When you go out there

Sitting in the laundromat reading about trauma while two apparently deranged individuals talk at top volume about how much they love trump and how, when he gets re-elected, everything is going to be alright. What is it about laundromats and people expounding on their political affiliations lately? What adult brain thinks anybody (let alone the sleaziest motherfucker you can name) is going to make everything alright? What's with the widespread messianic language and this human turd? 

The lady in the post office said, "Oh! Handsome!" when she saw the photo in my old passport taken twenty-six-and-a-half years ago. I wish I'd known that back then. The man in line said I was still looking pretty dapper, and I thanked him for that. The passport application has finally been submitted and that particular psychic obstacle has been removed. 

Poly

She told me she was polyamorous and a swinger even though I hadn't asked. Gross, I thought. Great, I said. Me, I can't find even one I like enough to hang around let alone poly. It's a new world, I guess. God bless all-a-yuns. 

I went back to the place last night. A couple of weeks ago, my experience there was nearly magical. Which is to say I had a good time. In fact, I think there have actually been three good times. It was exactly the same place featuring many of the same faces. This time there was also a bulldog who seemed to like the way I pet her around the ears. She hung out with me as long as I was feeding her pizza crusts. Relationships are transactional, I'm hip. I know some of the people there by name now. The bartender knows my name. I'll be a regular soon. 

But the portal I seemed to have walked through before which transformed the mundane to magic was nowhere to be found. I felt mildly uncomfortable and that gradually shifted in the direction of moderately. I became annoyed and avoidant. And at 10:30pm, I felt noticeable relief walking out the door and heading home. Something told me it was over.

Memento Mori

I get stuck in these procrastination what-ever-you-call-ems every so often. Some episodes last for a few hours and some can last for many years. What exactly is holding me back is nearly always a mystery that defies logic and common sense. Certainly there are subconscious dynamics at play. 

Anyway, one of these lingering episodes has been around obtaining a replacement passport. Mine expired in 2007. 

Today, I took a giant step forward and got my photo taken for the new passport. When it was printed, I compared it side by side with the photo in my original passport taken twenty-six and a half years ago. 

Ouch. 

Kinfolk

We shared a surname, and it turned out that we were kindred spirits too. 

Call me "Nobody," he said. Only the Moon understands me. 

Sonoran

You found yourself, despite months of effort, inside a carapace. Wearing a breast plate. Crack it open, it said. But my finger tips couldn't find a purchase and would have likely lacked the strength anyway. 

I saw myself ready for burial and shed no tears in letting that me go. So much time in miserable thought, it said. Lower the body, dressed in a suit, down into the hole. Spend your time another way going forward, Born Again. 

I spoke with other people. There were hugs. Getting beyond judgment and performance and separation sometimes only takes a little speaking and a little listening. Everyone has a story. Everyone has a wound that would make you love them if you knew about it.

The bright moon climbed higher as I got closer to home and to ordinary.

Can't we just call it going outside?

Maybe you think from reading what I've been writing lately that when I'm walking in nature I've achieved some perpetual blissed out state of being. This, I assure you, is not the case. 

Don't get me wrong, it's something I enjoy doing very much. Being out there often takes me out of my head and its dark imaginings and plugs me back into the larger world. Nature, that force of which we are all a part. But sometimes it still sucks.

Today, I walked about ten miles in my hiking boots. That's nothing much if you're a hiker but quite a bit if you're generally sedentary. Which I am. My feet complained. My joints were a little creaky. The muscles in my feet and legs and hips and back were a little stiff from walking yesterday. I felt somewhat depleted and that seemed to effect my balance and coordination. I tripped on roots, rocks rolled under the soles of my boots, the voice in my head was often unpleasant. 

I filled the outside pocket of my backpack with trash found along the trail - beer cans, glass and plastic bottles, a dog's chew toy, food wrappers. I thought unkind thoughts about the people who litter and wantonly destroy. Then I remembered periods of my own wanton destruction and the voice turned on me. 

And yet it was a beautiful day. I didn't really want to be anywhere else other than outside in the woods walking in solitude. I'm just saying I'm not Snow White out there with a bunch of enchanted birds tying ribbons in my hair, okay?

Practice

Things aren't right. You're stuck. Inert. Your life is draining away. You lack thrust. There's a disconnect somewhere between you and your source of propulsion which, if pressed, you'd likely be unable to identify. 

After a pot of coffee, a heaping helping of self-loathing, and a few strong hits of anxiety; you make it out the door. 

On the trail, before 30 minutes have passed, you're a different person. Grounded, focused, cheerful. All the life around you is coming into bloom. How do you manage to forget so quickly that this is all it takes?

The swamps are greening with grass and the skunk cabbage which had only sprouted the last time I was out here has grown hearty. Flying insects, tiny spiders, a swimming beaver, mating crows, the first elegantly curled fiddle heads. I sat at the base of a huge pine tree at a bend in the high river and listened as I watched the eddies whirl. 

Surprisingly

This morning I took my 80 year old mother to some appointments and to do some shopping. We went out for lunch and had grilled cheese sandwiches made with bacon, tomato and basil. They were surprisingly good. At one point we drove past a strip club. LIVE NUDE DANCERS, said the sign. We'd been driving along in silence just listening to the radio. "Well that's good," my mother said. "I'm not really interested in watching dead nude dancers."

Trip

Went into Boston for music. Walked the streets of Somerville after having sweat through all my clothes. Spent, completely. It's good to lose your mind entirely every now and again. 

I danced, or something, and felt the energy in the form of sonic waves moving back and forth between the bands and the audience. I became actively involved in that exchange. Other people in the audience weren't much of a factor. They allowed me a lot of space though. I think I got a little closer to releasing something. I think I gave some and I know that I received. 

The night air was cool and I walked in only a t-shirt trying to get dry. I walked past a mostly-darkened hospital. There's an 8-year-old girl in there. I know because I helped to get her there earlier in the week. Her name jumped into my mind and I tried to send calmness in her direction. Summer camp with new friends.

There were only a few people out walking. One in skinny jeans and leather jacket weaving drunken diagonals along the sidewalk. At some point, while talking to myself, I overtook the person now sitting in a bus shelter. How's it going, man? I asked. The person stared blankly past me. Not there. Entirely elsewhere. All alone in that place.

I was looking up at a third floor apartment. There was an inviting yellow glow in the large window. Soft and warm. A string of Christmas lights along where the walls meet the ceiling. I imagined myself there.

To be invited. To be made welcome. To be received. 

I remembered with awe the act of being received. Did I understand the profundity of it then? I don't think so. I was too close. I felt it though. 

I understand the profundity of it now only because I am so far distant.

13

Five days she's been in that room the interior of which looks and feels like a storage unit with a television screen sealed in plexiglass up in the corner. There's a few holes drilled in the plexiglass to allow some of the sound to escape. The people who sent her don't visit or check on her. She's thirteen years old. What do you think she thinks?

Basic

One of the squirrels came by the slider early this morning, then to the kitchen window at about noon, and in the late afternoon, up the railing beside the stairs to make sounds toward me, I presume. I'm the guy with access to the sunflower seeds, it seems to have figured out.

The last time I got friendly with squirrels, two of those red maniacs chewed through a metal screen and ran amok in my house for a weekend.

Work kept me moving for about eleven hours today, and I did a ridiculous amount of yawning. I went outside after dark to feel the air and to see the stars and moon and the dark tops of the tall pines swaying against the cloudless sky and to listen to the sound of peepers. That made me feel better, opened something inside me. 

I don't really need any of that other stuff anymore. So many years of living under the weight of that concern.

Graduation season

That inescapable feeling of regret for what you haven't done rises up into your throat but you manage to swallow it. It's letting you know it's still there though. Time with my son yesterday as he prepares for another transition. So many things have to be done alone.

Today I'm heading to Rhode Island to watch my older son and his team try to make it into the national finals in his sport. The weather looks promising.

Advil didn't help

A swamp has descended upon us here. Sixty degrees and several days of rain. Humid and strange. I sang some songs last night. Met a local songstress who's doing a Patsy Cline show next month. Woke up this morning with a couple of new Facebook friend requests and a bad head.

Cremora

Don't identify with your feelings, they tell me. They're not really you. They're more like a cloud passing over you or, more accurately, like an arrow passing right through the heart of you. 

I've become the man who laughs aloud alone in the grocery store. I no longer mutter to myself. I talk out loud freely if I'm feeling like it. The kid stocking the shelves looks over discretely. He's probably doing it too. 

I feel sad every time I pass the Coffee Mate in the dairy section. I have for years now. 

Today, I had this feeling that I'd been recently reassembled by a careless mechanic who left out an essential component of my operating system. But I'm not going to identify with that sentiment. I found my heart out there on the trail a few weeks back. It's up on top of the refrigerator now. Don't forget it. 

I saw the first yellowing forsythia up here today and it made me a little ill. The way another baseball season does or one more New Year's Eve with all of that fucking joyful noise. I can't pretend I haven't seen it before or that it feels new to me. I'm tied to the wheel is what you're saying. That's all. 

April is the cruelest.

Forget your troubles

I'm trying to allow myself the happiness of small things. Real things. Like, for instance, last week I stumbled upon a place that has all-you-can-eat steamed clams for a reasonable price. Steamed clams in melted butter? Yup, I can raise some happiness for those. 

As I was wrapping up my shift today, I remembered that tonight's the night. I started dancing around the kitchen trying to make the most of this rising feeling of momentary happiness for shellfish. Fly Me To The Moon came into my head. Sinatra's version. Then I remembered. 

I've left rumination behind, but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy a visit with a joyful memory now and again.  I remembered a few minutes of a particularly soaring kind of happiness while I sang that song to you one magical night. And that made me remember other moments too. We did enjoy some happiness together, you and I. Those moments are still like a box of collected gemstones to me. I'd like to sing that song again someday but, for now, I'll leave it there in happy memory with you.

Nature

I don't know why I didn't get excited about the eclipse today but I didn't. I was working from home. Somewhere between 3 and 4 in the afternoon, the quality of the outdoor light changed. It dimmed. The world around me seemed slightly more shadowy. That was it. 

After work, I headed out to the woods with a few items in my new backpack. The last storm took down a lot of great old trees and large parts of others. Sustained wind, wet snow and ice, and then powerful gusts proved a lethal combination. A tall oak fell in front of my house too. It snapped off about 15 feet up the trunk saving my house and car by choosing to fall in a neutral direction. 

I'm sorry friends. It hurt to see you broken like that. 

Alright then

There was a lot of dream activity this morning. I made a note to myself at one point to be sure to bring it back with me but, when I crossed over into waking life, the coherence was gone and only two fragments remained accessible. A mystic or a healer named Lemony. And a woman for whom popcorn was an important symbol. She kissed me with a mouthful of it.

My son is getting ready to graduate from high school. He's thinking about a solo road trip. The me that was him once says, "Go!". The me whose hand the little boy used to hold whenever we went out into the world says something else (silently). 

A young woman told me a story about being restricted to the parking lot of her family's business when she was a child. The neighborhood kids sometimes road by saying,  "Hi! We're all going to the park." She'd wave back and continue riding her bike in circles around the small parking lot. 

When her mother was angry with her or wanted to teach her a lesson, she'd make her lay on the floor and beat her across the butt and legs with a broomstick. She'd announce a certain number of lashes before administering the beating. Her mother would count them out loud, hesitating between the blows, using anticipation to its maximum effect. That makes the person on the receiving end clench and brace. 

Clenching and bracing eventually infiltrates your posture and you carry that response around in your tissues for the rest of your life. You also bring it with you into every relationship you find yourself in. That is, if you decide to have any relationships.

I keep seeing this little girl riding her bicycle in circles, lost in her imagination, telling herself stories about a better life. 

I'm the kid hiding in the bushes, a guerilla engaged in total war with the oppressors. I am watching her through binoculars. I recognize her. I want to tell her about the island in the reservoir and the sand bar under the surface of the water that would allow us safe passage. We could live there and be free. 

Cruelty is different from stress, different from lacking emotional intelligence, and different from being unable to control your rage. There's a calculus involved in it. One has to dedicate some time to it. A decision is made. There's a conscious intention. 

It doesn't matter what language the perpetrator thinks in, the message the receiver understands is always: "I will destroy YOU."

Tomorrow is the solar eclipse. I'm not planning to do anything differently. "The Path of Totality" though, I keep reading those words and wishing I'd written them. Ominous, right?

Out sometimes

A certain depressive confinement came in with the storm yesterday. Heavy, wet snow. The wind had blown itself out by evening. I put the last remaining birdseed out in the morning and attracted 20 or 30 birds who stayed around all day. By dark, I felt trapped and shrinking. I drove to a McDonald's run by teenagers. Their fries were cold. There was something careless and decidedly unappetizing about the Big Mac they assembled. Not a good start to an evening out. Stop at an ATM in a Cumberland Farms for just enough cash to power a four hour outing. Park on a side street and walk down to the bar. A few of the same faces from last week but mostly new ones. Technical problems with the karaoke system. A particularly loud and shrill voice. A scowling old man under a red trump 2024 cap - his badge of idiocy worn proudly. A few elements conspired to drive me out and back home early. It took a willingness to stick it out, having no place else to be, and a direct intervention in order to locate and merge with the strange magic but I finally did. Someone told me they thought they'd recognized me as a fellow weirdo. 

Know when to keep it shut

A day of yawning punctuated by the poly-substance addiction, loss of everything, walking the streets all night every night, and commercial sexual exploitation of other people and my own memories of other times and other lives. Kissing a girl in a parking lot and the way it stays with you evolving into a point of reference only you make any meaning of. Dinner is baked cod with gin and tonics. You try speaking the only Polish word you know to a misidentified Slovenian. It doesn't go over well. Outside, ice is falling from the sky, the winds are coming up, and the roads have frozen over. The peepers have gone silent.

Else

Tonight's a dark one accented with the sound of peepers and filled with the smell of rain. They say snow's on the way as part of all that weather battering its way east. A backpack arrived in the mail for me today. The cardboard shipping box sat soggy on the doorstep. I thought to myself as I picked it up that the stars we see are actually images from the past just like the me I'm imagining is. I became aware of myself walking up the driveway. A stranger in darkness. Becoming something else isn't sad. 

April arrives

Ill at ease today. 

The usual holiday political arguments and updated perspectives on the state of the world were darker than usual. It was easier when I represented the extreme of doom and gloom because there was some comfort in thinking that maybe I'm just out of my mind because the others seem so much more positive. Now it's me saying, we've got to heal ourselves first and others saying it's too far gone to matter. 

I burned sage and cedar in the house today. That sacred purifying smoke sent me back to a sun dance mindset. Sacrifice. Offering the only thing that actually belongs to you - your suffering - up for the greater good. I also burned it because I'd recently shut down one of the toilets in the house and I think the lack of water in it is allowing septic gases to back up into the house.

Took myself out to dinner later and regretted it immediately. A young woman with a piercing monotone talking ceaselessly and negatively seemingly directly into my ear. Barn rules and breaking horses and unfiltered criticism of the various riders (mostly children). By the end, I planned to visit her barn, release the horses into the wild, and burn the structure to the ground. 

I dreamed of cicadas last night. I don't think I've ever actually seen one. Certainly not around here. They were enormous and living in  the recesses behind the seats of my car. Ill at ease. A Voodoo priestess in New Orleans on my Instagram said the darkness is almost here and asked if we've prepared ourselves. 

It was a little harder to breathe today. But tonight, during my walk from the car to the front door, I heard the first peepers. I sat in a chair on my "lawn" and looked up through the pines at the clear sky and the brilliant stars. The first peepers were singing individually, as they do, but in a week there'll be so many more and they'll sound like a trained choir. They reminded me of the cycle of things, coming into being and passing away. The stars were cold, but not unkind, and they silently showed me how little any of this fleeting agony matters. 

Joyful participation in the sorrows of the world, Joseph Campbell said. 

Easter

Someone reportedly named John said something in his gospel that always appealed to me. He said, "greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." I was raised in a religious tradition that values sacrifice. I'm not referring to all the children whose innocence has been sacrificed to evil priests down through the centuries. Although I've left the church entirely due to its glaring hypocrisy and blood soaked history, I still respect and revere the notion of sacrifice. Easter reminds me. The story of one mysterious being who so loved humanity that he sacrificed his life to save us from death. I don't know if he got the results he was hoping for, but he stepped up. There's a 63 year old Filipino man reportedly named Ruben. He's been crucified - nailed through the hands and feet to a wooden cross - on Good Friday for 35 years in a row now. From up there, he prays for us all. I hope it's not in vain. 

Sink and swim

Emergence. That's a good word for it. It require a crisis, a break down, a period during which nothing works anymore. It also requires a spark, a catalyst, some sort of inspiration to make you start doing things differently. Then it requires application and integration - the work - every day. The process seems to involve great leaps forward, relapses, backsliding, moments of joy and elation, hours of despair, and a constant struggle with old patterns of thought, feeling and behavior. It requires surrender. It requires letting go which is an act, or many acts, of will. It means no longer feeding and watering the bullshit you drag around with you. 

I got my tax return information pulled together today (which is the deadline I set for myself last month). But it was only after three days of active avoidance and procrastination - one of those old patterns that doesn't serve me well. Procrastination is intimately related to depression some say. Others say it's a trauma response. I say it's a pain in the ass that wastes your time in a state of anxiety and makes you feel like shit about yourself. 

Emergence is your face breaking the surface and drawing that sorely needed breath of air. But down below, the murky depths remain. 

Good Friday

I saw Jesus Christ on Main Street in Worcester today. I'm pretty sure he was wearing a wig. He carried a wooden cross over his shoulder in the middle of a solemn procession of crimson clad centurions and other people dressed in the style of the times. They were followed by a small group of copper skinned Indians dressed in white.

Some measure of progress

Went to a place I've never been before to sing some karaoke last night. Someone I met the last time I ventured out to do that was hosting for her first time. It started and ended early. This is a good thing and a safety measure that should have helped prevent the hangover and wasted morning I'm experiencing now. 

An amber alert just arrived on my phone. A car was stolen from a parking lot. There was a 3 year old autistic child wearing an Easter egg tee shirt in the car. I can feel for a moment the cold abject horror of the person responsible for that child, the silent disoriented tension of the child, and the panic of the thief when he realizes what he's set in motion.

I made an instant judgment upon walking into that bar. These are not my people. The faces didn't seem friendly. There was an entire male rugby team in the house. 

Once things began, I got to sing several songs and after each one made more friends. It became easy to talk. The quality of the faces changed. There was a mother and daughter sitting together. Mom was in her late fifties and daughter probably in her early 30s. The mom had kind of spiked died blonde hair. I thought she was a girl I went to high school with who I hadn't seen in 40 years, but she was not. The three of us joked and flirted a little. Her daughter appeared to have had multiple augmentations. It was a little surreal. 

Mom is a visiting hospice nurse. This may have something to do with why her resting face is so deeply lined and sad. She deals with the dying everyday. I told her how much in-home hospice helped a friend of mine who died too young. We talked about a common interest in becoming death doulas some day. Being there to support someone through their actual death. I admired her.

But she was also afraid she said. If it weren't for her daughter being in from out of town, she wouldn't have left her house. Pieces of airliners falling off, random senseless violent crime, illegal immigrants. Only Trump can save us now, she said. 

I nearly laughed, but she wasn't joking. She had that frightened, programmed look about her that I've seen before. Her daughter tried to stop her from saying anymore. I told her I couldn't agree with her choice or her reasoning behind it but suggested a truce. She agreed and we laughed. I returned to my seat across the room. 

I didn't feel the usual rush of anger and exasperation I normally feel when something like this occurs, but it certainly felt surreal. We continued to talk to each other at different points. They came and hugged me when lt was time for them to go. Somehow I was friends with most everyone in the room by midnight. Something is definitely shifting.

Pine

I can either write about pining for the past or about passing through the pines. That's what I've got to work with.

So today I worked a ten hour shift at my dining room table using a computer and a phone to communicate with people who find themselves in pretty terrible circumstances. I took a break at about 1:00 PM to get the mail. I could smell that early Spring scent that arrives when the Earth is just beginning to open and I didn't want to go back to my table. 

When the shift was over, I took a walk. There's a mighty oak at the junction of two dirt roads out there where I've been going lately. I think of it as a friendly traffic cop and always convey my regards as I walk by. Keep going straight or make a right?  

I guess I'll go straight this time. But before I could take ten steps, an owl called out from the swamp behind me. I turned, stood, and listened while trying to spot it. It called out again from a little further down that right turn I decided against. Ok then, change of plan. We go right. 

I climbed a hill and went past some more great oaks. Four of them, very old. Next to them is a charred hollow stump. One of their clan. Something tragic happened here somewhere down the years. I feel it every time I come up here. 

I watched a crow in last year's dead grass watching me. The field came to and end at the top of the hill, and the cart road shrunk to single track at the tree line. I've never walked this trail before. A mild excitement came over me. 

The trail took me up and over another hill, down the opposite slope strewn with mossy green boulders, and into the valley below. Tall pines and mountain laurel. Darker here with a close in quiet feel. The smell of the last remnants of snow down in the recesses beneath the pines. There's something holy here. Stop and take it in. I looked up through the branches to the fading light and just stood there for awhile. 

I don't know where this trail goes, and it's time to turn around now, but I want to keep going. One of these days I'll carry my bed on my back and just go.

Ease

Sitting in a chair and reading for an hour without a single interruption or a popcorn head on your shoulders is a good thing. So is a nap on the couch after that.

Moon and Sand

 

Anthony De Mello

I don't like to think of you as a drug. I don't like to think of separation as withdrawal. But if I play it out and think through what your return would mean to me, it looks a lot like that. My imagination says it would mean the end of heart sickness, renewed vitality and happiness, an idol to worship returned to its temple. The cosmic order restored. 

Such is how it would feel to have my craving relieved. But inherent in the high is the next low. Misery is already moving back in. All of this is a diagnostic indicator of clinging. Of looking outside for what's inside. 

Loneliness is the suffering that comes with missing other people. Aloneness is the feeling that comes from enjoying oneself. I heard this on a deeper level today. We continue to learn what we already know, over and over, until we finally understand.

Sunday

It's early afternoon and the trees up here on the hill are encased in ice while the sun shines down upon them. It's beautiful to the eye - sparkling diamonds, garland, and tinsel. But beneath the glitter, the trees groan and suffer. Some will break. Most will endure.

Ice storm

Spring has arrived bringing ice along with it. I just heard a branch break under the weight as I began to type. I'd asked for birds recently and they've arrived - chickadees, finches, nuthatches, tufted titmice, cardinals, woodpeckers, mourning doves, and another kind the name of which I cannot remember right now. The freezing rain makes the feeders all the more inviting. I've watched the activity all morning and am starting to notice social order, etiquette, bonding and the competitive drive. I heard a strange large singular whoooosh at one point and noticed a band of at least one-hundred marauding blackbirds had descended. They drove away all the competition in a single rush. Their heads had a greenish hue and they elbowed and shouldered and pecked one another other chaotically as they ate. Pirates. They appeared to be at each other's throats as they pillaged the area, but they arrived and departed in one uniform, disciplined thrust as though they were of one mind.  A tight outfit indeed. 

Strong and black

I just brewed a batch of "defiantly strong coffee". This is the road I've chosen for myself this morning. Maybe it's due to my declining testosterone levels, but has anyone else noticed how over-the-top and embarrassingly douchey advertising directed at males has become?  

That's me finding something to complain about. See? It's familiar. It's my groove. To be pissed off and separate. 

I remember dreaming of an ever expanding circle. Stay with that. Don't get distracted. 

This morning with the curtains open I saw the sun arrive. Then the squirrels. And then the birds. I heard a bird singing. I'd nearly forgotten how much I missed the sound of that. In that moment, I realized how much better things are in the presence of birdsong. Immediately I could not help but feel pain imagining its absence again. How I cling to what's beautiful and how I suffer in imagining the loss of it. Non-attachment, I'm told. I struggle with that. 

Grief is love's shadow, I think. If you love, if you take beauty into your heart, you will certainly suffer greatly for it. Your heart will be torn to shreds, sooner or later, when all that remains is absence and memory. That's the price. That's the other side of love. Maybe you can avoid that kind of suffering by not attaching, but then won't you suffer the pain of not becoming? Love is a ripening, but it doesn't stop there. What ripens also rots. It's nature. It can only be denied or accepted. Acceptance is the only road that leads anywhere. Let me know when you get there. 

I'm not saying you shouldn't do it - as if there was a choice in the matter. I'm saying I think you should. I'm saying I think I would, again. Yes, you'll burn. That's a given. But it's the only thing I know worth burning for. 

I'm going to walk in the sunshine today. I have hours.

The afternoon was colder and grayer than the morning promised with the temperature just above freezing. I stayed out on the trails all afternoon. A perfect day for a long walk at a leisurely pace. I wasn't cold nor did I overheat. Just right. 

First, I walked out to the eagle's nest. The trail was firm and dry this time. Much of the brown swamp water had a wrinkled film of ice on its surface. Ducks were out on sections of open water. My presence made some of them sound the alarm, and then all of them decided to relocate around the bend and out of my field of view. I was listening to the soft call of a mourning dove as I walked up the trail. When I got too close it stopped calling out. The swamp, which covered the trail the last time I was out here, had receded like the tide allowing me to keep traveling North. 

I stopped to eat a snack in a field bordering a small pond. Three pair of Canada geese were on the water. Some were preening their feathers while the others upended themselves to feed below the surface. When I got up to leave, one or two of them honked an alarm. A pair of nervous ducks flew away. If only I were invisible to them, I thought. Man, the destroyer of worlds.

Later, the trail crossed a dirt road. I wasn't sure where exactly the road led but I chose a direction and set out anyway. I stopped to explore an old stone cellar hole off to the side of the road. I was enjoying myself and the day very much and thought the only thing I'd change would be to somehow make my presence acceptable to wildlife. It would be nice to walk among them without provoking alarm and flight. I stepped back out onto the dirt road and looked directly into the eyes of a Barred owl. It was exactly the same color as the oak tree beside it and nearly indistinguishable from it except that it blinked its eyes every few seconds. I don't think we were twenty feet apart. The owl was not at all alarmed by my presence. I stood still and spoke to it. We stared and blinked at one another until I began to feel like I was intruding and continued on my way. The owl just watched me go. 

I don't think there's anything I like better these days than walking, being quiet, and listening. Quiet has become my favorite word. Quiet, the word and the state of being, feels and sounds sensual to me now. Almost erotic.

Starting the day and getting through it

As if they heard me, a mating pair of cardinals arrive this morning. It's been a long time, friends. 

I was remembering something from a long time ago that I fear may have altered the course of my life for the worse. We were on our honeymoon in Spain. There was a little town up in the mountains along the coast called Mijas. We were beginning to learn that we didn't agree on very much but we both liked it there. On the edge of town, we discovered a grotto. It was a shrine to the Holy Mother or a particular saint. There were braids of hair tacked to the walls and other offerings made in exchange for intercessory prayers. Maybe in thanks for prayers answered. I found a folded piece of paper tucked into a chink between two stones. It was the address of a young couple who were visiting from Estonia. They requested that the person who found their message write to them. This was at the end of 1997. Enjoying the sentiment, I slipped the paper in my pocket and I never got around to writing that letter. I betrayed their innocent trust. I took their message in bad faith. 

This man said he received a message letting him know that death is safe. That dying is like taking off a too-tight shoe. It made me remember this sense of falling while trying to keep myself gathered together and somehow organized. When I let go of that absurd concern, whatever there was of me was no longer falling. It was soaring through vastness. I think maybe that's how we exit.

A message from Alaska arrives. She's fishing through the ice on the Kuskokwim with her boys who are now grown men. Her dark eyes are probably smiling at them. Proud.  I'm happy at you, she'd sometimes say. And her words had the power to ease pain. 

He said he's traveling right now. This is an alternative to saying,  I'm homeless and have nowhere to be. His person to notify in case of emergency has only a first name and might be living 2,500 miles away. First you came and you gave without taking, I remembered. He said he's out of medication and no longer feeling safe or confident. Then you kissed me and stopped me from shaking, I thought. 

Yeah, I miss her too. 

I found time to run out and get twenty pounds of black sunflower seeds and about five pounds of cracked corn. There were more birds today. I had to let them know that I'm for real. 

Thinking about karaoke tonight - just for a couple of hours. Go out into the world, have a drink, be around other humans, sing a song or two. It's easier to crawl into bed though. 

I tried listening to a pod cast. Someone reading someone else's love letters to the Earth. The first someone was someone I've never heard of while the second someone (the author, now deceased) is someone I admire greatly. I got through the first two and had to stop a few minutes into the third. I'm sick of performances, packages, marketing, consumables, branding, products. Enough of that shit. 

Leave me alone to find something else.

Trill

I didn't want to say anything about it at first, but for a while I'd been worried about the absence of birds. The winter woods were silent here except for the occasional soft speech of a chickadee or sharp lonesome caw of a distant crow. 

I put black sunflower seeds in the feeders and nourished eight local gray squirrels, but the birds did not arrive. A crazy nut hatch, the stalwart year round chickadee or two, but no more. 

Today, I heard other bird voices behind the house. I saw five different types during the course of the day. None of the brightly colored ones. They seem to belong to another time here. But there was some hope out there, some measure of surviving biodiversity, as they continue to cut the trees down to build solar farms and Mc Mansion cul-de-sacs all around us. 

Equinox

It was a little brisk out there walking as the sun set this evening. I realized at some point along my route that the winter passed without me feeling like I was in suspended animation or three-quarters dead. That's an improvement upon my typical winter condition in recent memory. Thanks for that. 

Unity

I looked into the face of each person in several of the group photos and did not recognize my community. This part of the insight - community is an essential and missing component of my health and world - has been, so far, the hardest to comprehend. The number of people I've felt a true connection with in all of these years is a very small one. It's hard to imagine myself smiling blissfully in one of those photos. 

March morning

One word I almost never say is "blessing." The noun. Like, what a blessing it is to have you in my life. 

It's one of those words that represents something beautiful, maybe even something sacred, that gets ruined along the way by overuse or corrupted by insincerity. Or maybe it's just a word someone who annoyed me said one time. 

Anyway, what a blessing these woods are to me. This morning, after a light rain, I walked in them again. I startled a great owl who flew higher up into a treetop where it could regard me at a safe distance. We stared at each other for a full minute. I put my hand on my heart. The owl turned its head as if checking to see if I intended the gesture for someone else. Who me? it seemed to say looking back at me again. Yes, you. 

Each being under the sun is equally beautiful and astonishing to each other. Even me.

On the trail, I heard the sound of water flowing over stones calling to me so I walked down to and along the brook. The moss and lichens are greening, skunk cabbage is sprouting, water bugs are skating across the surface of the pools. 

I let myself be guided by whatever it is that guides me when I shut up and get out of the way. I found myself back on deer trails following their impressions in the leaves, piles of droppings, evidence of chewed vegetation. Walking as quietly as I could with an occasional stumble or slip reminded me that I'm still a lummox with a lot to learn.

I thought of Walter Austin and his cool shoes. How much I envied him for his wisdom, his presence, his solidity. The first thing YOU have to do is heal yourself of anger, he told me with gentle firmness. He said one way to do that is to sit beside naturally moving water. 

I had it in mind to look for an opening in the earth when I set out this morning. The doorway to the other world - something I've been thinking about lately. As I walked, I looked around boulders, along the sides of hills, and at the bases of great old trees. At some point, I kicked up a stick about two feet long. One end of it caught the top of my boot along the bridge of my foot while the other stuck into the ground preventing me for a moment from swinging my left foot forward and holding me in place. I looked down directly into the hole I'd been searching for.

Eluxoroma

I came out of the woods with five affirmations last weekend. Today, I had a chance to practice them during less than ideal conditions. First, I forgot my phone and didn't realize it until I was too far away to turn around for it. I said a few not-very-nice-things to myself and then countered immediately with the affirmations. The dissonance made me laugh. What do I need a phone for anyway? 

We completed the tenth rolfing session today. My neck wasn't right when I went in but it was better when I came out. I fell asleep several times on the table. It was peaceful. Integration, she said. That's how it's supposed to be. Giant steps, she told me. There's still some opportunity there, but we've taken giant steps. 

I took myself to lunch after in a town where I used to work. Ordered the sandwich I used to eat pretty frequently back then. It was good, but not as good as I remember. Paid the check and drove back to Worcester where I had some errands to run. Bank first: check. UPS store: there's a problem. The machine won't accept my ATM card as payment. I try it as a credit card. I try it as a debit card. I try it each way three times. I'l use my credit card. No, I won't because apparently I left it at the restaurant 45 minutes South of here. 

I drag myself out of the store by the neck, bash my head against the trunk of my car a couple of times and get in. The words I'm using internally are not at all complimentary at this point, but good for you for tuning into them. I remember my affirmations. I say them aloud. The first run through sounds like I'm a prosecutor reading a list of charges to some monster in a court of law. The second is a little closer to neutral, but certainly not kind. By the fifth repetition, I was feeling pretty calm. What the hell? It's a nice day for a drive. 

The card was where I left it. The waitress handed it back to me with a smile. When I got home, my phone was there on the counter plugged into the charger. There were no missed calls. There were no missed texts. By the end of the day, I'd gotten done most of the things on my list anyway. The one or two items I didn't get to can wait. 

This again

I was busy with work for most of the ten hour shift while noticing the sun was out and thinking that I'd like to be outside underneath it. When the end of the shift arrived, that strange tiredness had come upon me. It's something like a mild novocaine curtain coming down inside my head. Heavy weights suspended from my wrists pulling my shoulders down. Find somewhere to get flat. Inertia. A strange short sleep takes me. 

One man spoke of the two wolves within while he patiently waited to know his fate fully understanding that to take a stand for truth is to offer oneself up for murder. Another spoke of Zen and maintenance in the wake of his woman leaving and telling him she was keeping his dog. I already meditated, he said. I'm calm. I understood them both differently than I would have a year ago. I can see the page is turning. 

Madman beside the water

In the dream, which is becoming increasingly distant, I was walking quietly along a ridge line above a swollen creek in the valley below. My walk was more like a stalk as I began leaning forward until my hands came into contact with the ground  and I ran along on four legs. A game trail which I'd not been able to see until then became clear to me and I sensed deer sign - tracks, droppings, scent.  A wildness seemed to be growing in me. I startled myself by speaking aloud in some kind of brogue. "We're not at all afraid of crazy. Never were and never will be." I said it over and over again as I made my way down the steep embankment to the laughing brook and squatted there on a rock. Something told me to brush myself off and let the flowing water carry away what had been clinging to me.

Nacho

A few days ago I re-entered the world from an interesting place with a serious appetite. Nachos, I thought. I can't remember the last time I had them. They seem awfully good right now. I went out to that Mexican place in the decidedly un-Mexican town which was in close proximity to me and ordered myself some. They didn't have any jalapeños on them. There was no hot sauce to be found either. The meat was apparently seasoned for New England white folks - blandly. Oh well, that's why you avoid having expectations in the world.

Tonight I tried again somewhere else. The owners and the staff were Puerto Rican in this place. I ordered a Mezcal margarita with salt and the Nachos Locos. They too came without jalapeños. I had to ask for hot sauce (which wasn't at all hot and I'm a medium spice guy at best). But the nachos were pretty good. The meat - three different kinds - had real flavor. 

As soon as I started digging in, a man came up to the bar a couple of feet away from me. He wore his hat backwards and low and I could feel that he wasn't quite right. He commented on my nachos. We talked a bit. 

Turns out we grew up about 4 years apart in the same neighborhood. His sister died from alcoholism at age 30, the same age at which my father died from alcoholism. You're Irish too, right? I can tell cause we both still got all our hair.  He laughs and shakes my hand again soul-brother style. He tells me he just bought his fifth motorcycle - a Ducati. He wants me to be impressed. Maybe this will be the one that gets me, he said. He drinks a flaming alcoholic beverage of some kind before heading home to his shorty and her kids. 

He's got the gene. I can tell. The one that sets you on a course of self-destruction long before you even know what that means. But he's made it to 53 which is really defying the odds. Good for you. brother. He shakes my hand soul-brother style for the fifth time and brings it in for an awkward-Irish-American-all-by-myself-in-a-head-that-wants-me-dead sort of hug and then heads on out. He doesn't have the bike tonight.

Crease

In the dream, I was walking along an old cart road. I noticed a crease in the earth off to the side and felt compelled to lay my body down in it. I laid the stone on my chest and folded my hands over my stomach. The crease was deep enough to hide my body completely. I tried to let go of everything and just let the Earth hold me. 

I was thinking of how living in this world means bearing your own weight and how there's always some pain inherent in doing so. It makes sense to travel as lightly as possible then. To leave behind any optional weight. Optional pain. 

I was looking up through the tree tops at the brilliant blue sky. The trees arms were spread wide and stretching upward. They were showing me how to let it go into the sky. Into the sun.

After a while, the Earth began to feel cold. A chill was seeping into my body. Cold like death is cold. And with that I stood, picked up my stone, my essential weight, and moved briskly up the road. 

Nice one

Sure, I like dogs well enough (despite some unpleasantness with a couple of them early in life). But I don't idealize them. They are totally capable of acting like assholes. Granted, acting that way is usually somehow connected to its human. Like the unleashed German shepherd who rushed me on the trail this evening with his human close behind fucking around absent-mindedly with a music player on his phone. Don't worry, he's friendly! the dope said as the dog's teeth connected with my shin. The dog didn't actually bite me, but it was an act of aggression. Put it on a fucking leash, I said to the man. 

That was the first negative vibration emitted from me all day long. 

Had a cheeseburger for brunch and thought I'd take a walk back out to the eagle's nest after that. I walked eleven miles feeling better and better as I went. Lighter. Unencumbered, I think. 

The eagle's nest was silent. I stayed in the area for about an hour and there was no activity in the nest at all. Not sure how to interpret that for the eagles, but what grace it was to have been able to see them nesting a week ago. A beaver has been at work in the spot I chose for mediation then felling three young trees and leaving behind small piles of pithy white chips. I watched a busy nuthatch for a while. A pair of ducks. The beaver slapped its tail on the water's surface just to let me know.

I am this heart

In the dream, you found your heart lying in the middle of a trail marked with red blazes. You picked it up and raised it toward the sun. It was as heavy as a stone. The sunlight felt more nourishing than ever. You seemed to be receiving instructions. Something about courage and renewal. You walked up the trail holding the stone to your chest and searched your mind for some Lakota words. Mitakuye Oyasin. You said the words aloud twice and three whitetail deer silently flew across the trail and disappeared into the trees. You said the words again, feeling a bright surge of life inside, and the trail opened into a field of arriving robins.

Each being under the sun is astonishing, the voice said.

Hometown

The conversation with the two sixty-something women in the laundromat was insane. They wanted to know why I think Trump is a disaster for the country and then looked at me waiting like - see, you can't even think of one single reason. It's true, I was flabbergasted to the point of speechlessness. 

Let me ask you this, one of the ladies said. So you think it's fine that Biden took a shower with his daughter?

I left there with clean laundry and ugly thoughts feeling hopeless for the entire American experiment. For humanity. 

Earlier, the cashier at the pharmacy wanted to put my two or three small items in a plastic bag. I told her I didn't need a bag. She looked puzzled and continued to put the items into the bag. You know, one less plastic bag snagged up in the tree branches? You must not be married, she said with a frown. We use them in the bathroom.

I'm not married, I told her. But I do have a bathroom. And I use plastic bags in there too, but I only need like one not one-hundred. She was still frowning as I wrangled my unbagged items out of there. 

If we're still stupid at this point, it's an apocalyptic lifestyle choice.

Big night in

The distance between what's going on in here (head) and out there (world) seems to widen significantly by the day. Not only do I feel like I can't relate to most of it, I don't want to. 

Whatever dude

Today - steady work, low mood, and dark thoughts (mostly staved off). If you were to indulge them, they'd tell you that you don't want to be here. They rise and they fall. That's all. 

French Press x 2

If I acted upon every urge, right now I'd be walking the Earth sampling every outlandish casserole. I'd be spinning yarns, splitting firewood, and mucking stalls for space to pitch my little tent at night. I'd meditate before sleep, practicing the loving kindness meditation. I'd begin with a focus on myself, the sickliest, and radiate out all the way to you. 

The man told me that, like most of us, I'm stuck in the second dimension, thinking it's the third, while he's looking down on us all from the sixth. He's the smartest on earth at the moment embodying the highest components of Man and the lowest elements of God. You can't be all good. 

Crystals, Artificial Intelligence, Humans (meatbags). Yes, No, Maybe. You see?

October 4th at 7:00 AM - don't trouble yourself making plans beyond then, he said. 

Most of what he said, I could follow and even agree with. 

I'm out there walking now, free for the moment, thinking only of the next casserole, smiling gently toward everything. I can tell it's a dream because I'm not footsore. 

Why can't yours be the voice inside my head, I asked her. She smiled faintly. I couldn't tell if she was smiling at what I'd said or what she was attending to on her phone. We want connection, don't we? But not really.

With some help

A good walk in the sun yesterday of about eight miles. On the way out, I was looking for a place to sit and meditate when things dry up a little but before the black flies come out (a space of about 11 seconds). I had to work later in the afternoon so thought I'd walk for about an hour and a half and then turn around. As I got to within about 4 minutes of the turnaround, I heard the cry of a bald eagle. I saw it sitting in its nest guarding its eggs high atop a dead tree out in the middle of a swamp. At the water's edge were some giant pines with an open area beneath them covered in rust colored needles. That's my spot. 

Processing

Transmutation was not a word I was familiar with but I had unknowingly learned something about the process of it. I'd learned that you could transform despair into anger by applying fire. And that one of the properties of anger is propulsion which will rocket you right out of that terminally stuck feeling that comes with despair. Locked in a tiny, freshly painted room of the bleakest white. 

It took me a long time to realize some of anger's other properties. Like that it's a corrosive that gradually dissolves its host and taints everything external it comes into contact with. And like that it's addictive. When you get deep enough into it, you start to think that it's who you are and it becomes your default operating system. Without it, are you anything at all? The chemical quickening of it. The gritted teeth of resolve. It works, in a way, for a while. That is until all your molars crack right down through to the tip of the root.

On the table, while she was drumming and singing and talking to me about the various phases of my life, I could see myself clearly and from a different perspective in each stage. Underneath the anger, the despair, the pain, the loss - there was love. "It's not sadness. It's love," someone said. Hot tears of understanding came.

Not much. You?

Session number nine was a integration which took place entirely in this dimension. Some areas of opportunity remaining are my neck, the base of my skull, and my left hip. I need to start doing some mobility work. 

After that, I returned to Horseneck Beach where I walked as far as I could along the blustery beach and up the muddy shore of an inlet and onto a sandy trail that led me through wooded dunes. It was about 42 degrees, chilly, windy, and deserted. I liked the smell of the ocean air and the movement. I haven't cut my hair in a few months now and the wind arranged it for me in the style of a chaotic haystack. I'd never seen it look like that before. You're not who you were, I thought. And that's a good thing. 

It's been raining today and I didn't do very much with the time. Ran some errands, bought a desk calendar, some writing pads and a couple of fine point pens, paid the mortgage, cleaned the farm dirt off the dashboard of the Toyota I bought from my mother who won't be driving it anymore, cooked a steak in a frying pan, took a nap. I could go out, I guess, but that means spending money. So, there's this for now. 

Remote

Jarring. 

Ran into someone I once admired very much for her benevolence and equanimity, her grace under fire, coolness under pressure, and her constant humanity shown to those who need it most and get it least. Things have changed, she said. I'm no longer that jolly person you once knew. 

She and her family got their third Covid booster before traveling. Forty-eight hours later she found herself recovering from two heart attacks and learned that her husband and son had both died. 

I was looking at her on the screen. Oh no, I said. I'm sorry. Oh no. The words were terribly small. I felt impossibly far away. 

Before I start work

I got out of the house after work and found some space between there and the sun's setting to walk about 5 miles in the woods. February thaw. Two days of temperatures above 50 degrees. The surface of the dirt roads is a mixture of melting snow, mud, and wet ice. The perfect surface for a graceless slip and a humiliating fall. I remained mindful and was apparently lucky enough to avoid that experience this time around. I noticed lots of evidence of the recent presence of others. Footprints - dog and human. Bicycle tire tracks. I felt fortunate to have this place to myself in this moment. The experience of being out there changed my mind in the way I needed it to. I watched the blue hour unfold and returned to the car as the darkness arrived. The rain started at about the time I went to bed and continued through the night. When the sun rose, it was still raining. The squirrels stayed inside. I thought of how much I love the way a chickadee descends to the bird feeder writing its short poem in the air.

Stop the tape

Play. Stop. Rewind. Play. Stop. Rewind. Play. There was a lot of that, wasn't there? I said I was ready to let it go once and for all and I did so.

Integration

Reviewing all the parts. The hurt little boy, the angry teenager, the angrier young man, and the hobbled adult. Taking the parts back in, scrubbed clean of all the pain, after removing the shell of negativity that grew up around it. Tears leaking from under closed eyelids. It's not sadness, you realize. It's love. 

Angelic

Her name is Carla Lee. She runs the place with her husband. Two converted sheds filled with statuettes, incense and ornate incense holders made out of painted liquor bottles, crystals, books, CDs, and other mysterious items on a now horseless horse farm. Her Appaloosa passed some time ago. The ground in front of the sheds is covered in a mix of white stones and pink rose quartz pieces. She invites the customer to participate in a complimentary angel card reading upon entering and affords him/her the opportunity to pick up a piece of rose quartz to place beside the altar, if there's someone you're thinking of who's passed on, and to take a piece for yourself and the continued healing of your heart on your way out. 

She served in the Coast Guard a lot of years ago and told me I should never diminish my service by saying "not a combat veteran" when someone asks me if I'm a veteran. She opened the shop because an Angel told her to. She doesn't advertise, except for the three small hand-painted signs I followed, and she's pretty far from centrally located. But, she says, people find her. She came through trauma and addiction and hopelessness. She said most of her family members are hanging from her family tree. She found her Angel after her brother killed himself in his early 40's. That's when she stood up and said, you're not gonna get me too! Things began to change for her after that. Recovery, sobriety, spirituality and an Angelic presence that has never left her. 

We talked for a long time - she and I and sometimes an interjecting Angel. I told her how I'd found her, what led me there. Part of it had to do with feeling like I had more work to do before I could help others. She looked up for a second and told me that "they said, qualified." Meaning that doing my own healing was what would qualify me to work with others. It's not enough to know suffering, to have empathy for the suffering of others. You have to have the experience of your own healing too.

Light rain started to fall. It was getting dark. A bird flew between us at head level. She was planning to play her flute at the open mic in town tonight. The Native American flute. I love the sound of that instrument, I told her, but I don't have any musical talent. Neither do I, she said. I just close my eyes and breathe into it.

If you are alive, I recommend that you see this.

 

Go where the day takes you

She was drumming and singing and helping me to let go of a lot of shit. My eyes were closed. Tears began to leak from the outside corners. Three beings seemed to be standing around me with their love and support. 

The beach was mostly deserted. Exactly as I needed it to be. I walked down close to the surf looking for heart-shaped stones. She said that if I found one I should pick it up. I found several and filled the pockets of my sweatshirt. They weren't perfectly heart-shaped, but we often see the way we feel. A lonely man on a desolate beach weighing himself down with stones on a gray day may give off a certain impression. But that wasn't me today. I wanted to stay. 

During my time on that beach, I saw three others. A man methodically beach combing with his metal detector in the far distance; a woman who walked slowly down to the edge of the surf squatted there for a minute looking out across the ocean then stood and returned the way she came; and a man moving toward me wearing a cowboy hat and a hi-vis orange jacket accompanied by a very large dog. As they got closer, I realized the large dog was actually a tiny draft horse and it was pulling the man who stood on what appeared to be a homemade four-wheeled scooter. 

I wanted to walk as far as I could see, but it started to rain and I was getting hungry. As I got back in the car, I remembered seeing a hand-painted sign shaped like an arrow - ANGELS -  at an intersection. Let's go back there and see where it takes us. It was late afternoon and I hadn't eaten anything yet. 

Westport, Massachusetts. I saw a sign for Lees Market, a parking lot, and a long low roofed building. What a beautiful store. It made me hungry for everything. I bought a few items to take home - Lees own buffalo dip and a box of crackers, a package of store made chorico, a raspberry long john, shrimp Mozambique over spaghetti, and a store-baked French meat pie. They have a small sitting area and a long prepared food counter. I scooped up some of the catch of the day with yellow rice, sat down, and ate happily. 

The people there had a healthy look that seems to come with living in close proximity to the ocean. I could see traces of Portuguese in a lot of them. Black haired and dark eyed women. Ordinary beauty seen with fresh eyes. 

When I was through, it was nearly dusk. I went looking for more ANGELS signs and soon found one. It pointed me out past a defunct dairy farm with it's collapsing silo and led me out to Sodom Road. Apparently angels are truly everywhere.

Once and for all

After all that, I drove to an oceanside state park I visited with my family once as a kid. It was a gray and chilly day and the beach was nearly deserted. The sea was green and deep and the hissing white foam rolled stones and churned up seaweed. I gradually filled the pockets of my sweatshirt with some of the more interesting stones. I was singing something over and over again. I can't remember the words now. They came to me spontaneously. But the message was, thank you.

Life sign

Hey. I suspect that we're all isolated and spiraling as we do our best to keep our feet underneath us inside the meta-crisis, but I wanted to let you know that the squirrels are doing that thing they do as Spring draws near. There were eight of them at the feeders this morning. They're starting to chase each other in spirals up and down the trees, not yet ecstatically, but with a growing tangible energy. I think that's a positive sign. You know?

Ancestral

Thinking about you traveling home. Thinking about what home means to you. Where is it? Who is it? Hoping that I am one brick among its component parts. Wishing you safe passage on your way.

Waves

It's not news to anyone that emotions are like ocean waves. They roll in and then they wash back out again. They pass. It's up for debate, however, as to why the hard ones tend to take so much longer than the sweet ones to wash back out again. 

A couple of days ago this wave of desolation came in. There was something more alarming about it than the usual negative waves. I couldn't attribute it to anything in particular. It was enough to drive me out of my house and into the world. 

I found a familiar bartender I knew some years ago. He's grown more silver, softer looking, just like I have. We told some stories and made a few quips back and forth. I inserted myself into the banter between him and some of the younger wait staff. They made ageist jokes. The "old" bartender is seven years my junior. I didn't know it, but the jokes were stinging him. For me, it felt like just another fragment of the whole unbearable thing that will break your heart and reduce you to tears unless you can distract yourself from realizing it in some way, shape, or form. Like stage laughter. 

You think too much, they've always said. And you don't think enough, I'd retort. 

Travel is an option

You can find yourself walled-off suddenly or gradually. Your world is shrunken down and depopulated. You could accept this as the new normal. Maybe it's just a matter of lacking the energy required to break out of that perception. 

In the dream, you were traveling for work. You were having a drink with two other people while waiting for your dinner to arrive. Presumably these were new and temporary co-workers. The restaurant was on the second or third story, had partial red brick walls, but was largely open to the elements. There was a light ambient fog. As you were chatting, a clear wolfish howl rang out from somewhere close by. Without hesitation and in solidarity, you howled in return. As you finished, you could hear other responding howls winding down. No one laughed or made a big deal about it. You thought maybe this could be a good place. 

The song inside you

Sometimes I found myself close to hearing the melody or grasping the lyrics and sometimes it seemed like I'd never even had one in there to learn how to sing. 

The high side of alone

Once in a while I run into someone who is suffering so much in a relationship with another human being that it makes me glad to be unloved, un-partnered and unattached. I met two of them today. Ghosts can't hurt you that way. 

Seven

Something caught up above my upper teeth on the right side of my head. It hurt enough to make tears flow. She said she could feel an enormous scream of anger, anguish, fear and pain from my teens. Asked me if I fought it out, screamed it out, or swallowed it all. A mix of the three I think. What a strange place for it to stick. 

No comfort food

This afternoon was a long one waiting for the sun to set at 5:19 PM so that I could eat something. I passed the time in between cases watching Phantom Gourmet videos which was not really the best idea. 

Fasting slowly

I walked this evening but not even half the distance I'd expected to cover. A bitter wind rose up at some point and turned this 25 degree dusk into one that feels more like 12 degrees. My shins din't want to cooperate either. You'd think I'd never walked before. 

I heard Robins in the trees today and saw maybe eight of them. The first of the Spring, and it ain't hardly that. I'm sure there's some grumbling going on in that group. Whose bright idea was it to get an early start and beat the traffic? 

It's Valentine's Day, and so I will wish my daughter and her Valentino a happy one. It's also Ash Wednesday and the first fasting day of Lent. I decided to fast between sunrise and sunset and allow myself an evening meal tonight. This coincides conveniently with the news of my highly elevated triglycerides. Dropping about ten percent of my body weight seems like a good idea. I read a novel I've been trying to finish for about a year in between cases today. It was a very quiet day. 

Results

The lab results came in. Some of them were apparently upside down. What you'd like to see high was low, and what you'd like to see low was high. But that gives you something to work on, am I right?

Nothing seems to

Down turn today. Not sure what to attribute it to. Just changing weather, I guess. It's no matter. Snow is coming tomorrow. I put out food out for the birds and the squirrels. Birds haven't found it yet. Two squirrels appeared glad they did. 

Stick to Monday nights

Shopping and errands are bad ideas on a Sunday, and that feeling of what possessed me to come out among people washes over you.

On the turn

Like a horse barn, when the doors are open the air flow is good and the light streams in. Time and lunch with my youngest who has begun to make post graduation plans. On the way home, I walked in the late afternoon sun for a few miles along a quiet river. Talked to a growing family of scrub pines down there.

Friday doesn't hurt

This session, we worked on my spine and the back door of my heart. I saw it plainly this time. Big wide doors that can only be locked from within. Her work around the length of my spine brought up names and faces and a history of behavior. I saw the lesson. And then a history of childhood incidents with a particular theme and a particular remedy. In the end, these are mostly stories I've told to myself. And I tell them still, over and over again. I check them out of the library frequently. Mine is the only name on the card. I know each story by heart. I recite them like incantations and magic is worked. Beliefs are reinforced. Leave those books on the shelf. I tell you. Acknowledged, understood, left to stand in the past where it belongs. Exhale shame. Inhale self-determination. After, I went and  had an incredible Italian sandwich made for my supper. I ate a breakfast of coffee, eggs, beans, toast  and crab cakes in a diner and then went for a 6 mile walk on the bike path. Single people walking dogs mainly, some chatting pairs, a few solo. Most are apprehensive and look at your hands. I drank a lot of water. Had a series of naps. Woke up with neck and back loose and without pain. I was almost afraid to let myself feel what that's like. Like maybe I might jinx it, find some subtle unconscious way to invite it back in. 

Thanks, China

A rolling stand-up desk arrived from China via the (probably Satanic, but terribly efficient) Amazon shipping network earlier this week. I thanked the Chinese engineers who made the assembly simple and the instructions clear today. I managed to assemble the thing without bleeding or smashing anything or flying into a disproportionate rage when I got frustrated. I put the raised desk on wheels to use this afternoon. Too much sitting, when you work from home, will mess you up big time. 

Medicinal

Wednesday. I could feel the sun stay a little longer this evening. I took a walk in the fading light for just a mile which was just enough distance to take me out of past-centered rumination and future-focused fantasy and to put me in my body which was working a little on the hill and feeling a chill in the winter air and appreciating the light and the space. It was enough to change my mood which is like saying it was enough to change the color of the world. 
 

Outside entertainment

Early: A little rock tonight. Jon Spencer and The Hitmakers at The Drake In Amherst. Why not? It's Tuesday. 

Later: I am transfused and revitalized. I don't get any better at dancing as I age, but I do get better at dancing by myself. Something close to joy in sweating and moving (approximately) to the music. High energy band. Crazy bass player. 

Morning lessons

Here's what you need to do. Don't get carried away thinking too far ahead. You're thinking about an appointment this afternoon and not the snow and ice you're walking on in the driveway. You're reminded when your left foot nearly flies out from under you. Don't bust your ass. That's all you need to remember. Watch where you put that next foot, and don't bust your ass. 

I was tested already today. Had an appointment to get some blood drawn at one of those commercial labs. The lab is about a fifteen minute drive from where I live. I left my house forty minutes before. On the way, I encountered two school zones with all the kiddies arriving at once. I got through the first one without much cursing. Go with the flow, I said to myself. The second one involved a five-way intersection and a level of absurdity that made it feel like a cosmic joke being played on me. This can't be a natural occurrence. My anger rose. I could feel my facial expression changing my chemistry. I tried to smile to counter it, but couldn't pull it off. I was able to at least fake it half way by simulating a smile with my eyes. That kept things from escalating. I've got ten minutes to get there now. It'a about five minutes away. When I cleared the school zone, traffic was still backed up. 

Construction. Excellent logistical planning, Worcester. I'm souring again. Man, I'm good at getting myself into this sullen simmering state. It's your own fucking fault, I say, trying to take some responsibility and feeling even worse. Kicking my own ass is something I do very well too. 

Eventually, I get there. The lobby is packed. There's no receptionist just two computer screens mounted on the wall. I read the instructions and check in. The screen tells me I am more than ten minutes late (13) and that I will have to reschedule. Muttering to myself, I leave.

Next door is a bakery. Coffee and something to eat will help. They have delicious looking croissants and Valentine cookies with cute messages written in icing across them. I ignore the latter. Salami and cheese croissant and a cappuccino, please. I tip the girl. There is a mother and little girl sitting in a booth. The little girl is probably three years old. I try to smile at her. Her face hardens and she looks down at the table.  It's not that easy being a cis gendered white man these days, I'm thinking. Nobody knows. 

I find a seat and a little solace in the first bite of flaky buttery goodness. The little girl peaks around the edge of the wooden bo0th at me. I widen my eyes at her. She smiles delightedly and ducks back in. Then she peaks over the top of the booth and I smile for real this time. She does too. 

Something clicked

I forgot the word she used. Change. Transformation. Shift. Something along those lines, but she said she thought it was something major. 

For many years, people in your life have told you that you need to let go. An odd thing to be told over and over again in several states among various people in different phases of life across a lifetime. Yes, you agreed. And each time you thought you did so. You said the words to yourself in a friendly way. You screamed them at yourself in a ferocious way. You cried them to yourself in a desperate way. You wrote the words down. You offered it up in ceremony. You prayed, fasted, went without water, danced, bled, burned and suffered. Many times you thought you must have succeeded in doing so. You were close to death. You did the work. But nothing felt different. There was no release, no decrease in weight, no sustained change in the way you felt or moved in the world. 

Since then, you think you're coming to understand that maybe it's not something accomplished in one go (except maybe through death). Perhaps it's something you do gradually as you become aware of what it is you're holding on to. 

This morning has been filled with memories bubbling up from somewhere. Not only from childhood, but throughout my life. Episodes I'd forgotten or haven't thought about in years. 

Sunlight was streaming in through the kitchen window. I looked at the solar powered flower on the sill where she'd placed it. It hasn't moved in its cheerful way in a very long time. I picked it up and examined it. The plastic arms supporting the butterflies had become unattached to the mechanism within that makes the flower and the two arms move in synch. It was just a matter of lining up small pegs with small black holes in a black background and snapping them back into place. Not so easily done with tremulous fingers and failing eyesight. I turned it over to see if I might be able to pry it open and shed some light on the subject. When I did so, the center flower fell out. I hadn't used any force so I thought it would just be a matter of replacing it. Not so. It had broken clean off. 

Letting go means letting go of all that has passed. Everything. Even what you can't bear to. Especially what you can't bear to.

I moved toward the trash with it in my hand but set it down on the counter instead. I returned later knowing it was time to throw it out. As I tried to do so, I thought maybe I'll just save the flower. When I snapped off the last remaining bit of plastic stem, two of the petals came apart in my hand, as brittle as fallen leaves in November. I had to laugh. 

Alright, I surrender. I give you up.

Shirt

It's hard to find the right shirt on line. I've made a couple of unfortunate purchases in the past few months.  One was the wrong size and the other was a strange fit. Neither looked the way I'd imagined it would. If one plans to return to the world a new man, he should do so in his favorite shirt.

Halfway

The halfway point in the rolfing series - 5 sessions in. She could see that my neck was messed up when I walked in. That's primarily where the tension was. Even more than usual, it's difficult to write about what happened in there. So much. At one point she was working sort of up under the base of my skull, the attachment point of the upper trapezius. It's a spot on my body that's never been touched. She asked me if, when I was younger, I used to do a lot of raging. She said she could feel something like a massive scream in there. Later, she asked if I swallowed that rage when I got older instead of expressing it. At another point, she was working along the center line around my diaphram. My eyes were closed. I remembered the faces and the names of the men in the jail in Anchorage. The circle. Walter Austin, the Elder. The larger circle of corrections officers behind us. The three-tiered crescent of plexiglass fronted cells behind them. The way it felt when we'd hold hands as Walter said a closing prayer. What passed between us there. I remembered all the people in the agency who welcomed me, taught me, showed me care. Tears started to come. When she moved to my legs, something changed and I fell about 85 percent asleep. I was still aware, but something internal had down shifted. When it was over, the tension in my skull, neck, shoulders and back had softened. She looked at me. There were tears in her eyes - most uncharacteristic of her. Without warning, they started falling from mine too. That's your heart opening, she said. Those people you were thinking of are all around you.

Thank you and goodnight

More on call work. The problems of misunderstanding, poor communication, too many patients and not enough time. A system that exists to maintain itself before all else. Everyone should travel everywhere with a posse - a polyglot, a lawyer, a bodyguard, and anyone who can sooth you. That's my recommendation. Oh, and your insurance probably doesn't cover that. 

English

Picked up some on call time and remembered what I liked about being dropped into these complicated, heart-wrenching, twilight zonish scenarios in the middle of the night with the task of making some kind of sense of them and helping a person begin to find their way through a crisis before I burned out entirely. 

A monk said to me, "To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love".

A voice on the telephone. Such clear blue eyes. 

My nervous system, I'm trying to calm it down. I'm trying to release what's embedded and interwoven in my tissues. I'm trying to look with clarity upon how I forged an identify out of my experience of suffering and rejected a lot of goodness along the way as a result. I'd like to think I might still become someone else.

I'm also trying to keep in mind how puny my sufferings are in the scheme of things. Worthy of my time only if I can transmute them into something that propels me forward. 

I put new sheets on the bed last night. That's a step in the right direction.

Minimalist drama

I prefer not to engage in poisonous exchanges. Even though I have, up until now, been rather easily bated into engaging in them. Probably I've used those occasions to vent pent up angers and resentments and to fan the flames of new ones. Now, I'll just let you do your thing without me. 

Shoppers of the last resort

I forgot when it snowed last but I didn't get around to shoveling it until tonight. I needed groceries. Coffee primarily. Apparently after 7 PM on Monday is the time to shop if your preference is to avoid crowds. The few people I saw in the supermarket were single men. They looked to me to be recluses, madmen and alcoholics. I felt fine.

Shadow work

Coming to terms with the past. Facing what you can't accept about yourself and don't allow out in the light ("everyone has a chapter they don't read aloud"). Let go of what no longer serves you. Embrace the ugly in yourself. Surrender. Integrate. Carry your true cross. Lay down your burden. How can you be so wrapped up in your own tiny pains when the entire world is on the brink? Heal yourself, heal the world. Shut up already. Enough for now. 

Memphis

The house became mildly oppressive today so I walked the five-mile loop on dirt roads bordering the state park. Memphis came to mind while I was walking. I've driven through that city a few times over the years but never really stopped. It might be time to go. The longer I remain in this house, the further away the world gets.

I'm not sure how it works exactly, but

I emerge once again from the session taller, upright, closer to my intended alignment. Something in the left leg this time. An adhesion. It's interesting the way it plays out. She locates it. I feel it (and try to keep my self from leaping off the table). She tells me to breathe into it. Somehow I manage to do that. Try it. Breathe into your leg. My mind reacts as though the injury and the pain around it is a given. Accept it, stop touching it, ignore it, and just stumble forward. She is working on it while I'm trying to remain unclenched and breathing. And then whatever it is somehow releases and is gone. Your leg is now longer and so is your stride. What was immobile a moment ago now has spring in it. 

I get home with plans for the rest of the day and fall immediately into a deep sleep for about three hours. Your history is being rearranged, I think. 

Healing

I had a doctor's appointment today. Nothing much has changed since the last time I had a primary care physician. Poor listening skills, very little time, no apparent effort made to connect, trite solutions I could have come up with myself based on no data. Physical exam in less than 5 minutes. 

Do you want a prostate exam? 

Is it going to cost me extra? 

No, it comes with the package. 

This ain't my first rodeo you know. Let's go. 

Slightly enlarged.

Yeah, numerous nocturnal bathroom trips clued me in. We gonna do anything about it?

No. There's medication, but it lowers your blood pressure.

Thanks.

She did give me the two sentence letter I need for my Flexible Spending Account though. 

Hoops

I've got a doctor's appointment tomorrow. It's my first one in eight or ten years with the exception of a trip or two to Urgent Care for Covid testing some time back. I spent the better part of an afternoon trying to locate one who's taking new patients and can schedule a first appointment before July. The only reason I'm doing so is to obtain the documentation I need to release money I have deducted from my paycheck and put into a Flexible Spending Account in order to pay for ten sessions of Rolfing. That account appears to need rolfing as badly as I do. Not at all flexible.

Maybe

Zoom makes me wonder who that stranger is. Not the person I'm listening to, but that other face down there in the lower right corner. That can't be my face. Zoom makes me realize that I've forgotten how to smile. When the face in the lower right corner follows social convention and tries to form one, he looks deranged and possibly ill. Maybe if you're looking for a goal to set it could be to find your smile again.

Black

I don't know why the memory returned. A black bear, shot dead, being loaded into the bed of a pick-up truck by two men. The lush, shining, impossible blackness of its coat stopped me cold. I felt this piercing shock of shame. Not just crime but sin. 

Brunch

Brunch with the three of them today. Wonderful to be with them. Not so easy to be young. Or to be. 

Winter

Twenty degrees or below and the snow blew in horizontal down the river from Vermont and across the low fields stinging my face and quickening something inside. I watched and listened to the ice sheets break apart against the bridge's stone footing. I was talking out loud alone out there, except for the Universe, which seemed to be listening closely. Such stark beauty in this cold.

Tipsier

Which is another way of saying live right now. 

Awake. Aware. Alive. 

And in love with the fact that you are.

I think they also meant that. 

There was a moment of terror when I realized the stone fortress I spent a lifetime building needs to be razed one stone at a time. Who will I be when I've taken my "self" apart? When all the lumps have been smoothed? 

You are as much the story you tell yourself as anything else.

Some of these words are not my own. At times in my life saying them would have embarrassed me. Hearing someone else say them would have made me sneer. 

At some point, early on, you came to believe that life was a process much like running a gauntlet. You steel yourself, cover your vitals as best you can, and charge forward. It's not faith that propels you. It's more like a fuck you kind of defiance. You can't win, but you won't make it easy for them either. The blows rain down and come in from all directions. You go on until you can't. It's a trial and a measure of heart, both a penance and a punishment. Life. 

There's no possibility of healing there. No light. No joy. No love. That's not entirely true - there is something like light and joy and love, but it's on fire - a burnt offering. The scenario doesn't allow you to live life with those things manifesting in the world around you. It only allows for you to die with them as ideals held tightly. 

What if the blows ended and you could stop bracing yourself and protecting your vitals? What if your mind turned away from war entirely?

Sober as can be

Five Remembrances

We will get old

We will experience sickness and poor health

We will one day die

We will lose everything and everyone we hold dear

There is no way to escape the consequences of our actions

Cup

There is a single large red cappuccino cup in the cabinet

It's been there for years trying to make me look at it

The cup's redness reminds me of when life itself

Changed from black and white to vivid technicolor

Of when the birds and their vibrancy arrived 

Of when my deceased brilliance drew a sudden deep 

Shuddering breath and startled back into life

That single large red cappuccino cup in the cabinet 

Is causing me to miss you sharply this morning

Just this

Made coffee, made tea, did ten hours of work, a little straightening up of the house, a little shoveling, ordered some heating oil, sent an e-mail or two, cooked a couple of thin steaks left sitting too long in the refrigerator, did the dishes, attended a therapeutic Zoom meeting, and wrote down this short list of activities that comprise a day in my life. It's strange, this. 

Fraught

We worked in the fields together for years as kids. He was a couple of years older than me. I remember him standing in for me once when an older kid called me out to fight. Sometimes he'd get into fights with his old man too, someone he wanted very much to respect but couldn't. During these occasions, he'd talk defiantly with a quiver in his voice about going into the woods to live. "All I need is my fishing pole and my bow," he'd say. You could hear his anger, but I could feel his pain. Rejection. Not being seen or loved for who you are. 

I realize I've told myself that very same story for many years. This is how, spiritually speaking, I've come to live upon this island out in the middle of the reservoir. I've watched the seasons change from here so many times now. I've endured the mosquitoes and the cold. I've also learned that one can only eat so many bluegills.

Putterer

It's always during a significant cold spell or a holiday weekend that I wake up with a sinking feeling about the state of my heating oil stores. I've ignored a couple of recent internal twinges warning me that I'm probably coming due until today when I noticed the gauge is bottomed out but the tank, thankfully, is not yet entirely empty. I bought five gallons of diesel fuel and will likely repeat the process tomorrow. Last Winter I experienced a similar event and, while distracted by rambling thoughts, I put five gallons of gasoline into the tank instead of diesel. That created some problems, but I eventually figured a solution without blowing up the house. Remind yourself to pump mindfully tomorrow. 

I discovered the status of the fuel tank this morning while trying to accomplish a simple task that turned out to take the better part of the day to accomplish. I needed to replace two license plates on a car. One of them came off easy enough, but the second one refused. I employed some WD 40. That did the trick for one screw but not the other. I apparently don't own any metric wrenches, so I went out and bought a few. The job was easily done once those were acquired. 

I think today I might have been an old man puttering around. I always wondered what that was like. 

Trail at dusk

I found this section of the rail trail I hadn't walked before. A friend from another state happened to text me while I was out there. I sent her a photo of the river I was watching go by and of the trail I was walking down. She joked that I was showing off about living in an enchanted forest and next I'd tell her the birds here do my hair like some Disney princess. All at once, I remembered the story you told me about raising a baby bird when you were a child. About how it slept in your hair. How could I have forgotten that? There was a feeling of horror in noticing that I had. How everything, even what you cherish more than anything else, passes away. 

Let go. Fall away with love and try to smile. What else can be done?

Grandiose and insignificant

The headline on the homepage my computer is set to lets me know scientists are saying time is almost up. The doomsday clock is advancing closer to midnight. 

They told me to come to the event with an intention. Maybe a question you want answers to. Sometimes, to gain perspective, it's good to say things out loud. 

I can feel the world dying, I said. What can I do to save it?

New Bedford

Second session. More history came up when adhesions were released. It's an interesting process. After that, I realized I haven't seen the ocean in a very long time. I drove to New Bedford and spent the afternoon walking along the docks and through the downtown. Spent some time in a shrine to Our Lady of The Safe Voyage and listened to the priests chanting somewhere out of sight. I lit a candle at the foot of a tall statue of St. Jude. He's the patron saint of lost causes and hopeless cases. It felt good to be out of my element and somewhere strange to me for a little while. 

Taste buds

Sleep. A million hours doesn't seem to be enough.

Waking, your mind reaches out and finds only silence.

More of the same -  projection. Bland. Doesn't have to be.

This is the life you are choosing. Right?

Like the strangest of dreams, we were having dinner,

my wife and I, in an Indian restaurant. One of our very young

children was with us. The waitress seemed to be staring at 

me. She was young, early twenties. When she came by to 

check on us, she stood very close to me. She was indeed 

staring at me. My wife didn't seem to notice this. I thought 

I might be losing my mind. When we'd finished eating,

the waitress came over to the table and, looking directly into my eyes 

with a soft voice said, do you want to taste something sweet?

The work day improves with the right amount of engagement. 

Too little and I'm bored, sleepy, ruminating. 

Too much and it's like a war and too much of that makes me hard to be around. 

Today was just about the right tempo, despite a headache or two. 

Today I'd be pretty decent company, I'll bet. 

Something sweet might be nice. 

Where?

I woke from a dream with a very specific place name in mind, and something told me to write it down. Timber Brook, Illinois. 

Maybe not today

Even when you don't talk, you can get sick of the sound of your own voice.

Dull

I don't know what tamped it down today. It was just an ordinary workday starting with coffee and a break for 15 minutes of shoveling thrown in the middle of it somewhere. I said good morning to the plant. I took a shower. By noon, I wanted to go back to bed. That feeling followed me around all day applying steady downward pressure.

Winter stuff

A week into January and we’ve now had the first real snowstorm. There appears to be six to twelve inches of light powdery snow out there. I’m going to drag myself out for some shoveling soon. The first time is often the hardest. Your body forgot how to move properly in order to accomplish the task, you’re slipping around, you feel as thought you’ve never done any physical labor in your life, and you are quite likely to have a heart attack and not be found until Spring. Coffee first. A good, long sleep again last night. Besides the shoveling, there are a few other things to accomplish today.

Move into the kitchen. I’ve let the dishes slip and have fallen behind on keeping the counters clean so I remedy that. I keep the used coffee grounds in an old plastic dishpan now. I put the food waste in a Grillo’s pickle container. This distinction is both a sign of life and of forward evolution. In the past, I threw it all together and wouldn’t think about taking it out until I was horrified by what I noticed growing out of the container or the smell dictated that I address the issue. What happens, see, is that it’s supposed to be compost. You know, to avoid sending food scraps to landfills. Food waste puts good nutrients into the soil. I don’t really have a garden, but it’s a nice thing to do anyway. Here, at the hermitage, it’s really an offering to the wild things. Whatever I compost gets scavenged - no matter how rotten, fuzzy, stinking, or moldy it is. On top of that inconvenience every food item was encrusted in rancid coffee grounds. What wild thing enjoy that? For the sake of my neighbors now, I separate them. I vow going forward to offer you tastier scraps, my animal friends. 

She recommended I sit on my sit bones. This means to put your feet out in front of you, flat on the floor, toes pointed forward, and you rock your pelvis forward. Don’t strain. Alignment. 

Out the door to shovel for 15 minutes while it’s still falling down. I’m thinking there’s a little more than a foot. By the end of fifteen I was mildly staggering, and my low back was considering greener pastures. We’ll go back for more later. 

Now, I’m on the internet and, because of the falling snow and that insulated silence that comes with it, I’m thinking of the radio program Hearts of Space: Slow Music For Fast Times. It features “ambient, space, and contemplative” music from around the world. The show is one of those personal treasures that come at you on the car radio when you’re spinning the dial alone on a highway after midnight. This one played, I believe, on a Sunday night on the public radio station in Fairbanks. 

It was winter and my entire waking life was spent in the dark. The temperatures were down as low as minus 40 and didn’t come up much from there. The cold there was very dry. It dried and froze the mucous in your nose on your very first breath when you stepped outside. It has an edge to it, a serrated blade on your skin and in your lungs. I had the feeling of living in a freezer. Frozen sparkling vapor for air and everything covered in a dry frost that appears almost fluffy. Meanwhile the ground and the Chena River’s waters froze solid as rock down several feet. 

Coming upon this music at 2:00 AM in such conditions, under a brilliant starry cloudless sky and the Northern Lights was a sacred thing. I’m lucky to have experienced it. You don't need to take an expensive cruise in order to see it. Just drive a cab on the night shift (6p-6a).