the visitor- a travel story about Crestone, CO

The Visitor

(everything that is written here actually happened exactly the way it was written)

She was the most angelic child girl I had ever seen. Six years old, almost white hair and her old pale blue eyes had an ancient combination of feline and snake crispness... seeing eyes they were... seeing everything true about the nature of her small earth life. The entire visage was topped off in a white summery dress, leg braces and clip-on crutches. Her family loved her, you can always tell when a child is loved. They walk around wide open and each new thing is another cause for expansion, rather than the constricting response of the wounded.

The neighbors had said they were the Visitors, the Visitor family. Something ominous came over me and my imagination took off like it does, pondering just how far they were visiting from. Crestone, CO is weird man you want to watch your back you never really know who anyone is until they are long gone from your life. I cast my eyes suspiciously in all corners for I am of the Wounded Tribe.

The day before, 2 inches of hail had slaughtered the hard worker's farms and gardens in the small town. It was June and it still lay in trenches of slowly melting slush along the shaded side of the house. Hail in June. This was not a place for the weak-willed.

"She'll not make it past 12." A neighbor spoke and the shadows took a subtle bend. I heard somebody whisper “Cerebral Palsy.” My heart broke apart, I knew I was meeting a living angel.

The little girl suddenly yelped "Snow!" and lunged in her beautiful elastic way to touch it.

I remember standing on a deck moments before, watching the family walk out of a shadowy Aspen grove full of the tallest Aspen I've ever seen in this time so far. Here, I've been Here all along. These amazonian Aspen knew more than I could, supped the air of more seasons change than I ever will. Reach further, dig deeper, stand stiller then small me mighty tree, teach all us humans your strong lesson. Show us the beauty of your eternal patience while we burn and yearn and churn to learn from new mistakes that are the same.

Two older siblings, also white-haired and blue-eyed, wore somber faces in the presence of we strangers. They were maybe 8 and 9, and skipped the earth innocently, yet with a quality of maturity rarely witnessed in even the full-grown. Grave youngsters they were, haunted by the beauty and short life-span of their sweet little golden sister.

The Mother was very petite, topped with mouse-brown gray hair in plaits on each side of her small and peering skull. She knelt down and faced her daughter as she reached for the snow, guiding the girl's sensory experience with it, helping her to explore the textures and sensations of the pure white snow, white as her soul.

The Mother could see I was sick. I had erupted in the most immediate, violent and miserable hay fever, pouring liquid out of my eyes and nose like a triad waterfall in the wilds of my face. Initially greeting her with a hands-free tissue stuffed up my nose, she could not help but address the matter at hand, like a Mother. She peered into my half-lidded swollen eyes.

"Allergies?"

"Yeah"

"We got those too upon arriving."

“Durn Pinyons... they really know how to stick it to ya, show ya where ya dun’t know the truth yit.” I said, helping myself feel comfortable in my country accent.

Maybe she thought I was crazy for talking that way, maybe she already knew allergies to be so much more than just a simple ‘reaction’ to a natural thing but an issue in my soul... to be allergic to my own planet. HA! Maybe I was crazy. I was ok with all of the above. And used to all of the above too.

My small entourage and I had been driving around looking for the Great Stupa. I had a long withheld yearning to be in it's presence. I never was a Buddhist, but honor the teachings I did. Never was very disciplined, but when my chaos erupted in those seasonal mega-volcanos, I grabbed onto those teachings for dear life, like a man on fire will take ahold of the hand that pulls him out, like a beaten child accepts an embrace with tears, like a drowning fool who forgets to thank his life saver ring.

I recall the surrender laying in the back of the truck, sprawled on my back with legs and arms akimbo and sobbing. It was as if the beauty and the glory of the sky itself was crucifying my body, laid out like a dead fish trying just to finally give up the drink and dry out in the sun.

Particles of truth-piercing ferocity penetrated my molecules and I felt for the first time the charged atmosphere of the sacred mantras so loyally sent out from the plentitude of the devout. We hadn't found the Stupa, but stopped to view the valley and chat in front of a Zen monastery.

I told Setting Sun that I was not merely Demian, but Demian Lyte, and had earned the name Lyte by falling in love with a hippy girl back in San Diego. My industrial punkrock friends, fans of guns and motors, biting and rabid zombie play, had dubbed me so in reference to the phenomena of a Bud Light, no longer the unadulterated Budweiser but a pale less harmful version.

I lost the girl but kept the name as an allegiance to my own unwinding karma, to announce that I am able to walk this wicked garden of the world immersed in both sides of the flesh, pleasure and pain, clarity and confusion, sickness and health. Was I? Could I swim from one side to the other, exposing the darkness hidden in the light, and bringing the light to the dark that is without? I am trying, I am stretching this rubber band of duality until the two points are so far into their own side of things the tension will snap. It should not be a matter of which side will I land on. I intend the rubber band to disintegrate, to disperse back into the Earth with nothing but a memory... “I once was a rubber band, but now I am no more. I have returned to the elements with grace. Now I only appear as an emotion sliding through your silken hair as the wind.”

Anyway, Setting Sun liked the story and began to behave towards me with a touch more warmth and sweetness from then on, rather than slaying me all the damn time just for a name. The elders always have to make me prove my long and tedious walk before they will let me be in peace with my confusion, as though the scars I bear upon my bleeding heart are ribbons and medals. Once they see these sad stories, they always look at me like Neil Young would beg, ‘Old man take a look at my life, I’m a lot like you.’

Is it just a name this Demian Lyte? A name that conjured up an energy, an energy that surely was going to kill me. Had I known then what I know now, I would have accepted her slaying humbly and let go my stories of life’s battlefield.

The sky was humongous, rolling over the misty valley like a tidal wave. Kingdoms of large fluffy clouds dwarfed all that we knew as solid, morphing shape in flowing chunks of vapor, intimating the triumph of the spirit world over our small Earth's... how much larger and complex it really is. Or perhaps, they are really the exact same thing and all I say and do or don't say or do is repeated on infinite levels of subtle and improbable existence. Hope so... who could maintain such a vision? I know not this mighty Maintainence Janitor but if you meet him tell him I’m not crazy and I have a job and I’m sticking to it. Tell him I’ll meet him in the Halls of Ascension when Spirit’s Breath finally leaves me.

The relief of sickness is like squeezing the trigger of a gun that has lain fully loaded for decades. Pow! Somebody shot my water main and I leaked from my heart through my eyes along with my nasal passages. What relief. How fitting to be alone and sprawled beneath the majesty of Sky as I released almost 3 years of geographic stagnancy in the back of her truck, so conveniently padded. Why the world has not yet learnt to pad it’s rooms before I enter I never understand. I just bleed my red red blood, I just give my red blood away.

I could not believe it had been three years since I lived on the road. Three long and painful years of taking life seriously, how boring and stifling for an infinite and immortal spirit such as mine. The pain was teaching me, grounding me, showing me my weakness and all that I had run from for so long and brilliant. The pain was putting me out like the final cigarette of the world, roots grew from my unwilling startled feet. I was a deer on a leash so that I could someday become a tree. Not an easy feat for one with such itchy feet as me.

How to train a fawn not to run back into the woods at sight of first reflection? You out there who pedestal the wanderer, the hitch hiking mythos of pseudo freedom, you do not know what you admire... the chaos and vulnerable broken child who cannot find a warm place to lay and so decide they do not need one, reaching for hot temperatures in glass bottles, burning loins, fires of disgrace and hearts who do not speak the truth. You do not know what you esteem, value your soft clean bed, roll in and go back to sleep. We the dirty ones with blackened fingertips, we touch eternity in each breath, praying for a quick short death. We grow old young while other elders regret their youth. We make perfect love always for there is nothing else to live for.

I was looking at myself in a dead stare, all that I ran from, all that I did that could not be made undone. The lies I told that destroyed my purest loves, the ego I allowed to run rampant over soft and trusting hearts, the things I stole just to give away to someone so that they might love me again. It was a sad and terrible thing. My eyes had been locked in with myself, coming down, detoxing, burning holes in an unsoiled perfect mirror, going to work and school on time with holes still in my pants.

My body sang joy truck bumping back into the unknown where no one knew my fucked up song, of course it did. The only safe way for me to travel was in pilgrimage format anymore. It was far too easy to walk away from tax payer realities back to my safe place in the unknown wilds of burning raging heart and bewildered mind, bewitched by falling leaves on the side of the street while passerbys reached for known destinies.

For some a mystery is unbearable, the unknown a fearful dark terrible thing. For others it is simply being known that strikes the shadow gong into a lifetime of escapism. I am the latter, I do not struggle to open or escape a box or prison. I struggle to climb down from my tall tree and do the same thing every day without resentment or needless destruction. My fire burns hot but it also burns black. The starry eyed citizens block out the color and transfix upon a mystic tragedy as though it were a Truth. The only thing that keeps them from buying my black energy is my own egotistical leashing. I do not lie.

We had taken a wrong turn and run into a friend of Setting Sun's in his driveway. I wanted to find the Padmasambhava Stupa, as the Buddha of Compassion is the one I hold in my heart. It is a bewildering and breaking onion to peel through as one approaches a Holy Structure. My false beliefs and stagnancy were ripped away in a synchronized progression. All the time reluctant and yet insistent to plod forward, my body taking me blindly through what my spirit was too afraid to endure. My ego screaming NO! STOP! DO NOT ADVANCE FORWARD! RUN AWAY! USE YOUR THUMB STICK IT OUT AND GO!

It is not bravery, it is ignorance that takes us to be cleansed. It is numbness that carries us through the terrible, and it is the Great Hand of Whatever that won’t let us skip the uglies. In the mirror is a million reflections but only one is truly you. The rest must be slowly masticated, lived through, faced, burnt, defecated, bowed to as all humble students yearning to fly on the golden wings of total freedom bow to the wicked teachers of their own darkness.

The cherub girl's mother walked me to her car to give me a dose of her homeopathic allergy remedy. Compassion is always a beautiful miracle, an expression of the grace who only comes when it is unexpected, unprayed for. The pill did not heal my facial orifices, but the concern of the mother healed my mind and heart, forever leaving a strong impression of the town and it's inhabitants.

From the other side of compassion, that of the originator, it is like a crisp deep warm oily moment of meaning and purpose, the swaying rays of the endless circle become crystallized into significant and synchronized meaning. To care for another's happiness, to give freely and with well-directed meaning- how to ever express the many layers of spiritual juice in such a moment of overwhelming connection?

You do not know me Mother of three children, and yet you care for me! How to say more than 'thank you'? To give a solemn speech, forever destroying this tiny moment of my life. I acquiesce, I happily am reduced into a simple human. Ancient surges push 'thank you' from my sunburnt lips.

I love you oh Mother of the doomed and karmic-free child! I love your story and your life! I love your pure and fighting heart- ever strong and merciful! I love the way you raise your children and I honor the decency of your tiny frame in braids, the brazen truth of life declared in your dedication "I will raise this child with Cerebral Palsy. I am honored to be her Protector and to Provide her with the most rare and delicious bites of earth life!"

The little girl stared at me, healthily curious and unafraid, the essence of both our lives commingling, questioning, recognizing and soothing our sojourn thus far. Hers was far the more beautiful than mine, but the familiarity made us equals. It was brief, but I had touched my inner innocence once... a long time ago.

I could feel her stare extracting my experience from my memory, the dirtied adventures of making sex and drugged journies, all the stanky dives, the horrific moments of exorcism; all aspects of human life she already transcended. I could feel every cigarette I ever touched and every insect I had squashed in that moment. Her purity of this incarnation was a white lilac trimmed in opalescent violets and blues, a standing altar in the droving greedy rivers of humanity. Love does not describe what I felt for her. I cherished her presence like the cooling touch of a saint on my burning forehead. Little girl, your lives have been long and arduous and I am tiny and vexed waiting far in line behind you.

Her siblings, the Guardians, wise enough to know about the befouled ways of many grown-ups, would not look at me. Pretending to be too engrossed, focused and protective to give heed to the mysterious fumes of a stranger's stare. They were ready to leave, already in the car full of their possessions and little dog, crawling around in flitty little fairy movements.

Their Mother asked one to hand her the allergy medicine and I felt a twinge of guilt at having inadvertently interrupted their sacred play in order to perform a menial task. Still, they would not look at me but watched as their Mother worriedly handed me the cap with a pill in it, instructing me not to let it touch my lips or fingers but just to use it to toss the pill into my mouth.

I felt so intimate to this divine family, holding the same pill bottle cap and flicking the same pill under my tongue for the same horrible sickness. Acutely aware of my defilement and in great respect to their familial cleanliness, I handled the plastic lid deftly and kept it far from my mouth hole. I treaded sacred ground with the Visitor family. I had not asked nor planned, but solely was invited. This family was so well-bonded by love and use of the earth, I knew that for anyone it was by invitation only.

I wanted to be back in the truck badly, out of the air, out of the little girl's painfully blinding light. I said my goodbye, projecting it to see if the older children would respond. They did not, but the youngest angel girl, clear as day and ever tuned in to her surroundings bleated "bye!" with none of the reluctance other children would display. I was warmed and returned hurriedly to the truck to resume the search for the great and hallowed Stupa.

A few moments later we were driving up a perilous dirt mountain road. I was emotionally stung by something Setting Sun had said to me earlier and observing the internal quarrel between my higher self and ego; the instinct to retaliate in rage of cold behavior, and the yearning of my soul to forgive and transcend the karmic complications that caused me to be stung in the first place. Lay me down into the recesses of mankind, to the witness I am fair. To sink deeper and deeper as the sky grows always higher, to not be a liar to you is

why I continue to reach for roads that lay beyond the reach of feet.

We began our departure in silence. I am so tired, I never want to be born again. Crouched in the tiny porthole of the backseat of a truck, nose ever-running rivulets of water over my stinging lazered lips. The sun is close in the mountains of Colorado, it does not forgive our mushy weakness of flesh, it fries it. We found our way to the washed out dirt driveway. Winding slowly up the side of the first layer of mountain in, we gasped at the massive flat valley and stopped to watch the paint stroke of gray rain run across the plain. A patchwork of sunlight and mist washed everything into an infinite static image of golds, grays, blues and greens, the celebration of purple... This Holy Image ignited my heart with hope and promise. Prayer flags flapped like flocks of seagulls and the glory of the Truth was everywhere.

A cool and shadowy turn in the road revealed a small waterfall running out from beneath a water drain covered in dirt and giving us a way across the stream. A particular angle of the road revealed a glimpse of an alter covered in Malas and a simple wooden folding chair with pale green peeling paint on the creekbed beside it. A picture of emptiness, so perfect and worn, holding space in the woods for all who yearn.

Setting Sun commented that people usually walked up the road, and I didn't blame them. Everything about it was absolutely beautiful. But it was the hour before dusk and the stream, flowing alongside the road, was alive with the buzzing of stellar sonic tiny little mosquitoes, the highest pitched little bizzers I ever heard. And I know a thing or two about mosquitoes.

I now sit frying under fluorescent tubes riding the city bus at night in Boulder. I am surprised to find myself here and the world is still empty but good. So anyway, we continue on up the road in the truck.

"Hallelujah!" I cried, "We're in heaven!".

I could feel all the prayers in the land begin to shower me. Ambrosia was in every sweet breath, plucked out of the air like tuftfuls of cotton candy. An erratic breathing pattern came into me. Three quick inhalations fill the lungs in three layers, and one well meant exhalation. Through the nose. I was so excited to be there.

Giant prayer flags hung lengthwise off tall poles penetrating the sky in silence. More than you could count maybe. Or more than I could count, my mind was drunk with the moment and counting was too heavy.

The earth meets the sky in violence, chaos and confusion down to the pebble and worm, down to the gnats and microorganisms crawling in the dirt. Sky is too big for it, Sky tells the Earth it is little. Earth feels too complex. Sky is simple and mostly clear. They battle it out in eternal restructuring, Earth always trying out a new surface to impress with. Sky loves it. It is a beautiful dance always. The Stupa said so by it's presence.

I am blessed for all infinity beyond time holding every aspect of existence within my small palms. I can see that all existence is what my palms are made of, that is what is all the time crawling on the surface. I chuckle to myself and move forward.

We arrived into a parking lot composed of gray sharp rocks, the size of fat thumbs. The lot was raised above the nook in the mountainside the Stupa was built into. Oh Holy of Holies, the perfect curves of solid white tipped by a golden head carved into a giant torch.

Astral rays began to sprout out of the mountaintops behind us. One had to descend a stone path curling back on itself in neat order. I of course stop to take pictures and spy Lily and Setting Sun already down at the foot of the Stupa.

Helter skeltering my way down in giant leaps over the trails, I weightlessly halted in mid-prance before a sign. “Please respect the silence people are meditating”. My body, obediently cradled in a warm hand of love, was guided to gently step upon the remainder of the stone path.

As the Stupa began to dwarf me in size, reverence rose like clouds of doves in my heart. The kindly tendrils who had been calling to my body since it was first conceived finally clasped my pilgrim weary soul and made me small and with good intent. I was filled with silence and the moment.

Oh to be before a place of many far-reaching prayers! The atmosphere was condensed yet light in weight. The cotton candy airpockets began to pump into my system. My meridians rushed open and golden light streamed through my tired demon-worn matrix. Prayers of music rung in my hard thick skull and I felt that I could do anything I wanted with my life. I knew again that this was truth. I knew again, the Holy Angel as the end, and the Wicked Demon as the vehicle. All was forgiven, all was pure. My dark acts, my raging ego, the need to control all was rolled into one vibration of peace. I knew that on my death bed my wings would once again shine white. And outside all lattes, all ego driven conversations about the removal of the ego, every cigarette, every drunkenly cut knee, slewn curse word and drug induced delusion of the truth, there was a cherub who was waiting for me to weave my way home through the broken slime of my ancient soul. I knew I would die like the little girl in crutches, just as fascinated by the elements, just as innocent seeing only purity even in a demon for that is all she is and that is all she will ever see is her beautiful sacred purest self.

More doves erupted from my forehead, I circumambulated. I looked up and saw the Golden Buddah of Rock in the window, hands making the ancient gesture pinky and pointer finger raised, the others curled together. Of course the Buddah who sits upon the mightiest throne in North America is the King of Rock. Hahahaha! I struck a lotus and prayed Om Mani Padme Om in my low voice. I did it 108 times and gave thanks for sacredness. I decided some day I would pray like this professionally. Then I felt the breeze as it passed through a layer of prayer flags and toussled the top of a pine tree. I saw how that movement could never be redone, how the wind is like curling smoke, an invisible art that communicates through touch. I gave up my praying career as soon as it began. The sun ate my eyes below from the line where the ground meets the sky forever. The sun didn't leave any of me at all but a mouthed thank you while I lay in the dirt slowly pulsing.