Written in July, 2023

I gaze through scaffolding of intricate greenery and corkscrewing bark where the birds and bees engage in their eternal dance.

I find myself sinking into a warm, unbounded ocean of consciousness. A realm of nostalgia, heartache, and wonder where memory, history, cosmic phenomena, and imagination all collide in a collective orgasm of truth.

BANG! A series of identical Egyptian sphinxes are cast in a matrix of lavender neon light beams that spin relentlessly on the wheel of an invisible zoetrope, invoking the powers of some great ancient deity.

BANG! The garish display of bounce houses spanning the full spectrum of America’s cartoon folklore and morality accompanied by the ritualistic burning of cow flesh lead me across undulating green hills that stretch backward in time to my childhood. There I find myself as an eight-year-old boy hunched over in a conic party hat clasping my knees, bathing in my hurt and loneliness. I want to reach out and put a comforting arm around the little man, but before I can…

BANG! Claude Monet has exploded my imagination as I am HALO dropped into a fractalized labyrinth of nature in all its unforgiving beauty and cruelty. Waving sunflowers, writhing weeds, cackling ravens, and ghost-like traces of slithering serpents and luminescent jellyfish flicker and flash before me like individual dots on an impressionistic canvas as the heat beats down relentlessly.

PLOP! The ocean currents have washed me ashore on a desert island. I find myself in uncharted territory without map or compass. The feminine side of my being anchors me on these sandy shores, surrendering to the overwhelming brilliance of nature’s splendid and elegant designs. I muse on the myriad of reasons that this eucalyptus tree I’m staring at has such an intelligent and exquisite design in juxtaposition with the crude, barbaric, linear machinations of man with his duct taped circuit board mentality. Does the fact that I can see this discrepancy express something about my purpose on this planet? Am I some kind of “techno-naturalist”?

Before I can contemplate these questions too deeply, I realize that I’m sitting right smack in the middle of the belly of the whale with two human beings that I have completely neglected: my fellow travelers. They are the obvious yet evasive truth that has been seated just out of my view atop my eyelids. Now I see that my surrender is their discomfort and their discomfort becomes my inspiration, for their needs and my needs are inseparable. With this simple recognition, the masculine side of my being is re-awakened…

He’s a Director
a Mountain Man
a General
a Conjurer of Worlds

…And “surrender” ain’t in his fuckin’ vocabulary. I was….

Washington crossing the Delaware

Sir Edmund Hilary setting his sights on the rooftop of the world simply “because it was there”

Neil Armstrong taking that great leap for mankind

In that line of inspiration, I felt the reassuring spirit of Lord Buddha and Marcus Aurelias breathing into me on the wings of a warm, gentle summer breeze, which calmed and focused my mind. With that, I pointed out a patch of familiar trees on the horizon and stated clearly and confidently, “There.” This simple gesture transformed an unknown wilderness into a fixed destination. And yet, despite this confident gesture, I knew that my internal crosshairs were as arbitrary as a discombobulated whatchamacallit, fabricated by the warped and limited imagination of man with his dict taped circuit board mentality. Still, I knew that what my fellow travelers needed in that moment was direction and clarity, so that’s what I gave them. I danced. What else could I do?

I danced between masculine and feminine
Between the corporeal and the abstract
Between the soil and the cosmos
Between a tragic truth and a useful fiction

In the throes of this dance, I zigged and I zagged across the tangled pathways, hedges, wreckage, and crossroads of my life, witnessing the tethered ghosts of the Grahams of Christmas past, crystalizing the trajectory of my current incarnation with each fateful choice.

As I wander deeper and deeper into the maze of my own life, my heart begins to bubble, filling with both aching sorrow for what could have been and ecstatic tenderness for the blinding beauty of what really was.

The bubble fills with more and more sorrow and tenderness, making my heart heavy with profound longing. A radiant light in my heart’s center longs to reach out through time and space to illuminate every dark corner of the world’s collective fragmented jigsaw soul.

I long to breath strength and courage into the heart of my past selves in my moments of weakness.

I long to send currents of love and forgiveness to whatever hermitic sliver of existence a certain someone is currently occupying.

I long to lift the spirits of my fellow travelers and ease their suffering.

I long to feed every hungry mouth
dry every moist cheek
mend every broken body
heal every wounded heart

I long to offer my eyes to all the broken sinners out there so they can look themselves in the mirror and see how perfect and beautiful they are to me.

In turn, in this moment, I also have my personal longings…

I long to be held
I long to be seen
I long to be loved
I long to be understood

My bubbling heart is so backed up with tears and inflated with unfulfillable longing that it feels like it will levitate off the ground and transform into a great storm cloud so that my oceans of tears will flood the whole world.

In the sturn und drang of my emotionally electrified dance, I find an unlikely ally in the form of the siren call of an immaculately positioned cosmic ice cream truck. Its nostalgic Scott Joplin melody echoes through the ravine and carries me toward promised lands.

Sure enough, my fellow travelers and I arrive at a vantage point that allows us to look upon a land that was promised to our ancestors once upon a time. A land of rolling hills and arid valleys where Tongva traders and Spanish settlers once had dreams of the land that stands before us today with its bustling freeways, skyscraper skylines, comfortable poolside dwellings, and well-manicured trails. What is Los Angeles if not a stage built for dreamers by dreamers? A sprawling wonderland of palm trees, exotic novelties, and literal dream factories galore?

These musings invited the real question: what dreams of today will shape the promised land of tomorrow? What will our descendants see when they look upon this land? How will my own dreams reshape this land for the dreamers of tomorrow?

This line of inquiry seems to beckon a seemingly instant vipassana-style insight. Aha! The dreams I entertain are not mine alone.

They are hers
They are his
They are theirs
They are ours

We are all participating in the ever-evolving creation of a collective dream.

Therefore, the mission is not to dream on behalf of everyone, but for each of us to do our part in giving form to the portion of the dream that we are each capable of expressing.

With this insight, I seem to wake up with my eyes re-opening under the familiar canvas of scaffolding of greenery and tree bark. Only now, rather than sinking, I find that I am levitating above the ground as sunlight emanating through the ornate tendrils of blossoming beauty is cast into the pale rainbow infinities of stained glass.

Before long, these swirling mandalas of pale light, blue skies, sprouting life, ancient wood, billowing clouds, and sacred geometry, descend and encase me in a sanctified palace of sublime light quanta.

Hovering under the protective blaze of this effervescent quantum cathedral, all of my longings are washed away in light of the realization that if we are all the dreamer, then we are also all the witness. As in the dreams of our nighttime slumber, we are both the creators and the experiencers of our collective dram. I did not long for a witness because a witness did not exist, but because I was too blind to see that the witness is everywhere, both within and without.

“WE ARE THE MUSIC MAKERS AND WE ARE THE DREAMERS OF DREAMS”

This is grace. This is life. This is IT!