el puente

It is more blessed to give and something’s gotta give because we’re not gonna take it, so we’ve got to leave it,  leave it alone, says a troll under the bridge. 

Talking to myself on the bridge. It takes me a little over a half hour to walk across the bridge and then I turn around and walk back and that is my sunrise walk. I also do a sunset walk across the bridge and back. Why do you have to go to Manhattan? someone asks. I don’t have to go. I’m taking a walk. Sometimes I walk to McCarren Park and back.

I took a stress test at the cardiologist’s and the doctor said my heart is normal. The treadmill reminded me of walking on the bridge. My heart is normal but I’ve gained a few pounds in the past month. They weighed me when I tested for Covid on Saturday. I’m negative. I was in North Carolina a couple of weeks ago among the unmasked and then news of the latest outbreak, so I got tested. 

Pandemic protocols are permanent as long as pandemic politics persist.

We are learning to be exorcists. It requires much prayer, much mind/soul transformation, and much critical race theory. Manhattan and Brooklyn are haunted, as is all of Lenapehoking, the land of the Lenape, the Algonquin ancestors who lived here for 12,000 years, who were nearly wiped out by a pandemic the colonizers were immune to and that the colonizers brought.

The Dutch bought the island from people who didn’t know the European game of buying and selling pieces of the sacred earth that belongs to everybody. The colonizers paid a few dollars for the land and threw in some smallpox as a bonus. The exchange transmitted the virus of private property. Their preachers went to work at the cultural genocide. The colonizers specialized in stealing things that must not be stolen and selling them. Land, people. We call it capitalism. The European invaders brought the white man’s disease, the white supremacy disease, and I don’t know how to exorcise this demon.

Bury my heart in Lenapehoking.

I want to see if the Tibetan Book of the Dead works as an allegorical poem like The Divine Comedy. Both stories could be about journeys through an afterlife that mirrors this life. I think the Tibetan book is about stages of consciousness and reality that are present with us now. We are dreaming now and we are sleeping now and we are awake and we are dead and we will never die and we are reconceived and reborn, face to face with the clear light of reality, the third heaven, but the idea of reality as the totality of facts freaks us out and we turn away from the clear light that pulls us toward liberation and sink down into our addictions where we think we feel safe. Freedom still scares us out and we love our delusions. We live in Paradise and in the Hell realms simultaneously, or something.

That’s the gist of what I am thinking about. It’s a mess of ideas.

The white man’s virus, an ideology of enslavement and exploitation, the negative history we try to forget and pretend isn’t here, haunting us, and pulling us down into the hell realms.

How do we exorcise this virus?

I walk to Manhattan and turn around and walk back to Brooklyn. I nod to people I see and take pictures of the sunrise and sunset and of the golden road that opens before me.