Milk Dharma

Jazz & Justice: the Softness of All Things

I have glided through sixteen light-and-dark spells so far, and softness runs through me.

Miles Davis’s lips spin silk from his brass trumpet. TBD says the tune I’m groovin’ to is “Sketches of Spain” from Kind of Blue. The sounds shape space into pillows and grass and arms, the sort of things you can rest your head on after a day of Milk and Poop. Blibl.

cool - soft and hard

TBD says Miles became a hard man. Stardom and heroin and unbridled desire, he says, can make a man so. It’s hard, he says, for a man to live in softness. Take the two Western classics TBD had his family watch last week - Shane and Red River. In Shane, the title character tried to give up his gun-slinging days. In the name of justice, to help a man, his wife, and their boy, Shane wields a pistol and kills a man again. He kills a man because he has a soft spot for the family. In Red River, Montgomery Clift plays a young cowboy who has a good heart. He survives the hard hearts around him even though some cowboys think he’ll perish. In a pivotal scene, after weeks of a daunting cattle drive from Texas to Missouri, the cattle drive leader John Wayne is all hardness and whiskey and ego and paranoia. The swaggering cowboy is going to hang a Mexican cowboy for trying to run from him. Montgomery Clift stands up to his mentor John Wayne and takes over the cattle drive. Eventually he softens his mentor John Wayne’s heart. The River was annoyed with the woman character in the film, but she also softens men’s hearts. It’s an odd world I’ve entered. But I knew it before I arrived.

Clift - soft & strong on the range

This mix of softness and hardness is the way of things. That’s what I’ve tried to tell TBD lately. He gets worried because when he works hard he hardens. His mind dives into holding his family together and keeping things in order. His neck cramps, and he doesn’t cradle me the same way. He says, “I must be soft with you.” Shift that hardness to strength and sturdiness, I try to tell TBD at night when he’s asleep. Rivers need mountains, that’s the Zen way. Yin needs Yang. Water needs fire. Then the next morning he flows into his yoga, and he is what he is.

I am all pink mush. This is what I hear when the River and TBD take me out to places like Morning Brew and Chefs on Fire. “You are all pink mush,” a woman says. I hear her. I am softness, the part of Miles Davis that won over Cicely Tyson, the texture of milk pudding, the kissess TBD smothers me with each morning, the padding in the River’s arms, mist caressing mountains. I am that.

In Yogic ways, this softness is called sukham in Sanskrit. It sounds like “sugar” because the word comes from that same Sanskrit syllable all of these centuries later. Sukham is sweetness, easefulness, the ability to go with the flow. It wells up naturally. It’s not something you can force or try on.

But all mush all the time lacks substance and form. All sweetness rots the teeth and taints the palate. All vowels make no spells. Strength shapes things and holds things up. It’s Paul Chambers on bass keeping the earth beat while Miles Davis’s trumpet lifts off and around the air like a barn swallow diving for insects.

On some days, TBD holds things steady so the River can flow. On other days, the River plays bass so TBD can improvise. Things work out that way.

Rain falls again this morning. My sixteen cycles have been full of Milk and Poop, Music and Rain. TBD and the River open the back door and hold me so my heart can hear the rain, so my skin can swallow rain. It peckles and spleets. My skin bossles and floops in response. Gbgl. BRWK! (I can be hard and strong, too.)

The Dine people believe that rain is their ancestors visiting for a spell. The Dine call jagged rain masculine. They call pattering rain feminine. They need them both. You can’t call all men hard and strong and all women soft, either. That sort of thing annoys the River and TBD. TBD’s great-grandmother Mudder could be kind of hard. His great-grandfather Papa could be soft.

This morning, it rains Miles and John Wayne, Mudder and Shane, Papa and Coltrane. 

When the two work and play together, when softness has strength, when strength has softness, they make jazz and justice, love and rain. And a family. Brbl.

Jai GOO!