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.