Oaxaca at the End of the World
*All italicized lines taken from Song of the Open Road by Walt Whitman
PART 2: In Oaxaca at the End of the World
9
Whoever you are come travel with me! Come join me in Oaxaca for the world is coming to its tired end and we, scattered bits of its cracking shrapnel, have nowhere to go but to start anew;
To digest all we have seen and felt and known to be true, and to start anew.
The earth is not what we were told it was! Everything we’ve ever been told has proven little more than an exercise in momentary contortions. Aye, it has made us flexible, but offered us less than zero to know or hold onto.
They say the essence of wisdom is just to know where you come from.
Who among us truly knows? Who among us truly speaks?
All too often the answers come as platforms upon which to pitch our tents.
All too often the answers are barked out angrily as if to say, “There you have it, now get back to work!”
All too often we build monuments to these answers only to find them, but a few short years later, as popular meet-up points for teenagers to drink stolen vodka by, and for lovers to drop used condoms before sprinting messily into the night.
10
No more! Our poverty shall be our salvation, our vulnerability, weak as a child who barely knows how to speak, open at last. There is nowhere to go. We know.
Yet towards that strange and pulsing destination,
(you and I shall go anyway.)
We no longer have a shred of a belonging to lose and nothing but a whole world to gain.
Forward! Accompanying each slink back into creature comforts is the tinny, medicinal taste of unnatural death.
Forward! We have always known the Way, we have always felt the Way, only now do we truly risk death in order to find, for the first time in our lives, that which is no longer Death. (withered muscles and depressive thoughts can no longer play the prison guard)
Now!
But I warn you: If you choose to come, to accompany me out here, in Oaxaca at the End of the World, you must bring three things: empty hands, open eyes and faith distilled to courage. You must leave all names and dreams and ego-hopes behind you in the empire.
Hope? I cannot fathom the idea! I understand working, but to hope? What poor withered soul hopes?
Bring not an ounce of hope, bring only everything within you that can be thrown as coal into the fire.
(Let he who would debate me on this point stay home. I no longer have time for arguments.)
11
Come join me only if you understand that I offer you nothing. Come only if you see that emptiness and failure are our greatest values. Come only if you feel that to risk everything for nothing in return is the safest of all bets, for everything was nothing, and Nothing is the closest to Everything a soul can dare to tread. Come only if you dare to arrive at last at your destiny, only to abandon it prematurely as a hostel on a highway.
Come to Oaxaca at the End of the World and drink a mezcal with me. Come dance to the rhythm of a song that you didn’t get to choose. Come and grope forward silently but determinedly with only your integrity and your energy as weapons in your holster.
12
Once boldly set out upon the journey without belongings, without a destination, perhaps even without movement, in the footsteps of the sages, then where shall we go?
Anywhere or nowhere, they amount to the same.
We shall make love in every different way possible: with our eyes and with our hands, with our souls, and with our words, with each other and with the world, no matter which little crevice is before us.
They amount to the same.
Wherever we are, whenever we are, we will touch what is at our disposal, we will release what can no longer be used. We will be what we are, who we are, as the ever shifting situation would have it.
There is a time for everything, and we will be and will find everything in time.
13
So to being as it is and as it comes. To wandering hungry until we are fed, to stumbling sleepless until a suitable patch of dirt opens itself and accepts us.
To seeing nothing but what is solid and real and within our lines of vision. To dreaming nothing but what corresponds to where we are and how we feel. To think of nothing but honesty and integrity, whether or not they’re with us.
To abandon all and in doing so, carry all with us. To know no boundaries and as such understand limitations. To learn the body language of a lover as a fractal pattern of the life and death of galaxies. To be sustained by all, while doing nothing but giving.
To all of this, I tip my shot. For all of this: ¡Ven!
14
Translating the word Tao, or Dhamma, through ten thousand metamorphoses, all recognize that the soul of the universe is the wind, it is the prime essence of all other life: animation, movement, change. And this truth plays out in puns on roads or paths or ways as in the Way of all things, the weight or mass of a thing being Energy divided by the speed of light squared, which is Movement.
And of that petty little thing called Personality, of those strange puppet-masters called Mood, neither is free of the great law of change, of movement along the way.
Forward we all march, or dance, or saunter, or are dragged, along the macabre, or festive, or romantic, or arduous progression of our souls.
Forward we all go, together, whether we like it or not, whether we embrace it or not, whether we understand it or not.
15
And here then, I have contradicted myself. Very well, I will cease to allow any demands to escape my lips.
For you cannot choose to join me in Oaxaca at the End of the World, as you are already here, whether you see it or not.
Your shot of mezcal has already been poured though you may not be a drinker, though you may not know Oaxaca, though you may not yet be born.
No matter! Your shot awaits you, you can drag your heels, but you cannot now refuse it.
Each gets naked at her or his own chosen, appointed hour.
16
At long last! We face the sums of our additions. We hold a measuring stick of our own designs, defining success and failure, and asking if any among us is found wanting.
We look to The Revolution. The Revolution, though it be merely one of seven billion: the focus and the standard of every breathing person’s call to battle, or calling to love in the early hours of day when he wakes to take her breakfast.
And as the dust or rose petals settle, this great change is seen in its clearest, fullest light. And it is found wanting.
My call then, is to Oaxaca at the End of the World, where you shall step into silence, vulnerability, and pliability.
But I warn you, in Oaxaca, you will find nothing different. You will find only your own volition, which has nothing to do with Oaxaca.
For Oaxaca is just another place, and the world is not really going to end.
17
It is up to you to end the world. It is up to you to snuff out your ambitions and block your ears from the calls of the historians and hypocrites. It is up to you to take that shot of mezcal, for no one is going to take it for you.
Camerado, I give you my hand! I give you my love more precious than money. I invite you to Oaxaca, for it’s easier to have courage together than alone. Juntos. Will you come travel with me?
12/06-11/2012
Rocio’s house
San Augustin de Etla,
Oaxaca, Mexico
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