My first education at Sweetwater Sanctuary was not in Plant Spirit Medicine, which is what I plunked down my hard-earned money pimpin’ ho’s for, but on the procedures for taking a shit. Hearing the sweet gray-haired Judy navigate through each step of the way on taking an ecological dump was like having my grandmother describe in detail how she pleasures herself—painful and a tad disgusting—and would probably require me to undergo the same 6-year duration of therapy I needed before I could look at her hair dryer again without simultaneously bursting into tears and puking.

“You shit in the bucket, wipe your ass in the usual way, and then scoop a cup full of wood chips over everything,” she explained like a redneck sailor. 

“Wait, you shit in the bucket and then stick a cup in the shitty bucket?” I asked incredulously.

“What the fu—? No! You take a cup of wood chips from the other bucket!” she clarified, and I couldn’t help she was laughing at my city slicker ignorance.

“I’m sorry, Judy, I come from the 21^st Century where we have indoor plumbing. Forgive my confusion but I didn’t know I was staying at Little House on the fuckin’ Prairie,” I said just a touch defensively.

Judy then took me through a National Geographic Channel presentation on how our shit, piss and used toilet paper is composted to form a rich black humus that is used to fertilize the soil for the plants on Sweetwater Sanctuary. She concluded the series with, “All the greens you will eat this weekend got their nutrients not only from the sun but from the asses of all the past students who have stayed at Sweetwater Sanctuary.” I made a mental note to myself not to eat anything green this weekend, be it cucumbers, moldy bread or shit-cultured salad greens.

Judy shocked at my outhouse ignorance.

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FOR THE FULL PIECE GO TO:

http://rebelyogi.com/a-tale-of-two-shitties

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Two egos on the sidewalk

Coming at each other

From opposite directions

They walked the same line

One would have to move

But when they came together

Neither would budge

For to an ego

Holding his line is what is most important

Even if it means harming another

Words exchanged

Challenges were thrown

Fists were flying

One ego walked on

With a broken hand

Strengthened by the fracture

The other was knocked out

Relinquishing his stance

Only with unconsciousness

—–

One ego on the sidewalk

One non-ego

Coming at each other

From opposite directions

They walked the same line

One would have to move

The non-ego did

He had no place to hang

Anger or arrogance

Self-righteousness or indignation

He stepped off the line

Not because he was afraid

But because hard lines could not contain him

And maintaining this one held no importance

And while the ego felt stronger

For winning the battle

The non-ego felt no weaker

To him there was no battle

I look at the scrapbook of my life

A heap of pictures and places and people

Strewn together in a sloppy pile

The storyline obscured

I grab individual memories

Hold them up to the light

Staring at them through aged eyes

Their color is faded

And they slip through my arthritic grasp

I am in an asylum

Because I no longer know which pictures are real

And which are make-believe

Which of these pictures I have taken

And which others have placed in my pile

Be they people or desires

The only picture that I can see crystal clear

Without the assistance of my reading glasses

Or an orderly

Is the one that I see when I look around my room

Even the cataracts that have clouded my vision of the past

Does not affect my view of the present

But I know tomorrow this memory will start to fade as well

That there is no preservative that will keep this photograph

This mind and body

From crumbling into dirt

I start to call the numbers on the yellow notepad

An accumulation of facts and figures

Taken from years of dredging through the darkness of my memory

Some of the phone numbers are disconnected

Others just ring indefinitely

I am not sure whether I copied them down wrong

Or whether they were just faded dreams

of girls who walked with me hand in hand

whose skin was soft against mine

That I awoke from

Staring at my empty palms

No longer able to remember how they felt

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And then I hear it

On the other end of the phone someone says,

“Hello?”

The voice seems modified from what my memory bank,

Whose savings has dwindled to nothing,

Remembers

A little shakier

Slightly lower in tone

Yet exactly same

As the girl I knew decades ago

or maybe just in my mind

She says she remembers

And her memory serves as proof

That I did exist

That I had walked on the beach

And left some footprints in the sand

She reminds me of things said

And people known

Deep in my pile of memories

That I would have never found without her help

I hang up the phone

With a smile on my face

I know that in a short time

I won’t remember the call

Already many of the memories she helped

Colorize like Disney

Have turned back to black and white

But for the moment I know

That I did exist

And this is the only thing that matters.

Soon like my memories

I will fade away too

The tides will come in and wash my footprints away

And the only proof that I existed

Will be in the fading memories of others

Until they too fade away

Wake from the dream

And start a new day

With no memories

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I was actually proud of myself for not engaging my emotions in his full frontal assault when in the past I might have found myself getting drawn into an argument and lobbing some of my own bombs in his direction, weapons designed to maim the other as much as win the battle. The HeartMath Institute has research that shows that any angry outburst, even if one believes it to be “justified,” is harmful to a person’s immune system (the system they tested) and takes him out of heart/mind coherence where better health resides as well as an ability to access your full intuitive nature to solve your problems. My recent reading of this has not yet made me immune to getting angry but has started to help me see anger from others in the same way that a scientist gazes into a Petri dish, wondering if I added a loogie to the mess if the bacteria I was studying would thrive or die.

The truth is that Austin cares much more about money than I do. He has enough money now to retire and still pay for his three kids to go through college and grad school and to the moon and still have some left over to join the circle-jerk with Hugh Hefner and yet he still focuses on making mo’ money, mo’ money, mo’ money.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jukQX2pl2Q 

This is in large part due to the fact that not only his salary but also his self-worth is based on his billable hours. This has resulted in him being on various medications and going through two weeks of shock treatment that erased some of his memory to deal with his depression and anxiety that seems entirely based on his earnings and what that means to him.

I donate 10% of anything I make to charity and to others. I seriously doubt he donates the equivalent ratio, which would be around $150,000 for him to charity. And I am next to certain his vote for President has little to do with protecting the environment or foreign policy or who’s been the most creative in their cigar placement, but with which candidate will let him keep most of his money via tax breaks.

He's either Hitler or J. Jonah Jameson from "Spiderman"

While I value my freedom to move around without Big Brother tracking every financial interaction I make, my being under the radar has probably cost me more in comforts than it has gained me in untaxed dollars. I lost a good job that I had and liked for ten years at a health club. I lost two more yoga teaching jobs, one at a gym and another at a yoga studio, where “paperwork issues” were the main contributing factor to my termination. One involved a fruity Fitness Coordinator named Blake that wanted me to get on my knees in front of him in submission and I pretty much told him, “I’d get down on my knees to suck your dick before I did so to Kowtow to you,” but that’s another story.

Just about every job is run by people who have been conditioned into a system that preaches a false religion that you cannot work unless you fill out government forms that declare you are a “taxpayer,” which means one liable to the Income Tax—which you most probably are not—and that the company has the right to withhold money from your paycheck because they are acting as unpaid agents for the Internal Revenue Service. As a result, I have not been able to get any work at any institution that requires this, which are basically all institutions. I went through a financial rock bottom where I couldn’t pay my bills and my eating suffered in variety and quality; where I once ate only organic food, now this word became an otherworldly fantasy like Heaven.

And more recently, I have discovered that my cloaked status is a big wedge in my relationship with Ace, who desires a “normal” life with an abnormal man and I am seriously considering plugging back into the Matrix for love. I’m starting not to care if the Federal Mafia takes their cut anymore. I’m so tired that at this point even the pursuit of Truth has become exhausting.

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FOR THE FULL PIECE GO TO:

http://rebelyogi.com/full-frontal-assault

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He’s “finding his voice”

Still doesn’t get that silence

is the real power

It has become cliché to talk about a dog’s love and devotion to her caretaker. And while I don’t like to be cliché, be a part of any click, make any noise that may be called a “clack,” work with paper mache, or take the necessary time to clear my computer’s cache, I can’t help but to reflect on one particular aspect of a dog’s love for which any human would give his canine teeth to possess.

Whenever I come home to our apartment, Abandon is always excited to see me with a wagging tail…well, unless she’s chewed something up about which she knows I will be pissed, which hasn’t happened in a very long time. Sometimes her overwhelming excitement comes out as whines and whether I have come back from a meditation sitting in the snow of a chilly winter day or a sweaty jog under a blazing summer sun, my face will soon be wetter than when I first came into the room.  This is the cliché part of which just about every lover of dogs will espouse. Hang on a moment, computer pop-up. “Do you want to clear your cache?” Uh, no…and…RETURN.

Today I reflected on the other side of a dog’s devotion to love, when things aren’t lusciously long walks or chasing cars or playing fetch but rather being forced to put on a stupid Halloween costume that their caretakers think are cute or having to be washed in the tub, taking away all those beautiful smells of cigarettes and drool and poo that they have carefully accumulated like a potpourri.

When things are not right, and I come home to discover that Abandon had decided that my phone charger was more fun to chomp than her plastic bone, her ears will lower and she will fill with what most would interpret as guilt. And, in less proud moments, I have allowed my frustration to lead me to drag her violently in front of the chewed plug or book, yell at her, throw her in the bathroom by her scruff and close the door for what for her must have felt like an eternity.

Inevitably, when I open the door, her ears perk up and she can’t help but to start wagging her tail. She’s not thinking, “Sorry about what I did.” She’s not thinking, “I hate you!” She’s just thinking, “I love you and I’m so glad to see you.”

She only knows two expressions of her love for me. Her first is utter blissful tail   wagging, tongue lapping love. The second is a sadness that I am not in a place where I can relax into that place of blissful tail wagging, tongue lapping love with her.

I’ve done just about every abusive thing to her short of hitting her and while doing it, yes, I have at times seen what I would interpret as a certain fear in her eyes. But remaining like an eternal flame beyond the fear, and clear as a lit candle in a pitch black room, is a love that never wanes even an iota and only desires for me to feel my best so that we can once again bathe in blissful tail wagging, tongue lapping love.

It seems only humans, whether hurt or angry, fight back not only to defend themselves but more so to hurt the other person. It is as if a martial arts master was mugged and he subdued the attacker and the police were on their way but then he decided to break the attacker’s arm just to “teach him a lesson.” You could beat a dog and even if it fought back with its mouth, it would never take pleasure in hurting you.

When done with love, a dog enjoys lessons of SIT, STAY, DOWN, FETCH, HEEL. But lessons of guilt and anger are taken with sadness, with an understanding that “My caretaker’s love is shut off when I do certain things.” Through an abusive teaching system, she learns the lesson of not chewing up your plug based not on the physical trauma inflicted from a rolled newspaper but on the emotional trauma of your withheld love, which is unbearable for a creature that exists on love.

While it is easy to beam our love when we are dealt a Royal Flush, what happens if we are dealt a 7 high? If we are truly in love with the game of Poker, we will still receive a metaphoric payout whether the cards are high or low. But it seems most card players’ love of poker requires the game to be played with a specific deck of cards, on a specific table, and only when they are dealt a specific hand. That’s not a love for the game; that’s a love for things going your way.

Ace and I had an argument last night regarding something I wrote. Underneath the hurt and anger on both sides, I was like Abandon: sad that we couldn’t just stay in blissful tail wagging, tongue lapping love.

For the record, Ace's mouth isn't that big (or so I will swear on the Bible in order to assure I don't get a mandated sentence of celibacy! (though she does tend to match her shoes and dresses with equal penache.)

I have imagined my wedding proposal to Ace. I would take her to the park on a nice sunny day and kneel down and flip open a ring case. That part is cliché. The ring would be a special ring that I had designed for her, not with a blood diamond of which she has voiced her disapproval but a beautiful crystal and design that is only dreamt up by crazy swamis.

“Ace, will you marry me? I don’t want an answer now. I want you to answer me in the middle of one of our worst arguments, which I’m reluctantly assuring you will happen sometime in the future. While we are in the park now and it is sunny and you are feeling all lovey-dovey with me, an answer of ‘Yes’ is cheap and I am too spoiled and you are not a whore to give a response from such a common place. If you can tell me ‘Yes’ when your eyes are not filled with joyful tears but red with anger then I will know that your love is forever and priceless and only then will I take you as my bride.”

Perhaps Ace and I would never argue again and so she would never have the opportunity to accept my proposal of marriage. But would that be a bad thing, two people remaining in tail wagging, tongue lapping love every day of their lives? Since I am a man with human frailty, I am guessing this pipedream would be more of a pipe bomb and an explosion will happen sometime post-proposal. Like I see beaming from Abandon, even a great fight—if we stayed connected in love—would just provide another opportunity to remind ourselves of our love.

David Deida in his book Enlightened Sex said that Tantra was staying open and connected to your partner when all you want to do is close off and disconnect. Perhaps dogs are the greatest Tantra masters of them all.

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Each night I prayed to God

For some things needed

And some things not

And whether they came or were forgot

Each night I prayed to God

Each night I prayed to God

When she arrived

I prayed no more

She was my answer

The love of lore

To ask for more would be to rob

She arrived one day

Eating foods I ethically couldn’t

Imbibing drinks I socially wouldn’t

But soon I ate a few

And shared a glass of wine or two

Because I loved her more than dogma

She didn’t like my clothes

So soon I wore pants that were a little tighter

And bought shirts with buttons and a bit brighter

Losing my ability to bend with ease

And pull on a shirt simple as a breeze

Because I loved her more than clothes

She didn’t like how I introduced

With bowing hair

And deeply staring

So I moved my hand instead of head

And tried to blink more often then said

I looked away at random times

To show no faults for her to find

Because I loved her more than the opinions of others

I never thought that this would matter

But for her this made me badder

As a social misfit, I did not flatter

A prince, a jester

I was the latter

I didn’t live up to her desire

And soon of this she grew tired

Though few others it seemed to bother

One night I came to surprise

Used the key she gave me

And slipped inside

Sneaked quietly into her room

And saw her on her knees

Her prayer in full bloom

She asked for a little more “normal”

With a partner that didn’t embarrass

She mentioned girlfriends

Whose men had savings and suits not sass

Etiquette and a firm handshake

Who liked drinks and burgers

Who promised their women

More than just love

And an uncertain future

I slipped back out unnoticed

In a bit of a fog

That night was the first time

Since she came into my life

That I once again prayed to God

I prayed that He would grant her what she wished

That she would always be supported and never missed

Not embarrassed but proud

Whether he spoke softly or loud

For her to be finally happy and at peace

That she would own this love

And not lease

Because I loved her more than myself

Suddenly a hand covers my mouth

And a blade slides under my ribs and into my kidney

His murderous embrace releases me

As a burning fire swells my back

And fogginess fills my head

My legs drain of their strength

To carry their cargo

And I involuntarily drop to my knees

I turn to him

And in cloudy confusion

Struggle with a single word

“Why?”

He looks at me in disgust of my oblivion and says,

“I’ve been following you for a long time.

You had to know I was coming”

Struggling to form words

To keep from passing out

My eyes gaze downward

As I witness tomorrow

Pouring out of me

Watering the earth

A crimson red

I look up at my executioner

His form framed in a halo of sunlight

“I…didn’t…hear you”

And he just stared at me incredulously

As my dreams

the book I was going to write when I finally got around to it

the girl I was going to marry when the timing was right

Drain from me like the color from my face

I thought I would squeeze out all my juice

When it was time to drop

be nothing but rind

ready to compost

But in a single moment

All items on my “To Do” list were crossed out

Left untapped

Ripeness turns rancid

Under the heat of a scalding sun

…which is now turning cold

Never heard him coming