Author: buddycushman

My computer was hacked. Everything was stolen. Any question or invitation from me is not me. And I’ll have no response to any question or comment.

This space will be silent for  a while.

I need a few days off. Back next week.

A late afternoon walk yesterday, on the phone with my son Cameron, and he’s sharing some medical information about his ongoingly battered body. I didn’t know some of it, and it scared me to hear it. He is such a wonderful human being, I’m always feeling knocked-out lucky he’s my son. We need him.

Most of my friends have their aches and pains and stuff. I have some of that, and there’s my practice which has brought me lots closer to a gate between here today and gone tomorrow. In fact, there’s an ease for me at that place I’ve never before experienced in these 77 years. Not all the way over to my son, though.

It was sunny and warm and beautiful walking, and I took a few pictures of crazy interesting sequoias and sent them off to Montana to my son and his kids. And near the end of the walk the above song slipped into my head. I have always considered Janis my ‘soul sister’ – we share a birthday and a whole bunch of the times. And her advice falling out of “you never know’ I take seriously. It’s a main reason for such a long-term unemployment. I’m not giving up ‘this’ for that.

The picture below is out of a magazine, and I had this very image as a large poster back in the day. That poster found its way onto walls in a number of my settle down here awhile stops in this kind-of gypsy life. It’s always made me feel happy, and totally part of.

Monday on the holiday trail:

It all began when I didn’t have a job for six months – when ain’t it a holiday? – and this ongoing sense of my mind cracking open a smidge on the way to the little library, to donate these:

the Crais (way fave author) I finished Sunday, Stephen King and Jack Kerouac duplicates of copies I continue to own/cherish, the other a lesbian fairy tale I scooped from another tiny library months ago and likely wasn’t going to get to. Still, so cool.

Earlier dropping some fun, goofy, all filled up with love things at the closed post office mail box. Lengthy morning walk, then the Camry to Starbucks, blasting The Pixies forth and back. My art all colorful and giggly on the coffee shop wall.

Late last Saturday afternoon I set out on a long walk, with a destination, and had a lovely, fun telephone conversation with my son Cameron along the way. I remember my good friend Mike in New Jersey telling me once he accepted a job – as a teacher, after four long full-on devoted years at Portland State University – an hour away from his new Garden State home with wife and daughter because the commute would give him lots of time to connect by tele with friends. It was like that, Cameron and me.

This was my destination late Saturday afternoon. I walk there often, there’s a feeling of ‘home’ when I stop and dawdle a bit:

Reporting from the holiday…

I finished reading David Hinton’s ‘The Way of Ch’an’ Saturday morning. It seems I was panting at ‘The End.” Pant, pant, pant. I’d read it through once before, but never like this.

Back in the eighties, back in Vero Beach, Fl, back in those ‘meetings,’ there was a sweet man named Todd who, upon reading out loud from one of the books, would say, “I’ll be damned if someone didn’t go and change the words since the last time.” Like, I read this page before but it’s different now.

There’s something about having ‘new eyes’ farther down the path. You – yes, you – know this in your life. I know it in mine. I come to the final ‘period’ on page 310 Saturday and I’m somewhere else from where page 310 brought me the last time.

Just saying.

After a full day, as reported, Wednesday, I spoke with only one human being yesterday; a five-minute phone conversation with my son Spenser. In it he told me he was having chile for dinner, along with rice and applesauce and four chocolate chip cookies.

I went to bed late, thinking about chile, and during coffee a while ago I decided the next time I was at Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods I’d buy a couple of cans of dark red kidney beans. And sitting in the recliner, second cup of coffee, I began thinking about how many cans of kidney beans there must be in the world. There’s probably 20 or 30 combined in two grocery stores in NE Portland, and just dancing out from there – Oh my head! – where are all these kidney beans coming from? Who’s growing them? Who’s putting them in cans someone made? Who’s driving them to two stores in NE Portland and a thousand or 10,000 other stores in Portland? And every grocery and mom and pop corner store in Lincoln, Nebraska and Newburyport, Massachusetts and the Brixton neighborhood in London, England and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam and just over the river in Vancouver, Washington?

I was jealous of Spenser’s dinner last night, and inspired by it, and this morning I felt like this teeniest, tiniest thing floating around and through here in all the wonder.

Yesterday was a wonderful day of life’s pie filling.

Up early for meditation; luscious coffee; fun in the Morning Pages; 25 minutes on Zoom with my teacher; off to early coffee with my great friend Kate (and her partner Derek), in from Missouri, so wonderful; back home and a long phone conversation with my lovely companion on the Way, Gina; four warm compliments received for my art on public display; watched a fave movie as a lazybones; long, goofball conversation with my son Spenser; out for a late afternoon meander, the first half in the falling rain, stopped to help two guys lift and move a large, fallen branch off one of their’s car. They never said ‘Thanks’ when I walked away, but the magnificent Copper Beech at the next corner did. The joy of saying “Nah” to a no-thanks job possibility.

Off to bed early.

My mother, Irene, used to make the most amazing cherry pies.

Outside my Starbucks, NE Fremont and 15th, an hour later. There’s me taking a picture of me.

I’m most fortunate to be offered a space to share art. Like here:

Most of these arrived after lonely storage, first in Portland, then up in Idaho. And now back here. I still have a small easel and a bunch of acrylic and oil paints, and no real place to stretch out and make easy going free use of them. But who knows, right?

It felt like Monday was the last day of summer. Upper 80’s. Today’s forecast 15 degrees less, tomorrow 25 less. And tomorrow they say rain, a bunch of it, and I’ve found myself yearning for rain these last couple of months, so it’s all alright with me.

I took a couple of long walks yesterday, just to be outside, the second late afternoon up to Wilshire Park, which is filled with Douglas Firs high in the Portland sky, and all kinds of other amazing trees. I asked myself to walk the circumference four times, not sure if I’d done that before, and your little sweat-ball blogger did it, probably about three miles.

Last Thursday I walked to the Regal LLoyd Cinema and paid to watch “The End of Oak Street.” There were three of us in the theater. I say this because the last time I sat in a movie theater was October ’21 in Encinitas in California, not long after the divorce, and sent-away me by then becoming a boogie boarder and eating veggie burritos every week – dancing with and around sadness. I liked “Oak Street” – it’s a pretty scary dinosaur movie – and I’ve liked it better as time has passed.

Passing. Like sadness. Like the good times. Like summer.

Oh! – here’s a good time:

“Practically speaking, a life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking brings us close to the actually existing world and its wholeness.”

That’s Gary Snyder from his book “The Practice of the Wild.” Someone I was renting a room from in San Diego gave that book to me as a Christmas present four years ago, and I never really looked at it until a footnote in another book I’ve been reading had me reach into one of the bookcases last week. I read the introduction by a United States Poet Laureate and I was hooked. I’ve been making my way through at a snail’s pace – bunches of books all at once – but periodically I come upon a sentence like the one above, and all over again I get the feeling of being exactly right where I’m supposed to be. In the “actually existing world.”