Surfing The Tao On San Vicente
I woke up with a song
running through my mind, leaving a trail of muddy Nikeprints as it pursued
me from the dream for which it has obviously served as a soundtrack.
I know the song well, but there is something about it this morning
possibly its lingering connection with the dream plane that gives
the song a power I have never associated with it before. Captivated,
I sit up in bed with a big grin on my face and meditate to its last
fading verse:
Joni's voice and Wayne
Shorter's sax fade out under the last words, segueing into a killer
meditation the perfection of word magic and song magic giving way
without attachment to the perfection of silence. Cool. Who woulda thunk
it, a psychic jumpstart to the morning just showing up like this, and
in Los Angeles, no less? Go figure. This whole damned Road
Trip has been like that experiences of blinding clarity appearing
when least expected, in the least likely settings. You must understand
that I came back to L.A. my home for years reluctantly. On my last
visit here, I hated it. Hate is a strong word, but no other word does
justice to the experience. On that trip, I rolled into town with a mindset
that had been washed squeakyclean by the winds of a full-moon vision
quest in Joshua Tree the night before, only to find that my beloved
City Of Angels had changed so much in the years since I moved away that
I had become Camus' existential stranger in my own home town. The city
had experienced death, decay and rebirth and moved on to a whole new
incarnation, as had I in my time away. But on that trip I could find
no ground on which the two new incarnations still had anything in common
to party down about. This visit has been
different. I have been having some Serious Fun here on this particular
Road Trip. Synchronistic events have been just happening, just at the
right time, just for the right reason. It's been a great ride, and as
I end my meditation and bow, I have a strong feeling that the ride is
not over, and that somehow today is going to provide more such synchronicity.
I am infused with a feeling an acute awareness that the surf of Tao
is seriously up today, and that if I am just open to the experience,
I can extend the bliss of this morning's meditation for hours...or days...or
maybe, with any luck, forever. This feeling is what
I live for. But it's difficult to describe. It's a kind of suspicion,
sneaking up on you from time to time, that all the paddling out and
all the time spent sitting on your board waiting for the perfect wave
have been worthwhile, and that somehow it has all worked, and has left
you in position to surf you some serious Tao. You know that you probably
don't deserve it, this wild ride that you feel building up behind you
and in front of you, but nonetheless here you bloody well are, perfectly
set up to hop on your board and hang ten, leaning way out over the ride
of your life. Strangely enough, I
associate this feeling this unmistakable tension, this psychic early
warning system that somehow 'beeps' me whenever it perceives a swelling
wave of Tao with an experience that I had here in L.A. a number of
years ago, in the early days of my study with Rama. And as I get up
and hop into the shower, thinking ahead to the day I can already feel
building in front of me, I think back to last night, when I found myself
telling that very story to Dakota. We met at the herbarium
where he lived and worked. Dakota looked good, a completely different
being than the one whom I saw last about a year ago in another city,
living another life, before he moved here to apprentice with a master
of Chinese tonic herbalism and Taoism. He gave me the grand tour, after
which we decided to go out and grab something to eat. We went to Monsoon,
a new Chinese restaurant/club on the supertrendy Santa Monica promenade.
As we drove there, Dakota pointed out all the new restaurants and cafes
that had sprung up in Brentwood since I had been gone. I was hungry
and tempted to settle for one of them, but his original choice had been
good seeing. The decor at Monsoon is early Hong Kong brothel,
and I felt completely at home. For some reason, in that right-at-home
state of mind in a not-at-all-at-home town, I found myself remembering
one of my favorite L.A. tales of power. Even though Dakota is one of
my best friends, somehow the story had never come up before. But given
all the synchronicity I had been experiencing on this particular Road
Trip the story seemed appropriate, so I told it to him over tropical
fruit drinks with silly little umbrellas in them. The story took place
in 1982. I had begun my study with Rama a year or so earlier, but that
had come to a crashing halt a few weeks earlier, when he blew me out
of Lakshmi as part of a 'restructuring' we later laughingly referred
to as 'Purge I.' So here I was, charged way up spiritually but no longer
part of any community pursuing a viable path to the spiritual, alone
and on my own on a Saturday night in Westwood. I had seen one film,
was feeling more than a little underwhelmed by the experience, and had
searched through the newspaper listings for a midnight show to take
the taste of the first film out of my eyes, without success. Nothing
appealed to me. Finally, giving up on
the notion of adventure for the evening, I got in my car and started
back to my place in Malibu. But about halfway there, driving along Sunset
Boulevard, I was suddenly struck by an overwhelming urge, an urge that
ever since I have associated with the concept of Tao-surfing. It was
a feeling, but more than a feeling; it was a certainty. Theoretically
I should have been able to ignore the feeling and keep driving home,
but I just couldn't. The compulsion was that powerful. I felt that I
just had to turn off and find my way to a bar I had been to once before
on San Vicente, a dive called Mom's Saloon. Mom's was not my kinda
place. It was a college/yuppie beer bar, with sawdust on the floor and
predatory patrons on the barstools, guys and gals searching for love
or something like it, something they would be willing to settle for
at this hour on a Saturday night. But on this particular Saturday night,
at this particular hour, I was overcome by a feeling that there was
simply nowhere better to be on planet Earth. Well, what the fuck, I
thought anything for a weird life. I hit the turn signal and headed
for San Vicente. When I got to Mom's,
the place was packed. I couldn't find a parking place anywhere on the
street, and had to circle the block twice before giving up and pulling
into the supermarket lot at the end of the block. This is important
primarily for the timing of it all; if I had found a place to park more
easily, the events that followed would never have happened. I locked my car, got
out, and started walking up the sidewalk towards my weirdly-compelling
destination. As I walked, my attention was somehow drawn to a woman
who had just come out of the door of Mom's and was walking, somewhat
unsteadily, in my direction. The timing was perfect. I passed her just
as she reached the entrance to the supermarket and reached out to open
the door. It didn't open. The market had just closed. She shook the handle
and then said, somewhat loudly, "Shit!" Now I don't know how
many of you have ever lived in L.A., but the prevailing wisdom of the
place is that you just don't talk to random folks on the street, unless
you're looking for Big Trouble On Little Santa Monica. But it was late,
this woman seemed harmless enough, and she seemed to be in some distress
over the fact that she couldn't get into the market, so I broke all
my usual patterns and spoke to her. "What's up? Can I help?"
She looked up as if
seeing me for the first time. In fact, I think it was the first time
she had seen me. She scanned me from head to toe and then said,
"I just needed to get in there is all. I needed to use the pay phone
to call someone to see if they could come and pick me up." For some reason, as
she said this, my intuition kicked into hyperdrive and I could see
the whole scenario, laid out clearly before me. I was already too far
gone into anything-for-a-weird-life mode to stop now, so I put what
I was seeing into words. "Let me guess," I said. "You came here
with some guy but he's being a complete asshole, and you are looking
for some way to get home without him." She stopped shaking
the door handle and looked at me more closely. She said, "Exactly.
I met him earlier tonight, and it started out Ok, but now he is drunk
as a skunk and coked out of his mind and he has the keys to my car in
his pocket and won't give them back to me. So I'm trying to find a way
to get back to my car. I'm pretty sure there is a second set of keys
in the car, so if I can break into it, I can get home." I ask, "Where's home?"
"Pomona." Ick. The full catastrophe.
She is stuck here in West L.A., miles away from where she lives. I ask,
"And where is your car?" "It's over by Robertson,
at the Beverly Center. I left it there when I decided to go out with
this guy and his friends." My mind is going, "Robertson
is at least a half an hour away, in the opposite direction from Malibu.
You don't really want to get involved with this. It's late. You should
go home and get some sleep." But what comes out of my mouth, even though
I don't remember consciously making the decision to say it, is, "Well,
I'm not doing anything particularly interesting right now. I'll drive
you back to your car if you want." Anything for a weird life. She looks at me long
and hard, obviously trying to focus through a fading haze of alcohol
and broken Saturday-night dreams. The silence is deafening. Finally,
she says, "Ok...if you don't mind." "I don't mind," I
say. "It would be my pleasure." I lead her back to my car and open the
passenger-side door for her, as non-threateningly as I can. I cannot
help but notice that she is alarmingly attractive, and I am trying to
do everything I possibly can to convince her that she has not just made
a terrible mistake by trusting some guy she has just met on the street
in the middle of the night. I help her into the car and close the door
gently behind her. I walk around to the driver side, climb in, and head
off towards Robertson Boulevard. On the way, she fills
me in a little on who she is. Not surprisingly, I learn that she is
an aspiring actor, here to make her mark on the L.A. film scene. As
I drive, we have a cool conversation about our favorite films and actors,
and both of us start to relax a bit. The drive passes quickly. Finally,
we find ourselves in the vicinity of Robertson, and she directs me to
the Beverly Center parking lot where she had left her car. Sure 'nuff,
there it is, a blue Honda Accord, sitting alone and unattended under
the glaring lights. We park next to her
car and get out, and I proceed to try to find some way to break into
it. This goes on for some time, without success. I come away from the
experience with an enduring sense of respect for Honda automobiles.
I try everything I can think of, from the old coat hanger trick to the
slip-the-flat-piece-of-metal-into-the-window-trying-to-jimmy-the-lock
trick. Nothing works. The Honda just sits there, locked, completely
impregnable, smirking at us. It's now about one-thirty
in the morning, and cops on patrol in the area are starting to notice
us. I am about to give up on the whole thing and wave one of them down,
but first I decide to try that meaningless gesture that guys resort
to in moments of helplessness like this. I reach into my pocket and
pull out my own car keys. I drive a Subaru 4WD wagon; she drives a Honda.
I know this cannot possibly work, but gestures are gestures, so I put
my key into the driver's side door and turn it. The key turns in the
lock as smoothly as a knife in warm butter. The door opens. She freaks out and starts
to alternate between laughing and crying and amazement. She simply cannot
believe it. I'm a former student of Ramas, so I do the macho cool-frood-in-the-flow-of-the-Tao
thing and suggest that this sorta thing happens to me all the time,
although it doesn't. After a while, she calms down and starts to look
around in the car for the mythical second set of keys. No keys. Nada. She starts
looking depressed again. So I think to myself, "Heck...it worked once,
right?" and sit down in the driver's seat of her car, slipping my Subaru
key into the ignition of the Honda. I turn it clockwise and the car
starts up, first time. She starts to freak out again, but by this time
I am kinda gettin' into the whole scene, and manage to convince her
that it's really just a normally kinky L.A.-kinda thing going down here.
She doesn't buy it, but doesn't know what else to say. But the issue still
remains, how is she going to get home to Pomona? Well, I'm a former
Rama student, right? He drilled into us the wisdom of being prepared
for any eventuality, so I carry a second key, stashed in a magnetic
box in a hidden area of my car's undercarriage. I retrieve the spare
key, try it in her ignition to make sure it works, and then flash my
best Buddha-like smile as I hand it to her. Mindblown, she hugs
me fiercely and then climbs into the Honda. Before she leaves, she recalls
our conversation about movies and acting while driving over here, and
promises to someday thank me for this onstage when she wins her first
Academy Award. I fully expect this to happen. No doubt. I mean, think about
it. The power here is clearly hers. In trouble late at night in Los
Angeles, a stunningly beautiful but slightly inebriated woman sends
out a psychic distress call and manages to attract not just one of the
few men in town who aren't likely to rape or rob her, but one who happens
to be carrying around a spare key to her car. The mind boggles. We exchange numbers
and promise to stay in touch and I watch her drive off into the night.
I climb into my car and start the long drive back to Malibu, pondering
the mysteries of life and savoring the clear, unmistakable feeling of
Tao-surfing. This morning, fifteen
years later, after a long shower and another meditation, I experience
that same feeling. It is hazy, indefinable, but the feeling that something
cool could happen is unmistakable, and I know from past experience that
if I just remain open to the feeling, something cool will happen.
Driving to pick up Dakota, I take San Vicente and pass the place that
used to be Mom's Saloon, and the feeling intensifies. At the herbarium, he
hops in the car and we drive off, stalking the perfect place to eat
lunch. Oh...pardon me...we're in L.A. do lunch. I have a place in
mind, but synchronistically Dakota suggests it, so I don't have to.
He pointed it out last night, as one of the spots he has heard is a
favorite restaurant of one of our mutually-favorite artists. This is
the kind of random, seemingly meaningless information that one gets
used to if one has known Dakota for a while. I've known him for a
while. And in that time, I have almost become used to being amazed
at his exploits. Dakota is a trip, similar in some ways to the character
Philbert in the film Powwow Highway. He is one of those amazing
light hearts at loose in the universe, free spirits who almost never
follow the rules. Add to this the indisputable fact that much of what
he does makes no sense on a practical level, and you have the propensity
for disaster. Instead, what you get with Dakota is a propensity for
adventure and absolutely incredible meetings with remarkable men and
women. Somehow, the guy just taps into the flow of Tao, decides to do
something that makes no sense whatsoever, and as a result manages to
meet just the right person at just the right time and turns the meeting
into just the right adventure for both parties. I have seen him do this
so many times that when he told me, almost a year ago in another city,
one of the things he knew was going to happen when he moved to L.A.,
I didn't treat it the way you might. He read to me from an interview
with one of our favorite artists, Joni Mitchell, stressing the part
where she talked about the problems she has been having with her health.
Dakota stopped reading
and sat for a moment in silence, and then said, "I know I am going to
meet her when I get to L.A. And when I do, I will be able to give her
a copy of Ron's book on Chinese tonic herbalism. And she will read it
and contact him, and the herbs will help her get her health back." If anyone else had said
this, I would have smirked and said, "Yeah, right. And monkeys will
fly out of my butt!" But this was Dakota, so I just smiled and said,
"Right." Because it had that feel of Tao of rightness about it.
I could feel it, he could feel it. It was going to happen. The only
question was when. But if you're as committed to Tao-surfing as we are,
you don't ask questions like "When?" You just paddle out and wait. Well, he has been waiting
for almost a year, carrying a copy of the book around with him, just
in case. But we're in my car today, me driving and Dakota giving me
directions to the restaurant. It's been a long time since I have driven
in this neighborhood, and I am fairly lost, so I take the turn just
before the one I am supposed to take and then have to wait for a few
moments for traffic to pass before I can back out and pull into the
correct driveway. This is important primarily for the timing of it all;
if I had pulled into the correct driveway the first time, the events
that followed would possibly never have happened. I pull into the lot
and Dakota hops out. I have to wait beside the car for the valet, and
as I am standing there I turn to my right and see that another car has
just pulled up behind mine and the woman driver has gotten out and is
hugging the parking attendant as if they're old friends. The timing
is perfect. It's Joni Mitchell. Across the lot, I notice Dakota staring
at her, too, but not with the look of recognition I would have expected.
I hand my keys to the attendant and walk over to Dakota and say, "Well,
it looks like today is the day, eh?" He looks at her more
closely and says, "Is it really Joni? I was just staring because it
was so unusual for someone to hug a parking attendant like that." It
was Joni. She went up the escalator and was shown to an outside table
at the restaurant we were heading to, where a gentleman friend was waiting
for her. We also were shown to an outside table, and Dakota ran off
to call one of his fellow apprentices at the herbarium and beg her to
bring over a copy of the book. She obviously has been around Dakota
for some time as well, because she arrived with it in only a few minutes.
Dakota runs downstairs to get the book from her, and starts back up
the escalator. Just as he reaches the top, clutching the book, Joni's
lunch companion leaves and she is left sitting there all alone. The
timing is perfect. Dakota walks over to her and says hello. I am trying my best
not to eavesdrop. My back is turned to them and I don't wish to turn
around. It is my friend's cool moment, not mine. But I cannot help but
overhear when Joni greets him not as an annoying fan, but with genuine
warmth. Dakota affects people that way. He starts by saying that he's
been expecting to run into her like this for almost a year, and for
all that time has been carrying around a book to give to her. He carefully
explains that he's really not a stalker, but I suspect that possibility
had never even occurred to her. Dakota doesn't affect people
that way. She responds to his
quick explanation about the Chinese tonic herbs with genuine interest.
Joni is definitely not a fan of Western medicine; doctors have messed
her up more than the diseases they were trying to cure. The two of them
have a very friendly, very real conversation about health and the value
of traditional but non-mainstream healing methods for the next five
or ten minutes. At the end of it, as Dakota stands up to take his leave,
I finally turn and look at them. Joni reaches out and takes his hand
and squeezes it, as if they were old friends. It is an extremely cool
moment. Both faces glow with so much light I actually consider turning
and looking behind me to see if I cast a shadow. Dakota
comes back to our table and we eat our lunch. His face is blazing with
light and the exhilaration of catching a wave of Tao. We don't even
talk about it much. What is there to say? Some days the surf of Tao
is up, and if you have done the prep work and positioned yourself perfectly,
you can catch a wave that defies convention and logic. This moment happened
because he really cared about this lady, because he wanted to thank
her somehow for all the words, music and paintings that had enriched
his life, and because his intent was pure. He didn't want to meet her
just for the hell of it; he wanted to pass along some information that
he sincerely believed could help her, and thus convey his gratitude
more deeply than he could with a simple "Thanks." I have no doubt that
one day Joni will give the herbarium a call and will take advantage
of their knowledge of the tonic herbs to regain a sense of health and
well being. No doubt. That's funny.
It suddenly strikes me that she used that very phrase in the song that
woke me, in a verse that can be interpreted as a paraphrase of the user's
manual for Taoism, the Tao Te Ching:
Tricky or not, it worked,
didn't it? Dakota felt the flow of Tao almost a year ago, and refused
to doubt it. I felt his certainty, and also refused to doubt it. Perhaps
that's the simple secret of surfing the Tao no doubt. Perhaps that's
the simple key that allows us to stay in touch with the flow of life.
Perhaps that's the Way life should always be. Perhaps that's the Way
life will always be, if we maximize our meditation and minimize our
doubts. Perhaps I should just
stop all this intellectualizing and allow the lady herself a far better
writer than I to express the joy of surfing the Tao on San Vicente
the way she did in her song:
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