dishes. The pores of his skin felt sullied by the grease and bits of discarded food. His spine wept from the day of bending to servitude.

Dave stilled. It was servitude, there was no other word for it. Like the early laborers of the Industrial Revolution, his heart railed at the injustice of wage-slavery. The lie of capitalism shattered like a crystal wine glass smacked against the hard cast iron of a frying pan. The lords and ladies of the twenty-first century sat out in front, dining in luxury while he sweated and wracked his body laboring for them. Wages were nothing but a cover-up for servitude.

Dave shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. As a worker, he could find pride in those stacks of glistening dishes, go home, sleep soundly, return the next day, pocket a paycheck, save up, buy a home, become the master of his own little property . . . but he'd still be a servant to the masters - not a tradesman, a householder, a craftsman, or an artist - he would be a servant washing dishes in the estate of the lord.

Does the hypocrisy of America know any bounds? he wondered.

The nation built on the promise of equality and opportunity gave rise to one of the greatest wealth divides on the planet. There was nothing egalitarian about capitalism. The rich got richer; the poor grew poorer. Capital flowed to those who already had it; power followed capital. Upward mobility in the United States was a standing joke. Downward mobility was a statistical reality.

Suddenly, he thought of Joan. An ache of longing wracked his tired body. Her eyes, that cascade of black hair, the wry smile pulling up the corner of her lips; he saw her in the teahouse, bringing hot kettles of water to the tables, sliding into a seat to enjoy a cup with friends. She was neither a master nor a servant, but a companion to all those who traveled on the road of life, an equal among equals.

"To serve and be served," he heard her muse, "to love and be loved."

In his mind, Joan leaned her hips against the teahouse sink, bending slightly as she washed the cups and tea ware. Was it all just attitude, then? Dave didn't buy it. The speed, the insistence of the conveyor belt, the demand of the kitchen managers, the fear of dropping a whole tray of crystal goblets, the scrutiny of his superiors - the notion of superiors! - these elements would challenge the best of the enlightened ones to see the emptiness of the situation.

"Bodhisattvas can awaken in a pigsty," Joan used to claim.

"Yes," he would argue back, "but if you had the option, wouldn't you prefer a quiet, gorgeous temple?"

"Enlightenment doesn't care about the scenery," Joan informed him.

"Yes, but - "

"Dave," she had said, tilted her head to the side and folding her fists onto her hips. "Would you have sex in an abandoned car, rusting in a junkyard?"

"Do you mean, literally? Right now?" he asked.

"Hypothetically," she amended. "We don't have an abandoned car."

"I'd make love to you anywhere," he declared.

"Would you fuck an ugly shrew in a palace?" Joan retorted.

"No," he admitted. "What's your point?"

"Enlightenment will fuck with you anywhere."

The critical manager doesn't matter, nor does the speed of the dishes flying down the conveyer belt, nor the snobbery of the wealthy diners in the restaurant sending dirty salad plates down the line.

"Yes, but," Dave protested as he sat exhausted in the kitchen. If it was all the same to enlightenment, he'd prefer to have every man doing his own damn dishes; every family having enough to live on without spending their lives slaving for the rich; every child receiving equal opportunities of education and employment. He didn't need opulence when he had enough. He didn't need a mansion if a shed could keep him warm. He didn't need chanterelles flown in from France if a small bowl of soup could soothe the ache of hunger. He didn't need a blonde heiress, coiffed and manicured, when there was Joan.

He had once owned it all: mansion, resort, golf course, billions, jewelry, art, servants, sports cars. Everything that money could buy, he'd had and lost and now he couldn't care less. He'd slept in the gutter. He'd soaked in champagne. Poverty did not frighten him. Opulence did not entice him.

If dishes are dishes, Dave thought, why can't everyone just do their own? Why can't we all chop onions, cook soup, eat food, and clean the dishes when we're done? Would that be so bad? Do we really need to work to get wealthy so we don't have to wash the dishes?

Dave stared at the stainless steel industrial sink, imagining a lifetime of scouring those stacks. Day after day, repeating the same monotonous cycle. No one is born to wash other men's dishes. Not the low-wage laborers who showed up in restaurants nationwide; not his mother who endlessly served her husband and sons; not Joan who refused to perpetuate patriarchal cycles; not himself or any others in this world.

At the onset of the Industrial Revolution, agrarian men and women, tradesmen, and craftsmen found the notion of doing menial labor for wages deeply insulting. They objected to wage-slavery, decrying the manipulation of the market, taxes, and politics by the wealthy, elite that swept the poor off the land and into factories. They rose up against fifteen-hour days for wages so low that hundreds of thousands perished as destitute as when they began.

They went on strike, boycotted, marched, took over factories, shut down cities, faced brutal repression and violent crackdowns. Every authority in the nation fought them: cops, mafia, private mercenaries, the military, the churches, the social clubs, the newspapers, the elites. Hordes of ordinary laboring mothers and fathers continued their struggle for living wages and jobs that would not kill them with injuries, overwork, pollution, diseases, rapes, disasters, and starvation.

Their top-hatted, silver-caned adversaries in bank offices, mansions, and Congress declared the workers of the United States would go to Europe and fight the good fight in the war to end all wars. The workers of the world shouted an early version of Hell no, we won't go! Why should the poor man die in the rich man's war? Why should the worker's blood be shed for the wealthy man's profits?

Congress clucked their tongues and shook their heads. The worker parties were booming, attracting converts by the second.

"We must stop them once and for all," the robber barons growled.

The Espionage and Sedition Act passed faster than any bill in the history of the nation. It swept up all who spoke out against the war. Two hundred labor organizers were arrested in one week. They languished in jails for a decade. The workers floundered. Business boomed. The boys went to the front.

The Second World War echoed the machinations of the first. By the end of it, capitalists had packaged up the vision of equality and opportunity promoted by the workers, and added a white picket fence, a dog, and a brand new car. The American Dream was now for sale, with a price tag on every piece: the lawn, the clothes, the toaster, the kids, Mom's white smile and pearl necklace, Dad's rolled up shirt sleeves-

Ah, those rolled-up sleeves, a touch of brilliance in the painting of the dream. If Dad's cuffs had closed neatly at the wrists, he would have fallen into a different class - the class of servants of the wealthy: the managers, the bureaucrats, the clerks and the lawyers; all those whose shift cuffs buttoned neatly under jackets, paired with clean fingernails and obsequious smiles.

But no, Dad's shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows; he was a workingman who labored and sweated and by some miracle still had energy to flex his worker's muscles as he tussled with his son on the weekend.

This is the dream, the vision of the worker: that at the end of the day, he has more than when he started; that he'll get home in time to see his kids; that he won't grow old and thin from working overtime to pay the bills; that the kids won't be sent to work instead of school; that the house will be warm and the food will be nourishing; that his wife will be smiling; that the dog will be more than a snarling set of ribs - these are the dreams of the worker. He dreams of them because he does not have them. He joins the struggle to wrest such humble visions from the grip of other men's greed. He is beaten, arrested, fired, persecuted, hunted, hounded, shipped off to war . . . and if by some miracle, he survives decades of that misery, he comes home to a slap in the face.

The Dream has been plastered on billboards and is still out of reach, packaged up by the same capitalists who broke up the worker strikes; the same rich men who enclosed the commons, the same upper class that took the land of Europe and replaced peasants with sheep; the same millionaires who manipulated poverty in America; the same merchants and nobles who impressed starving men into indentured servitude; the same elites who whipped up the poor to massacre the natives; the same ambitious ruling class who rallied the colonists to fight a revolution so the wealthy could seize the Crown's stolen land; the same businessmen who chained desperate immigrants to fifteen-hour work days . . . this self-same lineage has now bottled up the visions of the people and rolled out the advertisements to sell it.

In the stainless steel kitchen of his high-class resort, Dave Grant rubbed his red, aching hands and noted his rolled-up shirtsleeves. History swept over him, swirled, and eddied around him. He thought of the women in skirts singing for bread and roses, children marching with a little old lady to demand school instead of a lifetime in factories. He thought of the daydreams of laborers: living wages, safe work places, healthcare, eight-hour workdays.

Slowly, incredulously, he shook his head. They shortchanged themselves with even the best of those demands. The laborers had struggled and suffered, but in the end, they were still slaves asking for better conditions.

Freedom is what the enslaved cry for, not shorter workdays!

Emancipation is the demand, not better rations!

If we ask for anything less, it is a compromise for the sake of survival. The real vision - if we dare to demand it - is to abolish all forms and causes of wage-slavery.

We sold our labor because we were starving, landless, evicted, foreclosed on, run out of the trades, uneducated, lost. The Earth spreads mightily in every direction . . . but in every direction stretch fences. Property, ownership, control of the common resources by individuals instead of peoples: in a thousand pinpricks of greed seven billion human beings die. Whole populaces are shut off the land, shoved off, locked up in cities, and starved.

If we had dared, Dave thought with ferocity, we should have torn up the fences, the deeds, laws, courts, charters, constitutions, and all notions that carved up the land and gave it to private individuals.

 

 

The resort sat like a temple on the top of Gold Mountain, demanding pilgrimages, offerings, tithes, and worship to the cult of wealth. The ultra-rich attended services and took part in the ritual rounds of golf. The semi-wealthy filled the pews and ate the crusts of the bread and body of fortune. The servants nibbled the crumbs in the back halls. The poor could not approach, though their labor erected the steep cathedral peaks that formed the temple of the resort. All of them, from altar boy to dishwasher to high priest to parishioners sang the praises of money and the glory of wealth and prayed that fortune would bless them.

The waiters, the staff, and the servants of the wealthy held up the pillars that raised the rich to their towering positions. Lawyers, legislators, judges, accountants, and consultants formed the ranks of the wealth defense army. Private security joined the state in guarding the life, liberty, and property of the wealthy.

Our whole nation, Dave realized, is devoted to the cult of wealth.

 

And, Dave added thoughtfully, some of the rich were notorious cheapskates. Give them a price tag and they'd argue it down. Hesitate due to moral principles, and the money would come pouring out in bribes. Dave had dealt with multi-millionaires who dickered for a lower price on a luxury suite. Many of the wealthy made their fortunes by shortchanging everyone else through outrageously high percentages and interest rates, illegal mortgage scams, tax evasions, overseas labor, sub-minimum wage salaries, part-time jobs without benefits; there were a thousand ways to skim the cream off the milk of economy and industry.

Dave had once scanned a packed opera hall and could not find an honest man or woman in it. A whole society of high-class crooks, raising toasts to each other's swindling, scathingly derisive of the recent crime wave of petty thefts that were wrought by the widespread poverty their business practices induced.

He had yet to stumble upon a stockpile of wealth that had not been amassed through misery and suffering. The trust funds of the past were tainted by unspeakable atrocities. The fortunes of the present were laced with the blood of illegal wars for oil. The speculations of the future rested in the financial enslavement of third world countries.

"I suppose the rich are all very nice people," Joan had once said doubtfully.

"They're not, " he had answered bluntly. "A lot of them are sociopaths, absolutely insane. A few are very nice people when they want something from you."

"But you're not a sociopath," Joan had protested.

"Maybe I was, then," Dave had replied. "Everyone can change."

 

 

 

He scanned the faces subtly as he walked. Kindness is a thirst that no amount of extravagance can quench. The yearning for simple, human connection makes the rich and powerful wake up crying in the night. Their hearts grow parched and dry as dust, aching with the cracks that split inside them. All-devouring, the wealthy consume to assuage their desperate thirst for kindness. Their material obesity threatens to kill them, but they cannot stop. It's not enough, they wail, and irony binds their words to the desperate cries of the poor. They are dying men gasping for a shave of ice to be placed upon their burning tongues. Their bodies scorch with unseen fevers. Hell is nothing more than life without a touch of kindness.

Dave walked among them, a recovering addict shaken by sobriety. He passed by alcoholics drunk on wealth, druggies, whores, pimps and pushers. The ultra-rich perch on the shoulders of the semi-rich who are hoisted up by the upper middle class who sneer at the lower middle class who accuse the poor of being lazy who in turn crush the abjectly miserable in an immense, invisible socioeconomic human pyramid, a circus act of the tallest order, a whole society of clowns and back benders in the greatest freak show on Earth.

What happens if we walk away? Dave wondered. What if anyone at any level - or everyone all together - just refused to perform the circus act of crushing or being crushed? Could we live without the glitz and glamor and the rich men on the top? Couldn't we all just sit down as equals and share a dignified, common meal?

He pondered this as he navigated through his tables, bowing, nodding, taking orders, smiling politely to gruff complaints and humbly answering imperious demands. He served businessmen he had struck deals with and bankers who had loaned him millions. He carried food to women who had flirted with him and politicians he had funded. Not one recognized the thin-carved server as the former owner of Gold Mountain. He was invisible, unnamed, unknown. Without the signs of wealth, he simply did not exist.

 

 

 

If you're going to put gold on the top of a mountain, the bodies of the poor will be buried in the mines

 

"If you're going to put gold on the top of a mountain, the bodies of the poor will be buried in the mines."

Dave swallowed, seeing visions of pharaohs and pyramids built on slave labor, skyscrapers that rose on immigrants' backs, fortunes amassed on the genocides of natives, and estates stolen through wars of aggression. Under the gilded facade of Gold Mountain lay an Earth full of suffering. Under the jewel on the crown of the richest man in the world lay the sordid truth of squalor and oppression.

"You cannot be free until all are free," he murmured.

 

 

"Can you be a billionaire and a buddha?" Joan had asked him, once.

Serving caviar to gold-decked hands, he answered silently.

My love, the question is not 'can you?' but 'why would you?'

 

 

Anything is possible in the realms of the enlightened, but why would an enlightened being perpetuate the delusions of riches, money, ego, and wealth?

It is all nonsense, Dave thought, and worse than nonsense. Delusions of grandeur were often bought at the price of another person's suffering. Every penny of the wealthy has been taken from the poor.

If the Buddha ran a business, it would not turn a profit. The workers would earn a living wage, the suppliers' children would be well fed, the products would be affordable, and the Earth would not be devastated and destroyed for the sake of profits.

And if even one of these wealthy benefactors understood this concept, lived by it, ran their business by this concept, it would be more beneficial than all the charitable donations of all the rich people in the world.

After all, what is charity but a cruel joke? It's a mockery of the masses - the powerful take all the wealth and hand a penny back to the people. They chastise the poor for fighting tooth-and-nail over scraps from the rich man's banquet table. What is charity but the snobbery of those who have taken more than they need? They give to operas and theatres, art museums, and private schools. They fund a culture of devotion to the wealthy. They support Cinderella stories in which the hero's quest centers on becoming a rich man by hoarding money from the poor. They endow scientific institutions that generate convenient facts. They finance research for technology that serves their profits. That's not charity; it's investment, and tax-deductible at that. They fund education for the specialists their companies will need. They give money to the non-profits of sons-in-laws of influential politicians.

The charity of the wealthy, Dave scowled, is not charity.

It's greed.

"I have slept in gutters and mansions," Dave began. His voice fell into a soft intonation, mimicking the rhythm of the sutras. "I have sat in teahouses and redwood forests. I have been locked in solitary confinement and in the embrace of my beloved."

 

"I know something of the art of charity. I have given small fortunes to single mothers in rolls of hundred dollar bills. I have received a handful of pocket change and wept with gratitude. I have walked in the ranks of the rich and the poor, and there is one thing I have learned.

"The poor do not need your charity. They need equality and justice. They do not need to be robbed of a decent life so that you can give back mere shreds of their survival. Our wealth devours dignity. Their children's future lies in the mortar of our mansions. Their parents' hard work formed the bricks of our success. We hand out trinkets, baubles, pittances; we throw coins from carriages lined with gold. What we give away is nothing to us; what we take away is everything to them."

The wealthy were balking like sheep that sense the wolf circling their pen. They could smell danger in the night. Dave grasped command of the room with a bark of his voice.

"We have taken hope and turned it into golf courses! We have taken small joys and filled our pools with them. We have taken elements of their survival and served them up as delicacies on our silver platters."

 

 

 

 

"The masses are stirring."

They flinched at the words all elites fear.

"The people are roiling, rumbling."

Heart rates quickened. Fingernails bit into palms.

"They cry for bread; we stock the shelves with cake." He pointed to the silent auction. "Heads will roll because of this."

Massaged backs stiffened. Mouths pulled into scowls.

"The ingrates," someone muttered.

Dave laughed in a sound as dry as desert sand.

"Why should they be grateful? Their mothers work three jobs. Their schools are crumbling and overcrowded. Their sons are sent to die in wars. Their daughters are forced into prostitution to pay the rent. Their children's fathers are locked in prisons. Their sisters and brothers are looking for work. Drug dealers are the only employers hiring. And they're supposed to thank us for all of this?"

His voice rumbled like thunder, unstoppable, saying words that no one had ever dared to speak in cathedrals of the wealthy. On the street corners, the prophets cried of the coming apocalypse. In the ranks of the poor, the revolutionaries foretold the fall of empires. But in a world of seven billion souls, only one man was poised to deliver this warning to the rich.

"We sit in their halls of power. We own their land. We hold their wealth. We can move mountains or blow them up. We can buy up the stars and name them after ourselves. We can launch wars of utter annihilation. We have the power to make change."

He paced as he spoke, striding rhythmically, circling, mesmerizing, forcing them to turn, turn around the room, turn around themselves, turn in a full revolution, turn and return to the place where everything began.

"They will rise up and take it back. They have to if they are to survive. They may riot. They may organize. But, either way, it is only a matter of time. All our preparations: armies, strategies, surveillance, police, prisons - these are nothing to a father's love for the dying child in his arms. They will not stop determined mothers who see your children growing fat. They will not restrain the righteous youths whose innate sense of equality and justice rebels against oppression. There is only one thing that will save us."

He stilled, suddenly, absolutely, exactly at the starting point framed by the arches of the entrance.

"Give it back to them."

Those diamond eyes swept the room, leaving not one of them exempt.

"Rebuild equality and justice, pour the profits into the people, restore the public schools and services, pay your taxes, honor debts, take no profit from your work. Pay yourself a living wage and nothing more. Live simply. Be humble. Become one among the many.

"In return, you will receive security in equality; brotherhood in justice; companionship in solidarity; community in mutual prosperity. You will lose your fear of those in poverty. You will lose the unbearable loneliness of our lives."

He stood then as a human being, one who had suffered and struggled, a Dave Grant who had nearly died of loneliness and separation, a man who knew the pain of isolation. He stood as a mere mortal who had lived and lost and learned to love, who had been touched by kindness and restored by soup, who had walked miles in many shoes until he wore all shoes off his footsteps. He stood as one among the many, humbled by them all.

Those diamond-eyes blazed with sharp compassion. The blue ached for the hard words he had delivered. He had stirred uneasy feelings and resentments. He had shattered the evening for them all. The charity would flounder - who could bid on the auction after this? They would stand around awkwardly for a short while then leave as swiftly as they could. He released the power of commanding presence; shock would hold them now. He spoke as gently as he started, beginning with charity again.

"I have learned something about charity in these seven years. We don't need charity, any of us, rich or poor. What we all need is equality, so we can stand side by side again. So we can look each other in the eyes. So we can live and love once more."

But, there was more to say, Dave realized, for the wisdom of the buddhas began to hum inside his chest. There is the perfection of charity and he must speak to this before they left.

"I want to make a gift tonight," he said. Speeches alone would not suffice. "A perfect gift, an unexcelled gift, one that is unsurpassed."

He walked now to the center of the hall, looking up and around as if pondering which piece of art or statue or gold leafed trim or beams of Mayan temple wood he would sacrifice to show his generosity. They pivoted to watch him, fascinated despite themselves. As in the folktales, some choices might bring disaster; others could shower riches, but only one answer would end all suffering.

What would Dave Grant give?

"I have urged us all to give everything away," he told them. "And now I should practice what I preach."

The breaths caught sharply in throats and chests. Whispered phrases shot out.

"My god!"

"He's insane!"

"He won't do it."

"He's going to give Gold Mountain to charity!"

"Not to charity," he corrected, smiling. "To the perfection of charity."

He paused, for he could feel the buddhas and bhagavans, tathagatas, and fully enlightened ones amassing. The crossroads gathered and surrounded him in all directions like a thousand roads conjoining in a great intersection of the realms.

"Liberation is the greatest gift, but I cannot give what I do not own," he said. "And what I claimed to own was never mine. For the mountains and the forest do not belong to humans. The rivers, birds, and beasts are no more our slaves than our fellow man. And if all of these are, by rights, already free . . . then to whom can I give the gift of liberation? I cannot say to the stars or the sky that I, Dave Grant, now release you. I cannot say to the trees that I, a human with this notion of property, now tear up this paper written on your father's back."

He chuckled to himself, for there was only one thing he could give.

"I give up my delusion of ownership, and give everything back to itself: the rivers to the rivers; the trees to the trees; the minerals of Gold Mountain to themselves." His eyes crinkled in an inexpressible burst of laughter. "And though I say, I give everything back to itself, that is not exactly true. There is only one thing I give back to itself . . . and that, of course, is me."

The slave owner emancipates himself from the shame of enslaving other men. He releases the cause of his own confusion, his own suffering, his own agony and living hell. Thus, though he liberates hundreds of beings, he, in truth, emancipates himself.

The same is true for all property, trees, land, objects, wealth. Not one being belongs to another.  We belong together, side by side, in a brotherhood of all the species, in the equality of Earth.

Dave Grant closed his eyes. The room stood silent, shocked. But the realms of the invisible crossroads roared with thunder, for the Billionaire Buddha had finally awakened.

 

 

 

 

"So, why does the Buddha make poverty?" the woman interjected.

Joan tilted her chin up and quickly fired back a retort.

"You tell me, oh Buddha," she challenged the woman, "and you and you and you," she pointed around the crowd. "Why do you make poverty and starvation, hunger, sickness, wars and prisons?"

Dave put his hand on Joan's arm.

"Forgive them, love," he murmured, quoting Jesus, "for they know not what they do. We've been crucifying ourselves in ignorance."

He hesitated . . . then grinned.

"But now you know. So, stop it."

 

 

 

just seems to me that what we did up here - " Larry broke off, staring at the peaked roofs of the resort. "It's a thing of the past," he said finally. "Like lords and ladies. Like dinosaurs and dodo birds. I watch my sons - and all the kids - and whether they grow up rich or poor, they've got a world of trouble. Nobody on this earth has time to waste knocking little white balls around golf courses."

Larry spat onto the green. Dave remained silent, letting the other man talk.

"The young folks are different from us," Larry declared. "They're chatting with people all over the world. A fly sneezes in Hong Kong and my son gets a text message about the chain of events that led up to the hurricane in Cancun. Can you imagine? It's a different world. I'm not sure it has a place for Gold Mountains - not when the kids know that half of the Appalachia Mountains have been blown into smithereens. They want to do something about that, not ignore it."

Larry smiled shyly and proudly.

"My younger boy, you remember how he couldn't keep his hands out of machines?"

Dave nodded. The troublemaker had pulled apart his golf cart, a lawn mower, and the resort's floor waxing machine before Dave caught onto the cause of his mechanical glitches. He'd hollered at Larry to enroll the kid in vo-tech instead of bringing him to work at the resort.

"He took a green industries course online," Larry told him, "and that darn kid converted my old pickup to bio-diesel. Can you imagine?"

Larry's smile shown brighter than the golden rays of sunset.

"My older boy, I took him up planting trees in that nasty clear cut someone got through the county permit process. It's my boy's last summer home; goes off to college this year. Says he wants to study poetry. Can you imagine? Me, with a poet for a son!"

Larry shook his head, incredulous.

"We went up planting trees and it was Gary Snyder this and John Muir that. 'Look Dad,' he'd say. 'Look at that cloud! It's a perfection of a poem - that's Ginsberg, Dad.' And I didn't chew him out for thinking I grew up with my head under a bucket - I know who Al Ginsberg is, for chrissake - because the kid was right, that cloud was a perfect poem.

"'You know what's poetry, son?' I said to him. 'This.' I pointed to the burned out slope and the saplings coming back. I gestured to the whole crazy world messed up by people like me and you. I pointed to his strong young back. I rolled his muscles and mine up in that one word, This, and I meant that the poetry is both of us working together to set things right.

"'Son,' I told him, 'you study hard, because the world needs great poets to capture these times we're living through. Only poets can do it, not scientists or reporters.'"

Larry laughed at the memory.

"I grabbed hold of his shoulders, all serious-like. 'Son,' I said, 'I'll love you even if you never write a word . . . but if you can write down the changes pulsing through this world, why, the angels in heaven will weep with gratitude until the Earth is washed fresh and clean again.'"

Larry stopped, breathless and smiling.

"You know what that boy said?" he asked Dave.

Dave shook his head.

"'Dad,' he said, 'maybe you oughta start writing poetry, too.'"

Larry's laughter bounded from his chest and startled a flock of birds out from the pine trees.

"Can you imagine?!" he hooted.

Can you imagine? the mountains echoed. Imagine, the wind sighed. Imagine, the grasses whispered. Imagine, the earth hummed. Imagine that a man - a world - could change so much that he begins to speak in poetry. Imagine that one generation could change the course of all the generations of humanity yet to come. Imagine that the human story does not end in the chapter of today.

Can you imagine? the whole world wondered.

Dave smiled and quietly answered.

"I can."

Quotes fron Billionaire Buddha...

Bob Banners Billionaire Buddha Selections

###########  pg 42

"What must I do?" he asked, nearly wailing. "Travel to foreign countries? Put out want ads? Help me!"

He pleaded with the universe. He offered a guzzle of his rare and vintage wine to the night. The ruby liquid of the drink of the gods tipped over the glass balcony rail and disappeared into the darkness. He could not hear the splatter on the rocks below. The night drank the offering on the wind.

"What must I do?" he asked again.

The night stilled. The wind halted. His hair stood on end.

Give it up.

He heard a voice so ancient its depth defied the confines of gender and language. The stars shuddered overhead. He knew without a word the sacrifice the voice demanded.

Give up your wealth.

Dave flung back from the railing; back from the night, the wind, the voice, stunned not at the demand, but the immediate retort of agreement that sounded through his synapses. Money bound him in its embraces, defining him from head to toe. Before a stranger saw his face, the subtle mask of money reached out to shake the stranger's hand. Wealth suffocated his humanity and slid adulterously into bed with his lovers.

But now, Fate was robbing him at gunpoint: your money or your love. He could not have both. This woman existed beyond the beaten path of luxury. She hid behind a door his gold-tinged eyes could never see. His money clung to him worse than his earlier obesity, driving a wedge of gluttony between them.

Drop it. Shed it. Toss it vehemently from your life. 

 

 

###########  pg 95

"There have always been rich people and poor people. It's the way the world works - "

"That is patently untrue," Joan retorted, her eyes flashing. "The monkeys aren't wandering around rich or poor. At some point, the human species invented money, wealth and property . . . and with those came poverty, the notion of scarcity, and the condition of hunger for some and abundance for others. It was a shell game that paid off well for the elite, so they perpetuated it. But," she fumed, "what came into existence can fade from existence. Humanity could drop the shell game if it wanted to," she spat out in disgust, "but everyone keeps thinking they're going to win it. Everyone keeps gambling, hoping to get the winning lottery ticket."  

 

####  pg 99

Dave's expression fell into deep shadows as he grappled with the parasitical nature of capitalism. The spine-shuddering vision of a massive beast haunted his thought; he watched capitalism sink its talons into living creatures and suck their blood and sinew until the emptied sack of bones and skin collapsed. In the New World, capitalism had unleashed its seething violence to massacre a continent of civilizations that objected to its parasitic invasion. The coasts of the east, the farmlands, the Appalachia’s fell to the all-devourer. No more! the natives cried, but the Spanish conquered Mexico at sword point and sucked up the California coast. The French trappers wormed into the tall forests. The English, the Irish, the German, the Dutch: the hordes continued to advance as greedy European elites consumed wealth, food, equality, and justice, thrusting thousands more into desperation, and ultimately, onto the ships departing for the Americas. Manifest Destiny delivered divine rule to white-skinned masses; opposition was plowed under, along with the arrowheads and blood of massacres and battles…." A heartless novelist capitalized on the ill-founded myths and a well-funded foundation ensured her books were read. A thousand false premises paraded around in the psyche of a nation without a single courageous child to cry out, "Look Mommy, the Empire has no clothes!"

It had no clothes, no heart, no decency, no shame, no foundation in truth, no reality. Capitalism was Greed unleashed like Satan's right hand man, justified by convenient misinterpretations of the Bible, and rationalized by sciences that failed to account for the reality of the world.  

 

#####  pg 142

 

Dave's body started to shake. He sat down on the curb of the main street of town, even though the city ordinances made it illegal for the poor to stand on the corner, sit on the sidewalk, lie in the bushes, carry a blanket, wash in public, or piss in the back lots. Yet, the public restrooms were closed, the shelters were full or shut down, and the benches had been removed. Tourists and shoppers sat in cafes, never dreaming that they had to pay for the right to sit down. They sipped café lattes while the poor who could not afford coffee or tacos were swept out of sight from a city that denied them their right to exist.

Dave broke the law when he fell to his haunches. He'd broken so many laws in his life: tax codes, zoning ordinances, monopoly and antitrust laws, speed limits, investments in stocks. The wealthy break laws because the laws don't apply to them. The poor break the law because their survival has been outlawed. Dave added loitering to his litany of crimes when he crumbled to the curb, shocked by a memory that symbolized the height of his conceit. 

 

###### pg150

You are not free until all are free. Equality is not a half measure. While the animals cower in the feedlots, and the dogs yap behind the fences, and the trees, rocks, rivers, and valleys are owned by human beings, our species is no better than the plantation slave owner loftily claiming that without him, his negroes would degenerate into wild beasts.

Dave groaned on the ground. The wilds - that which we called the wilds - was nothing more than a perfectly content ecosystem going about its business until our fear came along and choked on it. The wilds once humbled humanity, keeping our species into the natural system of checks and balances. They cast the arrogance of human beings into the democracy of the species, the round table in which elephants and ants are all created equal. And for this reason, humanity holds nature's egalitarianism

 

 

 

with deep disdain and lauds the hierarchies of man. But as the slow quest for equality between the human races, genders, and classes begins to bear fruit; humans are also starting to wonder . . . what is humanity doing on a pedestal of our own construction?  

 

######  pg152

I'm here, she whispers. Immortality, resurrection, birth beyond death, the emptiness that births your form, embraces your form, gives meaning to your exclamation point of existence.

And still, the man rages. He shaves the forests as severely as his culture insists that women shave their legs, armpits, pubis. He blows up mountains in brutal rapes for coal. He pisses his sewage into oceans as if defecating on his lover. He cruelly exhales toxic smoke into her face. He sprays her with disfiguring, cancerous substances. Then he kicks her in disgust, saying she is old, worn out, useless, ugly; her vagina stretches wider than a whore's; her breasts hang like an old sow's.

In her brokenness, she mocks him. Missing a tooth, she sneers at him. Go find yourself a virgin, fool! She is the wilds, the woods; the Earth. She says to humankind: in this entire Universe, I dare you to find another planet as hospitable as I. She stands on rickety knees, naked and hideous. She waggles her flabby hips.

I was beautiful, once, she reminds man. He groans, remembering. She was beautiful once, beyond belief, beyond compare. The very memory of Earth stirs his loins and quickens his pulse.

 

############## pg153

Dave wept into the forest floor. His mouth grew chalky on the crunch of loam. The musk filled his nostrils. She is there; the maiden, mother, crone; every woman he's ever known, the friends, adversaries, ex-wife, fantasies, lovers . . . and Joan. 

 

 

 

####### pg 162

Dave shuddered on the fallen oak. The consequences of this cultural insanity were dire. As long as humanity believed in the colonizing lie that survival came by destroying others, nothing on this planet would survive. The forests would be clear cut, the indigenous mowed down in genocide and wars, the earth torn open in search of minerals, the oil burned into the skies, the people devoured by a machine of greed that knows no bounds or limitations.

"Somehow," he told the oaks, "we must stop the madness of these beliefs." 

 

#######  pg196

Bits of sand and seaweed clung to them. The salt of the ocean mingled with his sweat, her tears, semen and dampness. And as they lay shuddering, bodies hot against the coolness of night, Joan looked at the envelope of darkness above, below, and to all sides, and felt safe in night's embrace. Dave listened to the sweep of ceaseless waves, felt the reverberations of their thrusts through the rocks, through his skin, through his own body. And they wondered why humanity had need for anything more than a quiet place to love one another in peace. 

 

 

####### pg199

The modern world may scream for rational explanations, but there are forces beyond the mechanistic model of the Universe. Science knows only the limits of its answers; infinity is vast and fecund with the unknown. Joan dropped the constraints of society and stepped into the lineage of wandering saints and mountain sages, ecstatic nuns alive in God, and singing women who walk naked through the streets, clothed only in wisdom and compassion. Throughout all time, they have leapt for

 

 

love and reached for knowledge of the divine. Societies have mocked and scorned them, bound these women to husbands, children, chains of propriety and property. But when enlightenment comes knocking, how could they refuse to answer the door? When the divine says, leave this life and leap into the unknown, would you protest that the laundry wasn't done? Joan closed up her house, gave away her sparse belongings, quit her jobs, and left.  

####### pg 216

They would circle these themes like koans as they hiked into towns. After a day on the corner, they would split their earnings with other homeless people standing around town holding cardboard signs in grimy hands. Now that they had embarked on the path of the Buddha, holding out the begging bowl in modern America, they could never be certain that winos were just drunkards - a bodhisattva might hide in that body. The jittering meth addict and the tired old veteran could be emanations of the Buddha sent forth to test their compassion and wisdom. 

 

####### pg233

Freedom is not a concept that swears allegiance to any flag! It defies nationalism! Patriotism! Boundaries and borders! The wild birds are free! The wild fish are free! But the wild human? Such creatures have gone extinct. Out of seven billion humans, not one knows the meaning of freedom. Humankind enslaves their species by culture, society, history, and law. In blind ignorance, they utter the word, freedom, to launch wars, spend money, make laws, and imprison others. Freedom is not free, their bumper stickers read . . . but such a twisted convolution of logic baffles the brightest thinkers.

Freedom is free, you fools! It is war that is costly, that takes your sons' lives. It is protecting the empires of the rich that is expensive to the people. It is the fortunes of the few that enslave the lives of the many. It is the imprisonment of your mind that bankrupts your freedom.