Travis LaFrance
At Home in the Halls of Power

I Say Om to the Bush Agenda

It seems that no matter which way I turn I find myself one-on-one with some exotic doe, both of us breaking a sweat in unlikely positions.

Last night I was so deflated and defeated by Dick Cheney's sinister sneer and aw-shucks authoritarianism that I'll admit that for the first time of the campaign season I succumbed to the sin of despair. Gasping for air and freedom I stumbled out onto 42nd Street. I was unable to utter a word, and with my fiber of my humanity I began scribbling on a scratch pad and shoving notes at passersby. The political has gotten personal, I wrote on one, following it with, It'd be funny if he weren't our government.

This project constituted peculiar behavior even my Times Square standards, and as I result I netted only one phone number—though the holder of said digits was a creature so rare and ebullient that I'm tempted to count hers as three if not four. (That reminds me: gotta go to the pile of paper scraps and promote that one to the wallet.)

But back to the subject at hand. Today I was still a bit low—the chaos of the week catching up with me. Yesterday I was forced out of my apartment and my intended cottage fell through—leaving me stranded on a friend's sofa until further notice. I couldn't find that spiritual ease that elevates me to the higher plane where readers seek me. And who could blame me? For four years the president has pushed our God and our democracy out front like a pair of hostages, nudging them with his Tommy gun of purported patriotism, bellowing: "Down on the floor and nobody gets hurt. Make a move and Armageddon breaks out."

And for many of those years, those of us who answer to a higher calling than profit motive and brute stupidity have, by and large, lay there. But today I rose up.

I did what I often do in such moments of doubt—stuck out to a secure, undisclosed, mindful place. I picked up my yoga practice while on pilgrimage in Nepal, and honed it while incarcerated in Madagascar on bogus political charges. It guided me then and it guides me now. So I headed out to the studio, where my instructor, a Swiss-Turkish émigré with a voice like small bells tinkling in the wind.

As it turned out, I was the only pupil.

"Pity," I remarked. "I guess it's just the two of us."

And so we swept into an hour and a half of movement, the toxins poring from my forehead, and trembling there in Warrior Two, my mind lifted out of that Brooklyn studio and traveling to a freer place where our current slate of con men in government were locked up in irons.

"We are not humans in search of a spiritual experience," she counseled. "We are spirits enjoying a human experience while on this earth."

Those of you whose private schooling served a course of lighter-fare American Lit may be familiar with the dismal denouement of Salinger's Franny & Zooey, where a distraught Franny takes her best shot at communing with the oversoul by listening mutely to the buzzing of her telephone's busy signal. This was nothing like that. Instead we sang together, man and woman, American and Eurasian, harmonizing in God's holy vibration. Om, om, om.

I came floating back down to earth, and walked out onto the sidewalk, heading for midtown and the convention.

Welcome to New York, Mr. President. I'm ready for you now.