Dharma

Next month, Ms Ché will head north to Boulder to spend three weeks at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa. Oh my. When she told me she was going, I nearly burst, it was so exciting.

She's wanted to go for a couple of years but hadn't yet been invited and was a bit reluctant anyway as Boulder is not necessarily kind to Indians or elder women, both of which she happens to be. But her buddy Doug went last year and came back a Bodhisattva, so what can you say? He's an Indian too, but not an elder woman. Ms Ché arranged for Doug to live in a shack up on the side of a hill in Lower Cañoncito outside of Santa Fé after he was thrown out of the tent he was living in on the arroyo down the Turquoise Trail. So now he's staying in this hand-built Eagle's Nest on Dr. Z's property where he can watch the sky and the clouds and the soaring, wheeling turkey buzzards, eagles, hawks and ravens and hear the coyotes and think there might be bobcats jumping on his roof just because there might be. There is a round cave opening high on the hill behind his shack and it's probably the bobcat's den, or at least it might be. He has a full buffalo hide on a stand in his shack for ceremony and a deck on which to sit and contemplate the Universe when the spirit moves him.

A poetry reading up there at his shack might happen sometime in the next year or so, though Dr. Z is nervous about it. One thing, it's hard to get up there. Lame as I am, though, I made it, one step at a time, careful, careful, and it's even harder to get down again, as the slope is steep and you're not entirely sure where you should or shouldn't step at any given moment. Especially in the dark.

But that's as may be. It hasn't happened yet and maybe it won't. We'll have to wait and see.

I gave Ms Ché a copy of "The Dharma Bums" to take with her to Naropa. I tried to find my copy, all dog-eared and dusty, to give to her as a graduation present, but I couldn't find it, so I got her a new one. That and the Truman Capote Reader. She's always admired TC since a version of him appeared as Dill in Harper Lee's "Bird Book" (as he called it.) On the other hand, Kerouac has scared her more than anything. Kerouac the pacifist who might have been part Indian himself.

I'm linking to a piece I wrote about "The Dharma Bums" after re-reading it four years ago. Time may fly, but... oh my.

The Dharma, "The Dharma Bums," Prefiguring the Rucksack Revolution, and How We Got Here -- Or Something