time travel

Last Wednesday, as I clicked the ‘Publish’ button to share “singalong junk,” a message flashed on the screen – “You’ve published 100 times on fromamountainbench.” I was kind of surprised to see it. One hundred’s a lot.

It doesn’t feel so long ago when one day – Oh whimsy, sweet, devilish whimsy – my long-standing blog “couch surfing at 70” just stopped doing its August 2018 thing. No one received a post in their email that day, or any day after, and maybe a month later I stopped swimming against the tide of why and said, to myself, “Now what?” Not long after, this showed up:

And “from a mountain bench” burgeoned forth out of the space that was ‘couch surfing.’ Then last Wednesday the ‘Jetpack’ tag-along-stats held up its “100” sign – “You’ve shared your personal goofy, sweet, sorta weird, mostly confused, experiential, wondering, wandering, gypsy-ish, and, (re #102) vastly lost self here in front of all these people 100 times. One Hundred!!”

I’m older now – um, as are you – and call this metaphorical, and so, so real, mountain space home. Wait! Check this out –

“For whom do you bathe and make yourself presentable? The voice of the cuckoo urges you to come home; hundreds of flowers fall, yet the voice is not stilled; even deep in jumbled peaks, it is calling clearly.”

That’s a verse from “The Five Modes of Tung-shan,” which I was hanging out with back in San Diego’s Golden Hill neighborhood, way before San Luis, even way before I met Ann. If that’s not a perfect description of me right here right now today, I’ll run to the closest mirror and take a picture of me taking a picture of me taking a picture of…….

This is 103. Thanks for hanging out.