The Holy Land
A lot of us were raised with the tradition that the holy land is somewhere else. Or in our searching have created our own version of this idea. Jerusalem, Mecca. India, Tibet. Someplace far away. But far has gotten nearer, two days if you make all your connections. And as the world gets smaller and rounder connections are easier to make. What goes around comes around, as they used to say. This is the holy land—the intersection where you wait for the light to change, the restaurant where you meet your friend, the place where you turn off the TV or close the book and head for bed. You live on the holy mountain, at the foot of the world tree, at the center of the universe.
Heaven
Not here, but there. Made of marble and clouds and inconstant stars. No one is there. Not grandmother, or Kwan Yin, or any of our past lives. But no one is there right now on the streets paved with glass and gold, and in the big amphitheater. You, me, stuck in traffic with our names as glaciers melt, watching our country pulled apart like a baby by laughing celebrants. Around us is always the end of the Roman Republic, the fall of the Roman Empire, rapids and cataracts, crashing water. There, heaven. A book when no one is reading it, all its story present at once, mansions, plazas, meadows. How difficult to not let the book collapse into whichever sentence a single pair of eyes seizes, the way a jeweler examines a diamond necklace to price each piece of light. Impossible in fact—it’s all right to say it—impossible. And there. Not real. But you see it anyway.
The Seven Cities of Gold
All our history books refer to these. There everything is made of gold. Not just the palaces but the streets where workers walk home from the bus stop. Not just the big library but the gas station restrooms. There once a week a golden trash truck stops in front of each home, then heads out along the golden road full of potholes to the landfill, and every broken bottle and hamburger wrapper that goes into the ground is made of gold.
Peter Cashorali
Peter Cashorali is a neurodivergent queer psychotherapist, formerly working in HIV/AIDS and community mental health, currently in private practice in Portland and Los Angeles.