Ode to Tom Robbins

(Read introduction)

This is the door of transfiguration. A magnetic barrier between where you are and where you’ll be.

This is the door through which your illuminatis have passed, be you artist, scientist or sage. The handle is carved from the Tree of Life. Get a grip, but beware of splinters. They cut straight to the heart.  

Yesterday, the door was freshly cleansed by mother’s tears: mothers brown and blue, white and crimson, mothers aerial and underground, mothers who walk and mothers who crawl, mothers four-legged and mothers two, mothers in amethyst and stone, water and light, winged mothers, hairy mothers and mother bare, the original Queen Bee Matriarch Mother and every sweet mother there ever after. So never mind if it weeps.  

This is the door through which every eager lamp-toting bridegroom has passed. Notice the path ahead, the obscure path, path trodden by all who seek union with the beloved or attempt to marry two into one. Marriage is not as clear as it seems. 

What door is this? This is the door that safeguards wrathful deities from the faint of heart. This is the door where Shiva propped his trident to watch Kali Ma jazzercise. This is the door Mary Magdalene inscribed and sealed with a kiss, the door Jacob limped through after meeting his match, the door Lucifer mistook for the men’s room and the disciples missed entirely on their way home from Gethsemane. 

A hint: this is the door that leads straight to the Self, where images slip away like wet pickles and beauty smells like home. The music you hear is the heart-stringed symphony, press your ear to the sky. Now can you hear it? Now can you hear the door creaking open? The door of transfiguration swinging broad and wide? 

Enough meandering. You saddled up and rode into this here town, guns ablaze, western winds at your back. Your pony is grazing out back—and a fine looking pony at that. He’s making small talk with the scavengers, sidestepping the cremation fires and sky burial grounds. You know where you stand. 

This is the door Father designed to set the world ablaze built from the bones of Mother’s breast, where the Son passed to warm a thousand smoldering embers and the Maiden turned the coals, where the Holy Ghost lingers with a flamethrower and the Crone holds a match while singing punk rock iterations of Bob Marley’s Redemption Songs, these songs of freedom. 

So step inside… 

Welcome to my room of the wolfmother wallpaper—Tom Robbins led me here, but I made it my own. The eclipsed middle-of-nowhere roadside rest stop I once doubted. It’s been a worthy, wondrous, apocryphal trek. 

This is the room where my mothers were born; past, present, and future. This is the room my soul took hold me in hand.

I see the ceiling is still singed where flames crept to the seams of the wolfmother wallpaper, the wolfmother wallpaper where the immigrant child had passed long before me and paused, shook the dust from their sandals while scanning the room for red hats, set the broken shoe on the window sill, and ascended to heaven in the cool light of dawn, making all great again. 

What room is this? The room where fertility clocks count down to space launch and the timers never tick out. This is the room where earth day was decreed by interstellar council—they signed the papyrus with milky ink extracted from Orion’s spur. No animals or otherwise sentient creatures were harmed in the extraction. It was amazing to witness the long lines spiraling out of the galactic notary that day. 

A clue: this is the room Palden Lhamo reserved a thousand decades ago, seeded the pasture out back for her mule, and bought a Rolex watch to wear for the moment of return—for this moment of return. The second hand is on the move.

Enough pussyfooting around the puddles. Everyone out back is waiting in line to fill up, it’s raining cats and dogs and we can’t guarantee anyone’s unharmed, folks found the roadside rest stop, fair and square, but not the right door in. They missed the entrance, I told you the door wasn’t well marked.  

This is the room at the beginning of tomorrow, where the brightest possible future for all reins supreme, where I sharpened my teeth on milquetoast while heavy petting the paper—that’s wolfmother wallpaper to you—where insecurities melt away and I storm the world stage while riding roughshod and bareback on Palden Lhamo’s mule, and yes, indeed, I did it with skinny legs and all.