Where the Floor Remembers
Beneath my feet, while standing in the altar room of my Sanctuary I behold a Yin & Yang in the wooden flooring. With my very own hands I painted the eternal dance in red and black in a room that for me serves as the Holy of Holies. The inner Bardo of my journey during this stretch of Samsara where I have experienced more death and rebirth than I care to admit or can accurately remember anymore. How much of my own blood is soaked in the wood? How much of my own tears? How much of my anxious and grief filled sweat saturates the particles of each plank the symbol is painted and sealed upon I cannot say. These things I speak literally, for in this Bardo I have indeed bled out, cried out and sweat out over and over and over again for many years that in expressing how haunted my home has been called I can surely say that I am the ghost. Though standing within it on the 5th of January 2026 it was apparent that the first grain of sand in a new mandala was being placed as I surveyed the space for a gift to exchange with the Venerable Monks walking the country for peace.
Like many others I discovered through social media that Venerable Bhikkhu Pannakara was leading monks on this sacred walk from Fort Worth, Texas through the “Bible Belt” on their way to the District of Columbia. As fate would have it, the walk for Peace came into my awareness as the Venerable Monks were still in my home state of Georgia. The multiple feeds of my algorithms had been serving up for me the commotion they faced in Clayton County, when clashing with a “culture” that failed to “read the room” as well as the appalling conversion attempts by the “Corporate Christians” in Monroe. While not being surprised some locals in Georgia would excel in the ignorant buffoonery, they are so accustomed to exhibiting, this did not retract from the disgust I experienced while watching it play out in the palm of my hand. And while those are two issues we will soon touch upon, for now they simply serve to state I was compelled to the call of a rendezvous myself before Georgia was to their backs.
For most, 2026 is turning out to be the worst year in a string of years that have consistently been spiraling downward most notably since 2020. On a global scale, national scale, and in the personal lives of most everyone we know, things are not okay. Life on planet Earth right now is as far away from being okay as you could imagine & unfortunately very few strands of hope that it will get better are laying around to pull from. The level of horror we are being exposed to daily is nothing short of biblical. Wars. Rumors of wars. Financial collapse. Mass surveillance. Weaponized artificial intelligence. Global police state. Injectable nanotechnology. Fascist regimes discarding any semblance of law & at their disposal are armies of useful idiots with get out of jail free cards, willing to violate human rights with utmost cruelty and the security of impunity. No one is immune from the blitzkrieg of tyranny that has been unleashed. And no one will be exempt from the effects caused by the agents of this organism.
There is no channel you can tune into, no social media platform you can scroll, no general direction you can turn your senses without being bombarded with news of state sanctioned violence or murder domestically or internationally. It is a non-stop 24-hour stream of negative information reaching into your brain stem to hijack your nervous system and paralyze you into a state of helplessness, hopelessness & despair. Yet as the planet is approaching its darkest hour, somehow something of a glimmer of hope has managed to rise to the surface in the noble mission of these Buddhist Monks in their walk for peace. To be apart of that, for me, is simply non-negotiable. For I knew all too well how transformative & sanity saving Buddhism is when chaos reigns inwardly or outwardly, having embraced it as a way of life in 2012. When my own personal world began its Armageddons.
The Breach
I developed PTSD February 15th, 2011, after losing my Father while performing CPR on him. That event began a series of cascading cataclysms in my life, which at the time had attained some semblance of stability despite a toxic and traumatic childhood. I had a great job, a home, a significant other, two dogs and predictable routines. Paintball on Saturday’s. Church on Sundays. Family cookouts. Movie nights. Occasional road trips. Life was good. It was cozy, predictable, safe & secure.
The manuscript for my first novel was finished and once the book was published the plan was to begin producing a child or children from the seemingly permanent relationship I was in, which was approaching its 13-year anniversary. For the first time in my life the thought of becoming a parent was more exciting than terrifying, probably due to the fact that I had assured myself of permanence on quite a few things. Permanence of the union. Permanence of the income. Permanence in my mental well-being. Permanence in my emotional well-being. Permanence in the overall quality of life I had attained by my 30’s. Having been raised through instability, the last thing I wanted to do was bring more life into that type of environment and when it seemed to me that would not be the case, I enjoyed the possibility of becoming a father. Grasping onto this potential new title, I figured that it would give me the roadmap for the next stretch of my existence on earth. More assurance of permanence. An imaginary concept I was soon to discover.
With fatherhood just over the horizon, from behind the dashboard of life I was steering, the car crash of PTSD did as all car crashes do & took me by complete surprise. With one phone call from my mother who was wailing on the other end, my nervous system instantly lit up like an electric chair as she screamed to me “I can’t wake him up! I can’t wake him up!”, her voice breaking as she called out to God for help. I was in the car and down the street to my parent’s house in less than 60 seconds, my heightened senses navigating me through any stalls from traffic, signs or lights. By the time I burst through the door and shot up the stairs it had been no less than a minute and a half before the 911 operator was giving me instructions on what to do to try to save my Daddy’s life. At two minutes I had lifted him off the bed and placed him onto the floor as if he had no weight at all and began the exchange of air from my lungs and receipt of the last in his.
This moment was the breach in my entire conception of what life & reality were, are and ever will be. The experience in this infinite moment of time, for Yours Truly, not only ripped the rug of a “Corporate Christian” worldview out from underneath me, but in an instant pulled back a curtain into a cosmos I have still yet to fully conceive. Without diving too far into the depths of the event here, I shall be discreet in what I say now to save the details for perhaps later. And while I cannot say that the event was the first of a supernatural one for me; I can assure you that up until that point in my existence it was the most profound. In that perhaps previously, metaphysical accounts could be reduced to zero with logical explanations, this one was a firsthand experience that I could not, nor would ever deny, allowed me the opportunity to bridge between the worlds. In this case the world of the living & the world of the presumably dead.
It’s difficult to articulate how in such a moment of extreme stress time compresses into the density of a stone, the senses become overwhelmingly acute, and the human brain begins to unravel outward like a blooming flower of consciousness to process the undefinable and unfathomable “reality” that is playing out within you and without you. The impossible scenario you always reckoned would not or could not come, or that you always tried to brush away when it crept up in your mind because it was one that you so desperately feared. The death of my Father was one of those scenarios. My Father cannot die. My Father was my superhero, my rock, my foundation & upon him was built everything that I am. For me to be experiencing his death was simply an impossibility that I had no base to even begin to process & yet from the moment my hands touched his body the unequivocal truth ran throughout my very being in a coldness akin to his skin.
While up until that moment in time my adrenaline was surging throughout my veins making me feel as if I was in a spherical blast chamber, dodging bullets pinging around me at lighting speed – the moment the last, trapped essence of air from his body pushed into my lungs & filled them up; everything stopped. Everything became still. The heart in my chest that had been beating like the war drums of Asgard at Ragnarök became as still as Siddhartha beneath the Bodhi Tree. To say, I heard’ is correct, though extremely deficient to ‘I felt’, which is more of how the words “Son, don’t panic. Everything is going to be okay” reverberated within every cell of me until finding their way out in an internal yet audible force that left no doubt in my mind that the words being created were from my Father who was just across a veil.
There was no time to process this in the episode, as in moments such as this the body tends to go into an automatic flow of actions as if it is carrying out a pre-written script for a while. Your Observing Consciousness almost watches it all like an astral voyeur somewhere in the corner, or above the room like it’s an old rerun on the tube. Pretty sure people smarter than me would call it a kind of disassociation for sure. You are in your body doing things but…you are really not even there at all. It’s only at some point later that the two things become one again, and you can give it your best crack at trying to process the experience then. I remember when that time came for me, it was the first major thread of the organized religion tapestry I was to tug at with great force. Because if what I knew I had experienced happened, (and I know it did, for it happened to me) nor can anyone take it from me; then the story I was being told by the “Corporate Christian” church about the way things are, were in fact not.
Now these are the sorts of things one does not openly speak about while residing in the “Bible Belt”. Surrounded by “Corporate Christians”. Social, familial, professional. Experiences that transcend the Sunday School tales told by pastors of prophets who could bring fire down upon their enemies, talking donkeys, devils, demons & angels. Keep that for bible studies and the sermons within the confines of the 501c3 box stores but don’t you ever go around the Big J.C.’s myriad of corporate subsidiaries claiming you too have experienced the supernatural and well,… biblical in the land that believes in every scribble of the KJV as if it were actually a history book rather than books of parables & allegories. Those ignorant hillbillies will string you up and crucify the fuck out of you. So, needless to say Your Humble Author, Narrator, & Fictional Character wasn’t exactly shouting the experience from the rooftops. No, I was quietly internalizing the event while simultaneously learning that I would now be required to have, in my flesh, the curse of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Putting Away Childish Things
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” This is the most appropriate verse that comes to mind when telling the tale of what ultimately brought me to Buddhism’s front door. Up until that point in my personal evolution, the trivial traumas of childhood were sufficiently buried beneath shallow routines of daily life. Never having been resolved but not seeming to need the sense of urgency about it either, these compounded powder kegs of unprocessed wounds from life in general lay wait & ferment. Out of sight & out of mind, which meant a surface level spirituality that provided little to no answers to the questions that matter the most was appropriately enough for such a lifestyle. Hence my affinity for a “Corporate Christian” worldview. With a lip service to peace dripping from every orthodox acolyte’s mouth; when in the time of my spiritual crisis, and I needed it most – peace was the very last thing the church had to offer me.
Just having faith wasn’t keeping the night terrors from exploding out of flashbacks to the real reflexes of the terrified flesh. Praying for the thorn of non-stop hypervigilance to be plucked from your eye sockets yielded no results. Reading Psalms, Matthew, Mark, Luke or John for 15 minutes every morning could not quell the ever-present internal earthquakes of nervous, anxious, electrical attacks of the system with triggers, both great and small. To be trapped in the body of a man whose mind is waging war upon itself is to be a battlefield in the deepest pits of Hell. Though an illness unseen to those on the outside; on the inside is a spirit so desperately oppressed and beaten down by emotional, mental, physical and spiritual bombardments of fiery arrows. This type of ongoing torture cannot be alleviated by simply showing up every Sunday, Wednesday or Potluck dinner surrounded by people whose mouths couldn’t melt butter, spouting off how great it feels to be washed in the blood of a lamb. Forgiven for all their misdeeds but nevertheless still just as screwed up during their tenure as a Christian as they were before they got saved from being so screwed up.
I needed peace. I needed peace from my own mind. I needed peace from my own mind that was actively trying to kill me every waking moment and 85% of the sleeping moments too. And while I had done my due diligence to pray, pray, pray as I walked through the valley of the shadow of death with a King James tight in clenched, white-knuckle fists; I felt certain there was no one with me at all. The same “God” that failed to come to my Mother’s aid while in shock, trying to wake her husband up from death with cries for help at the top of her lungs; was apparently gonna be a no-show for my hour of need also. Because if there is any ailment an all-loving deity would grant mercy upon those praying faithfully to them for relief of it, the ailment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder would be high on the list for that “God” to get to. Yet none of my prayers pulled down one second of peace in the warzone that was my mind or the nervous system that was bound to it through suffering. Something had to give to relieve the pressure of Armageddon inside of me & if it meant I was to go outside the confines or teachings of the “church” then so be it.
Walking the Middle Way at the Edge of Collapse
It seems to me that the world itself is in that very same spot I once stood in. Years and years of trash & toxicity that could be covered up with a little bit of dirt in times past are now about to be set a blaze like a karmic back burn. If the triggering event of the dominos falling to full collapse hasn’t already happened, it should be any minute now. Maybe even before I finish this sentence. And as it did for me in my personal journey, the teachings of Buddha in this Walk for Peace are now budding up in the Southern states like a lotus flower coming up through the thick of the muck. A real approach and real solutions to collective PTSD we are all entangled with that if taken, ran with & applied in our individual lives might actually give the human species a chance to survive.
A way of life, not a religion, is presenting itself to America in such a profound way via these walking Venerable Monks. Buddhism does not convert or use force to permeate within one’s experience. It almost always sneaks in through the back door, as it were. Unsuspecting. Tiptoeing. Or in the case of the Walk for Peace – power walking all the way from Fort Worth to Washington D.C. but nevertheless, this way of life is simply presenting itself as an option over self-annihilation. Because make no mistake, humanity is at the doorstep of suicide if it doesn’t get a grip. And that grip best be got real soon.
This is the overall message that is coming from the mission of the monks in my view. Such a drastic statement being made by them, which has caught the attention of all those seeking and very much needing a better way forward. A calmer way into tomorrow. A mindful retreat into a future that might be worth pressing forward to. Not in comfort. But inconvenient suffering through even the act of the smallest movements. As they say, sometimes just making it through the day has earned you a superhero’s cape and there is no doubt in my mind that all of us at this time on Earth are in enough suffering that it often doesn’t seem to be sufficient for the day. But like the monks, we keep taking the next painful step. Day after day after day.
As counterproductive as slowing down seems in a hyperactive world, it is probably our only salvation right now. If mankind cannot calm the collective monkey mind it is being pummeled by, then it too will be like I would have been had the path of mindfulness & meditation not unfurled for me. Broken bones and brains blasted out all over the beer bottle covered floor. So long. The end. You had a nice run of it, human beings. Therefore, as we trek forward in this discussion, of the Buddhist Monks walking for Peace, allow my past footsteps to give you some guidance at least, for your present invitation to walk the middle way. Who knows? We might just shatter a clay jar or two along the way.
To be continued ….
A SONG TO PLAY US OUT…
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