Nomad Codes

continue to rinse the roots. At that moment I understood, with an unshakable clarity, two things: that the causal, billiard-ball flow of the world proceeds absolutely lawfully, and that I suffer because the bright shards of witnessing angelstuff that lie at the root of my being get caught up in attempting to push and pull this procession, to cling and resist and identify.
    The word lawful seemed to appear in my mind as the experience unfolded, but it may have popped up shortly thereafter. It’s a funny word. I never use it favorably, for one thing, having a typical lefty countercultural prejudice against “the law”—either religious stricture or the cops or conservative ideals of absolutism and obedience. But that is how I saw our little slice of space-time. As lawful .
    Later, as I puzzled over this somewhat odd word, I recalled that one of the meanings of dharma is law. Maybe not law in the sense of the law of karma or the four noble truths or the five amazing thises or the six sobering thats, but just the way things are . And for those brief moments, the way things are was not causing me the slightest bit of tension or pain, unlike, I could see, pretty much the rest of the time, when the doublebinds of agency, choice, and desire set me at cross purposes to the flow.
    In the final movement of the experience, I looked up from my hands in the basin towards a row of pine trees and eucalyptus that fringed the edge of the field. This was the universe: the wind moving slowly through the branches. I remember being startled, even at the time, that everything still moved. Despite the extraordinary otherness of my perception, time seemed to mosey along at its usual pace.
    Except not so usual, because everything was light and surface and dancing, like sunlight reflecting on an inland sea, like mist in the morning, like Vegas (or the playa) at night. The wind, the leaves, the dappled light, the eucalyptus scent—it all vibrated with a consistency and dynamic togetherness I can only compare to a symphony, and like music it seemed to be fundamentally incorporeal, diaphanous, all void of substance, of that inertial stuff that gravity drags down. It was marvelous, beautiful, bittersweet, and just the way things are.
    Then, about maybe thirty seconds after it had begun, the cosmic boomerang was back. I slipped on the heavy duds of good ol’ anxious and horny me, finished up with the beets, and shuffled back to the zendo for the next period of sitting, more dazed than confused.
    Nothing even remotely similar has happened to me in the years since, though I sometimes get a gnostic whiff of the angel hovering over my shoulder. I could try to say more about the experience, about how it changed and, mostly, did not change me, but this little tale will have to do. I’ll say this though: even if what happened to me was a neural hiccup, I still know, in the way we know the mad unions of love, that we carry something cosmic within us, that the self is a doorway to another Self, and that death might swallow us in glory after all.
    2007

THE BAD SHAMAN AND THE FROG

    The man we called the Bad Shaman held forth on many obscurities lurking in our planet’s natural pharmacopeia, but few he praised so highly or so often as the venom obtained from Phylomedusa bicolor, a tree frog found throughout the Amazon basin. Used principally by Panoan-speaking Indian men in preparation for hunting, the venom was initially brought to the knowledge of the experimental underground by the intrepid High Times explorer-head Peter Gorman. Though neither psychedelic nor particularly pleasurable in its effects, the venom was, according to the Bad Shaman, definitely the shit.
    However, one could not always trust the Bad Shaman on such matters—he was the Bad Shaman, after all, el brujo malo , a New Jersey halfbreed known for pranks and a prodigious appetite for insects (he once described the taste of a wasp as “Brie on a Triscuit”). So it was with a mixture of excitement and trepidation that Pie, the Bear, and I all gathered at the Bad Shaman’s high mountain home that early winter afternoon. Live phylomedusa greeted us in the Southwestern-style foyer—spindly green Gollums that, so far, had not responded to the Bad Shaman’s variously comic attempts to coax venom from their skins. The batch we sampled came straight from the jungle, a dark resinous goo with the consistency of Vaseline.
    The procedure was simple, albeit odd: using smoldering incense