They serenade her
in the little wild places
those bands of folk
their faces open to the weather
wandering the faery paths and highways
making the Map with each step, sonnet, and hushed glance
those singers of love songs
those seekers of holy places
they eat the food she sets before them
they drink from cups she has filled
and make merry by her Moonlight

*** Disclaimer: I use both the graphic novel and the movie for this new way of seeing SIN CITY. So If refer to an event you don’t remember, check one or the other of those sources. For the sake of brevity (too late?), I keep to one storyline, that of Marv and Goldie, known as “the Hard Goodbye”. One last thing, I haven’t asked Frank Miller’s artistic opinion about any of this; best to consider this a “what if?”. In the end, if it clicks for you, then I feel glad to have shared something meaningful to me. Onwards. ***

One can watch the entire movie Sin City, without having a single moment of reflection. It doesn’t ask you to do any deeper thinking than you feel inclined to - the action rushes by fast and furious, the characters barking and purring lines, one after another.

Yet something stirs, underneath the surface. Something worth a more thoughtful look, for Sin City (the derogatory slang for “Basin City”) really contains two worlds: a world dedicated to Sincerity, and another to Cynicism.

Throughout Sin City, you see the same repeating visual message, over and over: bricks, bars, cages, gates. The Prison that we all live in, the Prison of our culture. And yet within the Prison, certain beings refuse to give in, refuse to cease making their beautiful drama of life, love, fury, and death.

The character Marv, a man somehow both ancient and in the prime of his life, a walking wall of muscle, embodies an intentionally anachronistic kind of masculinity. He comes from a primordial time when male purpose sat clearly in the open: to protect and provide for the goddess (our wives, daughters, sisters, mothers, grandmothers, and the earth herself).

[I see Marv as] Conan in a trenchcoat… - Frank Miller

He drunkenly wanders the line between those two cities, unable to find the entrance to Sincerity, unwilling to submit to the world of Cynicism and Lies, lost, alone, without any meaning to his days. And then it happens.

…she falls against me…dripping with that angel sweat of hers…the perfect woman. The goddess. Goldie. -Marv

The goddess touches him, asks him to protect her, shares her divinity with him, making love at the heart of the center of the universe, the origin point of the big bang, surrounded by the infinite darkness preceding creation.

Afterwards, upon waking, he realizes something terrible has happened. The goddess has died in the night. Someone has killed her. The snake has entered the garden created by the union of the god and goddess. But Marv can find no wound, no sign of damage. Almost as if she did not receive a physical wound, but a spiritual one.

And he spends the rest of the story trying to get back to that blissful origin point, back into the embrace of the goddess. And the only way there, lies on the other side of redemption. He can only get back there, by protecting the goddess after the fact. By redeeming his failure and protecting what remains of her – her daughters, her sisters. In our culture, after the first sunrise of the Universe, men wake up having failed already. Upon waking, into their laps and before their bleary eyes, they receive the bitter gift of this culture: a world created upon the enslavement of the goddess, a world choking and poisoned, where (in America) one out of four women is sexually assaulted, in a long tradition of patriarchal vengeance upon the bodies of those who remind us most of what remains ever outside of the full control of our science and machines: the earth mother herself.

When his eyes go dead the hell I send him to will seem like heaven after what I’ve done to him. I love you Goldie. – Marv

Before he had met the goddess again, and reunited with his original purpose, before she had touched him with her sacred power, the simple, everyday, miraculous power of her body, he had lost his way, lost his moorings, forgotten where he had come from.

…hell is waking up every god damn morning and not knowing why you’re even here. Why you’re even breathing…but I’m out. I know exactly why I’m breathing. I know exactly what I’m doing. – Marv

She had saved him. She gave him his purpose back. He had failed in saving her. She had died for him. Now he would die for her, but only after redeeming her death.

First, he obtains the aid of priestesses of the goddess, his parole officer who can get his elixir of confidence (anti-psychotic drugs that seem to have no more than a placebo effect) from her girlfriend the psychiatrist. Only women who love women will help him out at this moment.

Then he gets more support, from his mother, sneaking into her house, retrieving his pistol from his childhood room. He has named his handgun Gladys, after a nun from his primary school days. Another woman who will support him. His mother discovers him, worried.

Mom, I feel better than I have in years…I met a girl. Her name’s Goldie. She’s really nice. – Marv

Marv continues on to set a trap, by going to Kadie’s, yet another safe haven for him: a joint of “booze and broads”, run by the transvestite (a man who embraces the ways of women) Kadie, never seen, but who has extended a permanent welcome to Marv…yet another source of the Goddess’ help.

After some bloody detective work, he manages to obtain a confession from a priest: the all powerful Cardinal Roark has his hand in this somehow. This goes all the way to the top of the rotten patriarchy: the Church, the twisted and enslaved masculine power under the corrupt Cardinal, a power opposed to the ancient protector spirit of Marv, has murdered the goddess. The Church denies and stigmatizes everything having to do with the goddess, with any wisdom women have. And Marv stands on the outside of things. He finds himself the outcast. The Church has all the power.

Marv: It can’t be that big.
Priest: Find out for yourself! …and ask for yourself if that corpse of a slut is worth dying for.
Marv: Worth dying for. [BLAM!] Worth killing for. [BLAM!] Worth going to hell for. [BLAM!] Amen.

He follows a lead that the Priest gave him. It takes him to a very bad place, and almost destroys him. He meets somebody wholly new, somebody dangerous of an order above and beyond the everday cruelty of Sin City’s patriarchal powers. He meets Kevin, the Consumer of the goddess. And Kevin has powers that Marv didn’t even know existed.

…Impossible…nobody can sneak up on me…nobody…my fingers die…I go blind…nobody’s that quiet…nobody except the one who snuck into that hotel room two nights ago…”…It was you, you bastard! You killed her! You killed Goldie!” - Marv

With the face of cherub, the whirling and untouchable Kevin smiles his way through beating Marv unconscious. Blackness.

Marv wakes up locked in Kevin’s cellar, his trophy room. Several heads sit mounted on the wall. Women’s heads. Lucille sits nearby, also trapped.

He eats people…It’s girls he eats as far as I can tell… - Lucille

Marv has met, and temporarily lost to a force completely alien to him, a force that even the Church fears. The new power of young men who don’t just deny women, don’t just beat them, don’t just consider them second class humans. We’ve done that for long millenia enough. But these new ones do something altogether new: they consume them, with a smile, with an inexhaustible hunger, with angelic youthful faces, with a matter-of-fact everyday sociopathy that leaves Marv stunned. He didn’t even know you could do this to women. He’s seen them beaten, caged, humiliated. But eaten?

He didn’t just eat their bodies, you pig, he ate their souls! He loved them in a way that was absolute and clean and perfect! – Cardinal Rourke

And truly, Kevin’s masculinity has a catlike quietly, he rakes with his claws, all serpentine speed and grace. He does think he has consumed and stolen the dark powers of the goddess, and wields them savagely. He worships female power in a way no-one would wish themselves worshipped, like a vivisectionist awed by the complex, functional beauty of a cat’s exposed organs, using the knowledge gained “for the greater good”.

After escaping Kevin’s hellish cellar, Marv must head to Old Town, the sanctuary of the goddess, to get the help and knowledge of the women there. He sees Wendy, Goldie’s sister. Of course, you can’t kill the goddess any easier than you can kill Life itself. Wendy stands for the continuation of that goddess in the face of her spiritual suffering. As daughters of this same goddess, at first Wendy and the others don’t trust him – they believe the lie of the Police and Church, that Marv killed the goddess. What greater trick than that, if the Patriarchy can convince the daughters and sisters of the goddess that the ancient warrior, scarred and intimidating, with his antique protector ethic, killed the Divine Female. Yet it doesn’t stick. Sincerity wins through. The goddess runs Old Town as best she can, and her sincerity saves her daughters from killing their champion. Wendy, Goldie’s sister, realizes she almost made a terrible mistake.

Wendy: You sat there and took it—when you could have taken my gun away from me any time you wanted to—
Marv: Sure, but I thought I might be able to talk some sense into you. And I probably would’ve had to paste you one getting the gun—and I don’t hurt girls.

Marv feels terrified at the task ahead of him, as he gathers his wits, with the help of Wendy and the daughters of Old Town.

[looking at his reflection in a mirror]…Feel the fear and get past it…go ahead…shake like a junkie…you’ve got some people to kill, and if you do this right…you’ll go to your grave a winner. – Marv

With renewed conviction, Marv faces Kevin again, the Warrior against the Soul-eater. Because Marv now no longer doubts Kevin’s power, because he understands Kevin exists, no matter how alien, he fights fully aware, and though savaged by Kevin’s claws, he pulls him in and embraces him, clicking on the handcuffs.

Yeah, that’s right…get up close and personal…I can take it… - Marv

No longer denying that this alien thing in front of him is a man just like himself, Marv has beaten Kevin. Marv now understands what before he could even imagine.

Try to hop around now you bastard. - Marv

Looking at this poor soulless thing with the body of a Man, Marv does the only merciful thing. He disassembles him, piece by piece, like a robot.

Marv deals Kevin the killing blow at last, the cherub smiling peaceably all the while, his empty pleasantness ever reflecting the unfillable hole inside him. A thousand goddesses would not have sated his need, trapped by the addiction for something he could never get. Perhaps Kevin finds relief in his death, at last freed from his helpless sociopathy. Desperate in his lonely emptiness, completely estranged from the Mothers and Sisters and Girlfriends to whom, from his training growing up in Sin City, he could only see as objects of his unattainable satiation. He could only receive the goddess’s love and blessing when she gave it willingly, not by consuming it. By hiding this from himself, Kevin has lost himself to all that matters in this world, more completely and perfectly than any of us. And his mentor, the Cardinal, envies him terribly. Such perfect meaninglessness.

Finally. Roark. Patrick Henry Roark. – Marv

Marv takes it all the way to the top. Confronting Cardinal Roark, he learns the Cardinal had taken him under his wing, at first shocked by Kevin’s eating (something new to even him!), but then finally seduced by it, seduced by Kevin’s perfection of the absolute annihilation in himself of the capacity to live, feel, love, or see any speck of the goddess left in the world…like a true scientist of this mechanistic age, the world now appears a dead thing to him, for playing with and finally consuming.

…in time, I began to envy him…I could no longer stand to the side, while he touched heaven. – Cardinal Roark

In a strange kind of feedback system, the Patriarchy of Sin City gives birth to a creature it has never seen, but then learns from it to become more and more terrible, consuming ever more completely the goddess, violating too the soul of the Divine Male until nothing remains but tatters. Until nothing remains but Marv, the last scrap of the ancient warrior left.

…it’s beautiful Goldie…it’s just like I promised only better…and when his eyes go dead the hell I send him to must seem like heaven after what I’ve done to him… - Marv

Caught with the Cardinal’s dead body in his hands, gunned down and then resurrected on the operating table, charged with all of Kevin’s (and Roark’s) crimes, thrown into a cell on Death Row, after all his work, all his waiting, he finally receives, in death, his prize: a reunion with the embrace of the goddess. Through confusion, and fear, and pain, and violence, Marv has clawed his way back to a reunion with Goldie, on the heart-shaped bed at the center of the Universe. And the explosive power of that reunion starts it all over the again, as they once more create the Universe for the very first time, in the infinite darkness before sunrise, every single day.

So many layers ask for a telling here: the Marv in us, will save the Goldie in us, if we ask him. He will fight the Kevin and the Roark, the part of us trained by our culture to eat women’s souls, to hate them yet worship them. Actual men can also “save” actual women by honoring the goddess, the Goldie, in these living, breathing women all around them. By refusing to consume her. By coming together with her at the center of all things, on a heart-shaped bed, before time began, and create the universe again.

A great feathered dragon sleeps, hidden amongst the sprawling urban landscape. Not well hidden mind you, but hidden well enough for most eyes, dull and glazed over, clouded as the mind behind them.

Periodically it reveals itself in all its invisible majesty - cars crash, mothers give sudden birth, winds blow, pets whimper and hide, the world fills with terrible and wonderful things. And then the power ebbs, shrinking and withdrawing into out-of-the-way places: under beds, into attics and cellars, sewers, empty warehouses, condemned buildings, untrod and wild corners of parks and backyards, repelled by the predatory, analytical scrutiny of the human gaze and the painful grinding noise of human thoughts. It waits for the moments, when chaotic beauty rampages unchecked, often coinciding with defiant and unstoppable sunrises that hammer creation with the celebration of heat and light, shrinking the night into a patchwork of shadows, a scattered army of jigsaw puzzle pieces, hiding discreetly from daylight, behind and beneath whatever cover it can find, waiting silently for the night power to grow and piece itself together again.

In the beginning, Coyote created the universe. Or so many of the old native stories go…

The Joker, Batman’s archnemesis, a madman, born from an accident at Batman’s hand, reborn as he emerged from a soup of industrial chemicals in a Factory vat…

What does Coyote represent, anyway? Some say chance. Some say transformation. The Trickster, who tricks even himself at times. A Fool? A Sage?

The schizophrenic Green Goblin, throws bombs left and right, creating chaos and fear, as Spiderman desperately tries to stop him…

What do many in our culture see, when they picture the living world before the emergence of humans, the world newly made, by Coyote. The jungles, teeming with life. Not a human in sight. What does that look like to modern eyes?

Chaos.

The Riddler giggles and cackles, another mad plan coming together as Batman struggles to solve the newest riddle against the clock…

How does our modern civilization feel about Chaos? To what work would we put our superheroes, if we had them? And what mask would we put on Chaos, to demonize it, to make it an acceptable enemy.

…They called me MAD at the University, but I’ll show them, I’ll show them all! -Anonymous Mad Scientist

Well. We’d call it crazy, wouldn’t we?

Mwahahahah! Nobody can stop me now! Hahahahah! -Anonymous Supervillain

And truly, when our superheroes don’t have these colorful and insane archvillains to fight, they have to satisfy themselves as glorified cops and EMTs: stopping bank robbers, purse snatchers, putting out fires. But what about corporate polluters? What about enslaved workers at sweatshops? What about inethical and illegal logging practices? Fishkills from oil slicks? Well, we don’t employ them for those things. Their real work lies somewhere else.

Our superheroes don’t serve the world of life. They serve the prison that we all live in. They protect civilization [if you have any doubts about the prison-nature of civilization, I recommend you follow that line of inquiry, starting with the book Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn]. Of course, some of their archvillains can seem no more than glorified bank robbers. But we all can observe our superheroes reaching their pinnacle when a worthy enemy comes to threaten the integrity of the prison they guard…

Yes, my pretties, yes! Attack! Oh, my beautiful rodent army, no one can stop you! Kill, kill! -Anonymous Supervillain

…Magneto returned to his attempts at global conquest, being opposed time and again by the X-Men and a number of other heroes. In his most audacious attempt to conquer the world he threatened the governments of the world with earthquakes and volcanic activity…

Always our greatest enemy, insolent in her defiance, never submitting to our control, Mother Nature. She attacks our crops with insects, our cities with rodents, throwing hurricanes and floods our way. But Mother Nature…we like her when she behaves. So let’s blame Coyote. He never behaves.

The Green Goblin, poisoned by his own scientific experiment…the Hulk, chased and hounded, his powers the result of military research…the Joker and his chemical soup…the Riddler, victim of his own machine…

Our villains and our superheroes quite often seem born from the same womb: the arrogance of modern science. Its arrogance to study whatever it wishes, though the tools may injure and scar. To go wherever it wants, though it may threaten our lives, our children’s lives, our grandchildren’s lives.

So, if any of this does describe the stories we tell our ourselves, what do we do with this knowledge?

Well, we can start by firing our superheroes. Or putting them to new and better work. We can start by writing new stories, knowing full well what we do: that these new stories amount to nothing less than a vision of the world, and our place in it. What do we want that place to look like? Do we want it to make a future with great-grandchildren possible?

For we know one thing. As our superheroes zoom from one earthquake to another, from one robbery to another, stopping counterfeiters and mass-poisoners and mad arsonists, great-grandchildren really fall low on the list of priorities. With all this Chaos to control and stop, who has time for thinking of a seventh generation?

He walked, tall as a titan, to the circle’s center. His ancientness glowed fresh and new in the Dawn’s light, as if born just a moment ago, in the dark beginnings before time, before word or memory. With a face of polished marble he faced the assembly and spoke in words made of deep distant sounds, a language born of the romance between whalesong and earthquake. My ears went deaf from his voice’s relentless slow momentum, as sure as the turning of the earth, but I could still feel and hear the sounds vibrating in my belly. I could somehow understand it, in the same way mosquitos and crickets sense the weather changing, buffeted by the changing air pressure.

Murmurs filled the assembly. We felt resolved to carry the message onward.

To be or not to be? That is the question. -Shakespeare

E-Prime describes a version of the English language that does not use the verb “to be”. As you may find out with a little research on the internet, various reasons encourage the adoption of such a practice for writing and speaking.

Your internet search probably won’t turn up an even more interesting notion: indigenous languages don’t seem to have a proper verb “to be”.

For a Tracker, no answers exist. Only questions, suspicions, hypotheses, patterns, tendencies.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. - Einstein

To see a barefoot track upon the earth, does not mean the maker didn’t wear shoes. What if they had cut the bottoms out?

To see seven black crows in a row does not mean all crows wear black. To see an eighth appearing white does not mean some crows don’t have black feathers. What if the “white crow” fell victim to a sack of flour?

At best, a Tracker can say about a barefoot track: “this suggests an unshod human foot.” Yet like the invisible man, until each surface of the foot receives coverage, below and above, back to front, side to side, pressing into a medium that will hold an image, one must hold open many possibilities, while choosing the likeliest one as a working hypothesis. And even then…

Consider the hoax of Bigfoot tracks. Wooden stamps disguised as bare feet. Does a Tracker seem foolish if she refuses to make assumptions about any track, not just those that seemed an unusual fit for what one usually sees?

We can never quite completely trust our senses, yet these same senses encourage us towards exploring certain possibilities. One cannot state for certain that a groundhog made a particular track, even when you catch the groundhog, cook it, eat it, and lie satisfied with your hands on your belly. At least you can contemplate the mystery with a greasy smile and a nap.

Results encourage us towards particular ends, towards particular behaviors, towards particular models of reality. But results can change, patterns can shift, models can (and do!) become obsolete.

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. -Einstein

What if we judged our models and actions according to their utility in influencing our lives in a beautiful and expansive way, rather than on abstract notions of “truth” which will never replace actual phenomena, and more likely find themselves replaced by the evolving evidence? A Tracker judges how they model the physics of tracking by the tendency of that model to appear to predict future events, and to describe unseen animals. All with the original goal of full bellies and clothed backs.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods. -Einstein

When a Tracker hears about the struggle between Creationism and Evolutionary Theory, a smile appears on his lips…perhaps Creationists have perceived well that Evolutionary Theory, in the popular mind, feeds a belief, not a curiosity. Perhaps the satisfaction that some scientists and most modern folks have with Evolutionary Theory belies a willingness to accept it fully on faith, without examing the evidence. Even with a full examination of the supporting evidence, could we honestly say “it is true?”. Evolutionary Theory may indeed constitute a modern creation myth, competing with the Christian one, if instead of an excellent explanation of the evidence, we consider it “the last word or nearly the last word” on how life has appeared the way we see today. Our culture’s hunger for Truth may constitute the final trick we play on ourselves, the final blindfold we just won’t take off.

Science never pursues the illusory aim of making its answers final, or even probable. Its advance is, rather, towards the infinite yet attainable aim of ever discovering new, deeper, and more general problems, and of subjecting its ever tentative answers to ever renewed and ever more rigorous tests. - Sir Karl Popper

All models are wrong. Some are useful. - George Box
animal tracking

We split the atom to release unimagined destruction. We also split story away from wisdom, and thus gave birth to entertainment. And the radiation burns still glint in our eyes and upon our souls.

What if every rattle, every pictograph, every myth, every ritual, did not attempt to answer questions about the meaning of life, did not attempt to simplemindedly explain why certain things exist and behave the way they do…what if the notion of sacredness came about to help humans to survive in a world which demanded they pay attention if they wanted their children’s bellies full.

What if sacredness bounds the issues most material to survival? What if the sense of awe and the divine, whether at a beautiful sunset, a birth, a death, a melody that pierces the heart, what if this sense exists to help humans to pay rapt attention to a world with dangers and limits, with predators, heat, cold, drought, flood.

Any decent guide to wilderness survival begins with a chapter, or at least a paragraph, on attitude. Attitude, before all alse, sets the stage for our ability to survive emergencies, and for that matter, our every day lives.

Japanese swordsmanship delineates “attitudes” one can take when facing off with an opponent, each attitude appropriate to a different context. Defensive, offensive, hidden, naked, open, closed.

If seemingly superstitious indigenous ceremonies, full of colorful metaphors, behaviors, and beliefs, acted as an elegant compass, delineating attitudes necessary when facing the natural world as a human being, then (like two poems written about the trials of falling in Love) the details may differ, from one culture to the next, but in the end they all ask the same question: how do we set the stage for survival in this world; ’survival’ sounds so clinical, so unromantic, until we realize that true survival looks like immersing oneself in the thick rapture of beauty. In ceremony, singing, weeping, celebrating, and giving birth, we go to our deaths, drowning in beauty.

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping
than you can understand. -Yeats

Did an answer create the universe? Or did a question?

If one can describe religion as a system of answers and certainties about the cosmos, taken on and held in faith, has modern science become just another religion? What does honest inquiry into the natural world look like? What does the natural world itself look like?

Baskets containing emptiness.

Set adrift in a raft, on the vast ocean of the the world, two Trackers, grandfather and grandson, have a conversation, passing the eternity of the voyage, from birth to death…

Do facts exist? Does certain knowledge exist? How would one build the case for such a proposition? And what would motivate such a quest?

“Grandfather”, says the youth, “To where do we travel?”. “Ah,” smiles the elder, “to the ends of knowing, till we lose ourselves.”

If, according to the current understanding of physics, matter contains mostly empty space, empty space bounded by the paths of moving particles, from the subatomic level to galactic level, how might we describe the nature of reality?

Baskets containing emptiness.

“Grandfather, I feel lost”, says the youth, a tear upon his cheek. “The ground beneath me won’t stand still. It constantly shifts. The world appears empty, all the way to the horizon, and in a grand circle about us. Nothingness upon nothingness. Air and water, shifting cloud, nothing remains the same.”

What if “facts” and “truths” as we know them did not exist? What if the word “fact” meant “a good question to ask”? What if books of facts, stories, knowledge itself, instead of answering questions, asked questions? What if we read “books of facts” as “books of questions”? A field guide to birds, a physics textbook, a journal recording one person’s history, what if every statement in their pages, every proposition, every law, every affirmation of a particular reality, all said: “What if this did describe our reality well? What if birds did behave this way? Build these kinds of nest? And do they? Can you find evidence that supports this? Does the constant of gravity stay constant? How do we know? Will we ever know? Who measured it last?

“Grandson,” spoke the elder, as he put a hand on the youth’s shoulder, and looked deep into the boy’s moist eyes, “all you see around us, our people see as a gift: the changes, the flows, the patterns, no one thing seems to stay the same. Though you may feel we bob about aimlessly, like a leaf, I feel anchored by our curiosity. The mystery itself anchors us to the center of all things. At all times, each one of us stand in the center, as the world whirls around us, dancing its dance. What more beautiful certainty can you ask for?”

To make certain kinds of baskets, you cross flexible sticks, creating a centerpoint. Then, spiraling out from the center, you weave other long flexible materials under-over-under, bending the outer edge of the cross upward, making the center also the bottom of the basket.

A valley may have a river running through it. Surrounded by the valley’s high ridges, most animal trails wind their ways under-over-under around the bowl of the valley, past fallen obstacles, connecting to sources of water, and food, and shelter. The water, the food, and the shelter themselves have settled into spaces and containers. A small pool rests in the netted palm of the mineral structure beneath it; sand and stone, trapping it so that it can rest momentarily in that place. Before long, the thirsty mouth of a deer presses against the surface of the pool, and the water travels into a new container; a web of veins, and bones, and rushing fluids, ultimately trapped by the watertight basket of the skin. On the skin one can see the whorls, lines, criss-crossing patterns unique to each of us. At the cellular level, the same structure continues, lines of force, structures filtering, holding, releasing. And even smaller down to the molecules and atoms comprising the living cells, billions upon billions, each a tiny basket, holding flows, bounded by flows, containing emptiness, directing nothingness.

Baskets, made of webs, made of nets, containing unending mystery, holding questions, answering nothing.

Something seemed to spark in the youth’s eye as he looked out upon the ever-shifting expanse once more. It seemed new, alive in way he hadn’t yet noticed, full of mystery, heavy with question, comforting in its unknowableness. The elder spoke again. “Grandson, as long as the shifting sea of our world continues, we may observe it, notice patterns, and tendencies, make predictions about our futures based upon insight into the workings of our past, but all our myths, our models, our stories, our words, in the end they lie. Only by dancing with it, from moment to moment, cheek to cheek, can we honestly reflect this shifting world. We cannot find knowing in knowledge. We only find it here,” he said, pointing a bony finger at a place just below the boy’s belly button. “And here!” he laughed, pointing at himself, at his own belly.

Out beyond ideas of Right-doing and Wrong-doing, there is a field…I’ll meet you there. -Rumi

What if at long last, we arrived at an unexpected place, in time for a funeral. Seeing sad yet familiar faces, we decided to stay and listen, to pay our respect to the unknown one finding rest in the earth.

I will not say, do not weep, for not all tears are an evil. -J.R.R. Tolkien

And what if, overhearing whispers, the identity of the one inside the coffin came rushing into us. And then we hear the words of the weepers…

Right, I’ve never known one more True
Wrong, always faithful in your Falseness
Right, you’ve always told me just what to do
Wrong, you’ve always embraced my sadness
Right, more important than Love
Wrong, with shame you’ve driven me
Right, you kept me looking up above
Wrong, you’ve abused me with authority
Both of you have kindly fed me
with food I could not eat
Both of you have kindly blinded me
to things I needed to see
With this I say goodbye
And let this be the end
To me you’ve both been friends
but now I’ve left your lonely lands

What if Right and Wrong themselves had died? And we then entered a new world, one that had always existed all around us, but we’d never seen. A world of life, and observation. A world of patterns, and tendencies, of illusions, and tentative explanations. A world without certainty, or guarantees, or truths, or falsities. A world, most of all, of unending mysteries.

The same world that nurtured us into humanity, that shaped us into who we have become, where we emerged as humans caring for other humans, caring for the earth, because we danced to the rhythm of our own wildest natures.

The world of the Trackers.

In the Shinto Creation Myth, the primordial divine man and woman emerged at the beginning of time. The man dipped his spear down from the clouds and stirred the world into activity.

Decked with flowers, painted with colors, spirals, and dancing designs, he approaches. Craggy and ancient in one moment, as if chiseled from rock, young and glowing the next, like an emerging bud in springtime, he sets himself before the monster. An Ogre more powerful than a flood, more indiscriminate than a hurricane, with a volcanic belly full of fire.

Many cultures tells stories of a first man and woman, the divinity or sacredness of masculine and femine, instructing their maturing grandchildren how to perceive their own bodies and minds as men and women. And in turn, it instructs them how to perceive the dance of life and death in the world in a loving, compassionate, and ultimately useful way.

In our own cultural tradition, many of us struggle to find our way, to fill our lives with satisfying purpose. Perhaps a path that leads us there, lies through the song our own bodies sing…

A smile spreads across his face as he spreads his flower-hung arms. His heart racing, courageous not from lack of fear but from embracing it, he knows no exit, asks for no way out. What greater purpose than this, could one find?

What if the functions of our bodies as men and women told beautiful stories, stories of meaning and purpose? To wound a heart, you bring forth salty tears, speaking of our ocean-salted origins in the great churning watery belly of the Earth. In our mother’s belly we recapitulate the origin of our uttermost ancestry. We exit the internal ocean, accompanied by its waters, in the same place as the emergence of a woman’s menses. Women bleed monthly, from wounds that never heal, wounds meant to stay open, sacred wounds that give birth. In their time of bleeding, they can feel emotions especially keenly, speak especially profoundly, and grieve deeply, often without knowing why. For them, by the very nature of their bodies, they keep their hearts open, wounded, bleeding, so that life may continue, healing may flow.

What if grief sourced all beauty? What does it mean when we feel so happy, we cry? When we see something so beautiful, tears run down our cheeks? Do we call that a wound? Do true wounds create life, along with injuring it?

As a young teenager, I thought I had it figured out: with the help of the stories of my culture, heroes such as Mr. Spock, Robocop, and others, I decided that feelings themselves caused my pain. I need not to feel, and then the daily surging whirlwind of hurt, humiliation, suffocation would go away. I never quite succeeded, but then again, I did myself damage that I still continue to recover from…

When you grow up, your heart dies. – Allison, the Breakfast Club

Does a heart die when it can no longer grieve?

For men, we have a sword, that touches that wound, that encourages its openness. A flowering sword of life. Though one can wield a sword with violence to protect, at perhaps its highest purpose one can wield it simply to create beauty, to wound a heart, to bring forth the saltiness of tears. The saltiness of birth, life, and the original mothering ocean. Like the great poets, and characters such as Cyrano de Bergerac, a masculine heart thumps and thrums, aching to wound with beautiful words. To wound and receive wounds in turn, men dance, whether in the beauty of violence or of poetry, they care not.

And of course, in each one of us, a piece of the other exists: men have their own inner Sacred Wound, and women have their own Flowering Sword. Men and women, dancing their dance, touching inside each other, opening for each other, blossoming and birthing, sacrificing and dying.

The Ogre belches, and annihilating fire bursts forth. It smashes with its fists, and the ground splits. The flowering man burns to a cinder, his ashes scattered into the cracked earth. The sweetness of his perfume, mixed with the char of his demise, smells like birth and death all rolled into one. And there where he died the herbs will grow ever more greenly with his sacrifice.