how it feels

A guy who was in the rooms when I first set out doing the sober thing was always saying, “I don’t know nothing about nothing.” It took me two years to realize he wasn’t just saying it for laughs, he really meant it about himself. And it took me three more years to realize it wasn’t just him.

I wake each morning in my current state of unemployment with nothing more than a flimsy outline of possible acts, motions, even potions within that day. Yes, there are weekly staples – Tuesday night koan gathering, one of those meetings Saturday mornings. That’s about it. Of course coffee somewhere, like breathing, will happen daily. But, speaking in mathematics here for a sec, as I get up at 4a and mostly slip under the covers just before 9p, that’s 119 waking hours in which to entertain and be entertained.

I sit on the cushion a little over half an hour and write Morning Pages a little under half an hour seven days a week, get on the floor for my knees and hips, so that’s maybe 10 hours, and add Tuesday night zooming in Oakland and Saturday early showing up in Sellwood and coffee shop lingerings and there are about 20 of those 119 sort of spoken for, 100 hovering out in any seven days, peekaboo fairies and elves, whispers and giggles and calls from cuckoos and red-winged blackbirds – “Pick me. Pick me.”

And often, so often, there are mornings like this one where I just don’t have a clue – I hear myself ask out loud, “What am I going to do today?” and hear myself answer, “No clue.” And the to-thine-own-self-be-true self-awareness of that recovering cat back there in Somerville, MA keeps ringing through me. Over and over.

Me and Bob Zimmerman – ‘No direction home.’