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). 

Crop Dusted Sensorium

Here you are after having your sensorium crop-dusted. There’s this drift. Wait, I can’t find it now. It comes and goes in accordance with its own inherent rhythms. Give me a second. 

Do you know I didn’t plug the lights in at all this holiday season? These glowing bulbs provoke a very specific feeling. They’re on now and my altered perspective helps to metabolize it all. Shh, remembering need not bring you low.

Did you notice (I already know you did) that we found a way to make the story all about us? Instantly, automatically. Is it like that for everyone? The way we orient ourselves to events going on around us. How we always manage to become the point of reference, the protagonist, even when the story belongs entirely to someone else. Something about understanding when you are in a supporting role and disappearing from the scene. There’s something to be learned there.

I remember the row houses for saie in the center of a small northern village in which all the sheep had died in the span of a single season and half the farmers suicided rather than face bankruptcy.

Spent the morning out west among the worried well off. Nervous, hypochondriacle, entitled, white - hurrying around getting supplies and freaking out in in anticipation of a snowstorm tonight. I was mildly amused and kind of pitying them rather than feeling angry and spiteful. I chalk that one up as personal growth. 

Two, at the the most. One would be better, he advised.

Yes, sir. One was indeed sufficient. 

You bet I can dance to this. There's those leaves again. Combined, they're a tool for keeping time, but more than that, there's some kind of bouncing magic. Trance inducing. In time with your heartbeat. The bass will carry you home. And (a word to the wise) someone ought to adjust the density dial just a smidgen on either the dip or the dipping chip, nah'meen?

Pelvic Disorganization

It’s 7 AM, and I’ve got five items on my list today. The wind has calmed down. The snow hasn’t started yet and it’s gotten colder over night. I turn the heat up five degrees. Sixty is for sleeping. I’ve turned it up to sixty-five during the day lately since I’m working at home. I say good morning to the plant and put the kettle on the stove. I should give the plant a name. I’m burning more oil and my electric bill is twice what it was when I was out of the house 12 to 16 hours a day. I’d like to get solar power and to learn more about heat pumps. I need new windows and probably a roof too. The problem with being here all the time is that you begin to notice all that’s worn out and deteriorating. When you’re on the fly, there’s not time for any of that. 

Heart visualization. Imagine your heart. See it (I’m seeing it). Notice its doors (Hmm, doors?). What kind of doors do you see? (Wait. Doors?) The doors are where the love you give exits your heart and where the love you receive enters (I’m still looking). Some hearts might have great big doors - like bank vaults or meat lockers. It’s useful to visualize them in order to understand how love flows in and out of your heart (Houston, we have a problem). 

I saw it immediately and plainly. It was an ornamental heart - like those Mexican painted tin hearts but rounded and three dimensional. It made me think of a Christmas tree ornament. I was viewing it from the side, but I could tell there were no doors. No openings at all in fact. What I could see was a seam. A weld going all the way around the heart. Two pieces of curved metal (each comprising half of a heart) fastened together securely creating a chamber inside. There’s nothing passing in and out of that. What’s within stays within and what’s without can’t get in. How does love move in and out?

I’ve been thinking about how to write about it all. The way the manipulation of fascia seems to be directly responsible for the thoughts and memories that arise. These points of tension, knots, adhesions in the body and what they contain. Malignant seeds. And how you can breathe light into these area of your body and breathe out all that pain and negativity. If you were saying this to me, I’d be working hard trying to conceal a skeptical frown. By the end though, my legs had been lengthened. I walked taller. My arms had a natural swing to them. 

On the table, there was a springiness to my body after awhile and no more pain. Initially it was just tension and stiffness. The sensation of touch was like someone pressing hard on a bruise. I was confused after and a little disoriented. She warned me that these sessions can be significant. They stir things up and move them around. I managed to get a couple of errands run on the way back, but felt a strong need to sleep as soon as I got home. 

Ease. I still grit my teeth when I hear that word spoken. But I’m really just a puppet in this case. Yes, the teeth are mine, but the gritting is being done by another. Ease, relaxation, being comfortable - these things were violently opposed and then functionally annihilated a long time ago. First it was done to me and eventually I learned to do it to myself. I can still hear the door burst open and your work boots stomping in raging strides across the floor. That’s the image that comes to mind. The symbol for anti-ease entering my body. 

Keep telling me that the goal is to experience ease in my body. I need to hear a strong voice of opposition. Encourage me to functionally annihilate anti-ease. It’s not going to be easy, I’m pretty good at making the stuff by now. We’ve got a lot of work to do in 10 weeks. 

Accord

The light is gradually returning, I believe this even though I cannot perceive it. I’m waking up in the dark to start my job after a shower I have to remind myself to take. For a moment, laying there, I look out toward the horizon, the internal one, and see nothing silhouetted against it. This is disappointing.I am alone, which is alright, but the vista is lonesome and, for a moment, I’m sinking. I won’t drown, not because of this. It's just easier to do when there’s something to look forward to. Not that there isn’t, it’s just a failure of imagination on my part and a taking of life for granted with a general lack of gratitude. No need to flog yourself with that knowledge, but you might find yourself better served if you can shift your perspective. 

What you’d like to see there is the object of your desire, a great love, your soul’s salvation. What you should place there instead is a well-made sandwich or a walk under the Winter sun. 

Yours is a problem of scope not of hope, kid. Come back to this day. Come back to the Earth, to this house, to this room, to your body, to your breath, to your heartbeat, to right now. Stay here. And now, live…

The work day unfolded and kept me busy initiating sub-optimal electronic communications with people in crisis parked on stretchers in busy emergency department hallways. Is there help in that? Sometimes I’m not sure. 

Try to connect. Try to listen well. Try to communicate understanding and competence. I know what you need, and we are in the process of getting it for you. Help has arrived. Don’t worry.

I do that for ten hours and, when I’m finished, I’ve developed that strange exhausted feeling in my head. I layed down on my bed and fall asleep instantly. I’m already dreaming. 

It’s like walking into a room where people are engaged in multiple conversations and a television show with a laugh track is playing simultaneously in the background. It was going full tilt before I arrived and will continue on after I’ve left. It’s this whole other world in perpetual frenetic motion that I drop into and wake out of. 

Just before waking this time, I dream of a woman about my age being chatted up by two men. One man is older than me and one man is younger. I am sitting at a piano instead of a table. I decide to be bold and approach. I pull up a chair and, still standing, ask if I may join them. There’s just silence. I can feel the rejection which I’ve already absorbed and taken in stride as I begin to wake. 

Earlier, I’d thought that I might go out for a meal and a beer or two after work, in keeping with the spirit of having something to look forward to. Now, it just seems kind of pointless and like an unnecessary expense. I go to the kitchen and make a meal out of what I find there. Uncle Ben’s Spanish rice, bacon, queso fresco, and kalamata olives. Add a little garlic powder and some adobo, without tasting it, once all the items are mixed together. Frank’s hot sauce. Dill pickle chips on the side. Two slices of Dave’s Killer Epic Everything organic breakfast bread, toasted - one with cream cheese and one with butter. All of it washed down with a cold glass of watermelon juice. Dave’s isn’t a sponsor, but I’ll plug their bread anyway. It’s good. 

The wind has risen. Snow is on its way for the weekend. I’ve got somewhere to be in the morning so I’m hoping it will hold off. Early morning coffee, a car ride, and then some challenging work on my fascia. It’s trapped in my body, woven into my muscle tissue - I got that message very clearly. After completing her assessment, the expert agreed. “The issues are in the tissues.” 

Fifty-seven is a funny age to start working on yourself, I guess. But when else was there time?

No outside contact today. I only left the house to bring out trash and recycling and to check the mailbox. I didn’t spend a dime. I didn’t do any running or walking, and that’s been too common an occurrence since before Christmas. I feel the difference in my body composition. 

I was half-listening to an episode of the podcast I mentioned yesterday while typing this morning. A Costa Rican woman was featured as a guest. I missed her name, but she was one of the principal architects of the World Climate Accords. She comes from a prominent political family in her country and rose in status to become a world leader on addressing climate change. She spoke very matter of factly about being suicidal during the time of the accords while being featured on a world stage. Her issues were deeper and more personal than climate change or the pressures and difficulties of negotiating among competing interests, worldviews and political entities. She credits Buddhism with saving her life. But what impressed me most about it was the openness with which she spoke. A person of real stature speaking directly and honestly, like a real person, about her existential struggle. We need more of that. 

The world beats the shit out of people. People, in turn, swallow that pain, freeze it, store it, bury it, deny it,  dump it on someone weaker, and pass it on to the next generation. Sometimes, all too often, they end it by killing its host. 

Healing is one of those words that gets thrown around so often it’s in danger of becoming meaningless (and of making me gag). That’s true right up until you become desperate enough to need some yourself. Or you witness it happening in someone else and get a little taste. 

What if you can do more than just endure this place? What if you can actually heal? Maybe even thrive.

Progressive

I’ve set a goal to write 1,000 words daily. That’s why the posts are longer lately. They read like journal entries but they aren’t entirely that. I’m playing around with essay, memoir, fiction, poetry, automatic writing and therapeutic exercises. Mostly, I’m just trying to get serious about writing. Typing until, hopefully, something good emerges.

I just got my first pair of progressive lenses in the mail. I’m a little seasick trying to type with them on. It’s depressing, I guess. Or maybe, more accurately, it’s the way of things. And you can be depressed about it if you wish.

My mother is adjusting to aging and to changes in her health. A dear friend is deep into helping her mother through her last days. The horrors of dementia. Of cancer. Of watching someone disappear. All of it is part of the cycle. All too real. It can be faced or run from, but running won’t help you or take you very far. 

I got to see a version of dying some time ago. The hardest thing was letting go. That’s where all the struggle and fear is. But when I did, I was instantly free. Everything felt new and I was not afraid. I did not even imagine looking back or trying to return. Feeling like falling at first, but soon it was flying. Free of everything that gave me mass, that pressed down upon me, or bound me to the Earth. If there was a lesson, it was only that this will happen and it’s not something to fear. Practice letting go. Falling free. Flying.

Hold her hand. Sit quietly beside her. Wait for the song to rise in you. Sing it softly, when it does, with strength enough for her to feel. Your song will carry her through fear and struggle. When you feel her hand relax in yours, you will know she has let go. She is flying now, whole and well, beyond all pain and concern. She’s part of everything. Wide beyond all imagining.

I’m many years behind the times in the use of media. I wouldn’t know how to simply “watch TV” anymore with all the options available. I’m late to the party with podcasts too. Mostly, I rejected them as a whole some time ago because I’m annoyed by the human voice as often as not and also by the really dumb shit so many people have to say. Why put myself through that when I can have silence? 

There have been exceptions to that though. One of them is, The Way Out Is In: Zen And The Art of Living. It’s inspired by the late Zen Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, and broadcast from Plum Village, the intentional monastic community he established in France. I think I’ve listened to 17 episodes so far. Each one ends with a short mindfulness meditation. What a powerful thing it is to come back to your breath. To notice in breath and out breath. A simple, beautiful practice and an antidote to all the forms of madness I am intimately acquainted with. Sit still, breathe, return. It’s practical and effective. I hope it’s something you can use. 

I got frustrated while talking with a customer service representative today. I have a small amount of money in a retirement account sponsored by an agency I worked for for a little over a year. Since leaving there, I purchased a new phone and with it got a new phone number. As a result, I’m left with no way of accessing my account because a verification code is sent to either my phone number or my e-mail address (at the agency where I no longer work). The few pieces of mail I’ve received from this company strangely never have contact information listed. I looked it up on line, found a customer services number and made the call. Eventually, I found my way to a human being. I told her I would like to change the e-mail address and phone number associated with my account because I can no longer access it. She authenticated me using my full name, date of birth, social security number, former place of employment, and mailing address. She asked for my termination date from the agency. I can’t remember. She asked for my hire date. I can’t remember that one either. I know they were about 13 months apart. I can name the months, after some angry recollecting, but apparently I can’t name the exact days. I guess and guess again. She won’t budge. Can you please change just one of those things?, I ask. How about just my e-mail address? No, sir. Then can you please just mail a statement to my home address? Yes, that she can do. Alright then, if it’s not too much trouble, please do. Please allow five to seven business days, sir. 

I realize I’m feeling murderous and that I’ve raised my voice at her on the telephone. The matter is tedious and frustrating, but it’s really of very little consequence. There was no need to be harsh with that woman. The fact that I did so so quickly and without hesitation reveals something. On some level, I believe that I am more important than she is. That’s sobering. I don’t like looking at myself under that light. The woman stayed cool and professional (if a little mechanical). She must be shaking her head at yet another entitled North American adult baby. If I’d only taken a minute to breathe, I would have realized that, although the current situation appears absurd from my point of view, the woman I think I am frustrated with is protecting my assets even while under attack (by me). She’s doing her job very well. 

My behavior was what was absurd about the incident, and I very nearly missed that fact while operating in zombie mode. Zombie mode is your unconscious programming. Your auto-pilot. Mindfulness occurred, but not until after the fact. Not until I’d already infected that woman, who was only performing her job, with my poison.

Tijuana is for

He had a pet name for her. He used it unselfconsciously when talking to other people who didn’t know her at all. He said that he loved her with all of his heart. I could see that he did. He also said that he hoped this didn’t mean that she’d fallen out of love with him. I could see that he meant that too. His helpless eyes told me. I was adding things up. It wasn’t looking good. I filed the report.

This morning I was watching the sun rising up through the trees casting its life-giving light upon my housemate from the plant kingdom. A melody came into my head and then a lyric, and I sang to my healthy green friend. It was a kind of chant - simple, direct, repetitive. The magic moves through the repetition. A strong but gentle assertion driven softly home in the spirit of love. I sang the same song to the shining sun except I used its name in place of the plant’s. I don’t usually chant to plants or to the sun, but it was in me to do so today. It felt like the right thing and I enjoyed it. 

There were four deer in the trees behind the house all day today. There’s so little green left for them to graze on out there. They moved fluidly, slowly, blending with the trees and brush so perfectly that I couldn’t at first see their bodies only their motion. One listened and watched over with stock-still attention while the others ate and moved. It’s so difficult to be a wild thing. Always wary, always searching for food, always every effort spent trying to live another day. Here I am peeping through the window of my climate controlled dwelling worried about what exactly?

Then there was the nowhere man. He was a man without history or documentable experience. A man untethered to place, to planet. A crater where his soul had been, shallow puddle of  synthetic opioid glinting in its bottom. I have no answer to offer. Is that you or your shadow? 

Dumbbell curls, bench press, overhead press, behind-the-neck-press, lateral raises, front raises. I sprinkled them into the workday between phone calls. Movement is important. Without it, the authorities usually find people like me eventually decomposed into their chairs or beds. Our flesh, clothing, and upholstery all melded into one strange and stinking fabric. Not today, you buzzards. Not today. 

Here we are now, well into the new year, and I’m doing the things I set out to do. Nearly 48 hours of total victory. Here’s the thing though, I don’t have a whole lot to say at the moment. Hmm, what else? 

Well, interacted with three people from various periods of my past today. All three interactions were pleasant. One of them, though. reminded me of toxic people and this hollow, sleep-deprived feeling of being mired in a black tar, crude oil swamp. Today, I  am rejoicing that I am no longer in the swamp and  celebrating the fact that I had the chance to know those three good people, Remember when getting to know people over a period of time was a nearly invisible part of your daily life? 

This music takes me to Tijuana. I was 18 then. I thought I was too broke to be robbed and to invisible to be killed. The only people who gave me occasional problems were the police who were not ashamed to rob me even though I was broke. But they left me my military ID which was my means for walking back across. Mostly, I found tolerance there. Often, I lost my mind there. Sometimes, mercy found me there. That was nice. Thanks for the memories. 

Texting with someone from long ago. The bad timing we experienced together. The traffic patterns worked against us, the lights and signals, and so we never came together which saved us eventually the mess that comes later and the desolation that stretches out into the forever distance from there. 

I want to take a long walk while my knees still work. My hips. While I can still see with my eyes and my imagination.  While something in here is still stirring. While I can still dream and wish and wonder. I want to walk across countries and continents. I want to walk out of everybody’s memory and home again into somebody’s arms later. I can’t see her face. Beloved. You evade me. You misery.

It’s nearly midnight, when this assignment comes due. No extensions, the master told the students and I’ve got 240 more words to generate. When you think, it stops. You have to let it run. You have to get out of your own way. Frigid, you remember? How at ease she was diagnosing you. But she wasn’t wrong though, was she? 

The cashier at the gas station in a different state told me I looked nice. She said it as though she was only thinking it or, speaking the words, but only to herself. She nodded her head once after saying the words. Can you fall in love with someone’s nod? Yes, you can. But you can’t keep her. And if you try to replay the moment three days later, she will become afraid of you and you will have triggered a startle response. 

What I’m trying to say is - just be present in this moment. 

What I’m trying to say is - why bother? 

The question I have for you is: what are you saving it for? 

The question I’d like to pose to you is this: where the hell did it go? 

I’m seven hours from the start of the work day. This comforter smothers in its attempt to fulfill its destiny. Apostrophes. Forty. Nonsense. There is less to say as the hours pass it seems, but your sense of urgency for saying it is not what a writer’s should be. So what does that make you? Our time here is almost up. 

The first day of the new year

Twenty-twenty-four didn’t seem like a real possibility to a kid watching the futuristic fantasy Space:1999 on television in the mid-1970’s, and yet here we have arrived. Let this be the start of something better despite the prerecorded messages looping inside your head telling you otherwise. We are great and talented visionaries of demise. We have been well trained. Dystopia is so easily imagined. But what if we can conjure something else?

There’s no obvious winter here today, looking out through the window. I’m going to put my pack on and go for a walk in the woods this morning. I’m going to write 1,000 words today. I’m going to buy some spackle and start to prep the walls in the narrow hallway for painting. I’m going to shop for some 40 pound dumbbells. These are the things I will do today. 

The woods were waiting for me having changed some since my last visit. The road along the power lines runs up a short hill, bald after last Spring’s clear cut. The logs that once were trees there are piled neatly, obscenely, at the top. The site is always discouraging to me. My lower legs - shins and calves - are tight. I’m already feeling exertion. Always starting over is the curse of the inconsistent. 

The dirt road that descends the far side of the hill in a series of switchbacks is soft revealing deer and coyote tracks. It’s a little early for a January thaw. Once in the woods, I encounter a giant evergreen fallen across the trail. It seems to have split about ten feet up the trunk. The branches grew heavier on one side than the other, maybe, then the wind rose. There’s a zen lesson in there somewhere. Some of the branches are propping up the thick trunk, and I’m able to duck under without going out of my way. 

I take the same route as usual up to the pebble. Someone has removed a couple of fallen trees from the brook and its course is wider since my last venture through. There’s no ice at all in the swamp. The sun is bright. I’m thinking of the year ahead. 

Have you noticed that when you’re in motion - driving, flying, walking, running - you tend to think about goals and objectives? I have. I come up with all kinds of plans. My hypothetical life begins to fall into some sort of order during these times in transit. However, when I’m sitting still with time enough to put ideas into practice, I’m usually dull and inert. 

Walking up the hill to the first parking area brings the sweat out of me. Back in the woods, I roll an ankle on the trail, trip over sticks, slip on leaves, kick stones and roots. What’s the opposite of surefooted? Doubt footed. Let’s go with that. My booted feet are as deft as wooden blocks. There’s a process of acclimatizing you have to endure. You go through a sort of hazing before the woods let you feel like you’re anything else but unwelcome here. 

As I’m reaching the top of the last hill, I notice two dogs dressed in fluorescent orange vests trotting toward me along another trail. There are three people following them. I am not glad to see any of them. I’m ok with dogs, despite some early encounters with aggressive ones, but I’m usually annoyed by their people. One of the dogs, some kind of Doberman mix, slips around the boulder at the top of the hill to get behind me. He’s curious. “Hey Pup,” I say in that kind of high voice you use with a baby you’re trying not to scare. His people are approaching and they annoy me by not calling the dog back to them. I don’t even look at them.

I’ve reached my turn around point, so I execute an about face and head toward home. On the way back, the sweat is flowing freely. The pack is heavier than I remember it being and I know that I’m moving slower. Stop that shit, I say to myself, and just cover the distance. In the end, it’s 4.07 miles. When I get back into the house, I step on the scale. With pack and boots, I weigh in at 270 pounds. That makes me a little more understanding toward myself for all the stumbling and perceived exertion.

I took a shower and a twenty minute nap. The people who inhabit my dreams were speaking Spanish. My hair is as long as I remember having it in the last 25 or 30 years. It’s both too short and too long to do anything but look like a disturbed individual wearing a Beatles wig. That’s alright, I work from home, don’t date, and almost never go out. I usually remember to take showers, though that often seems unnecessary too. I think it’s a gesture to demonstrate to myself that I’ve yet to depart the civilized world entirely. Someone last week reached out to me to talk about a job that would allow me the opportunity to interact with others without having to manage anyone. The idea of something new sounded attractive for a minute, though I’ve yet to decide what, if anything, I’m going to do about it. 

I made the trip to Walmart and found the 40 lb dumbbells, spackle, canvas, sand paper and a bunch of groceries I could have probably done without and was astounded at the price. But what the hell, it’s stuff I’ll use. 

I took myself out for dinner to one of those Asian-Cajun boil places and ate spicy clams and shrimp with a Mai-tai and a beer. I’m a regular there. The staff recognize me. The owners are a very good looking couple who work hard together operating this business. I feel lonely when I see them together. Most of the time I don’t feel that way, but sometimes it gets me. When it does, I’m suddenly lost.