Author: buddycushman

I was standing behind the front desk at the Channel Islands YMCA Thursday morning. Earlier, when I woke up and sat in meditation and drank coffee and read books and wrote Morning Pages, I was 76 years old. I live in San Luis Obispo, California, I’m nearly entirely alone, my best friend’s a cow, and hiking is not only a way of life – it’s the way of life. Me and the sun-shiny day, down by the schoolyard. Tumbleweed tramp.

When I was just getting sober in Somerville, Massachusetts in 1983 I would hear people suggest you stay sober a day at a time and try to picture where you’ll be in five years, and, they suggested, you will inevitably sell yourself short. I don’t know about that sitting here today, but for suresy I never would have guessed/predicted/hoped for any of the things I told you up there in the first paragraph. Not a single smidge of my life here today.

I love my life here today. I’d much prefer not being so all by myself, I don’t remember what I would have pictured about a partner at five years sober. But I live in a beautiful world, and have taken the path of immersing myself entirely in it. Like really all the way into it – like totally. The Y thing is just kind of weird, though it’s a door through which I bring my hip, funky self a couple times a week and get to serve and be kind and be generous to others.

And dig this – my best friend’s a cow. Like totally.

I went hiking in the Laguna Lake open space yesterday, a little after noon. The air was clean and sparkly from the previous night’s storm, mountains bursting into the blue, streams of white clouds drifting from the northwest toward the southeast. The trail paths were more giving, spongier from the rain.

I’d walked there the seven consecutive days, the seventh last Friday, and hiked the Bob Jones trail Saturday and the Lemon Grove loop – replete with a path-sharing deer – Sunday. I went out to Laguna Lake Monday, before the rains, and again yesterday.

Two distinct thoughts have come to me. The feeling that if I do not amble along through that vast mountain and lake space I might miss something. And I don’t want to miss ‘it.’ Secondly, the reason I’m walking slower and slower each time out is because I don’t want ‘it’ to end. I don’t want ‘it’ to be over. The thrill. That experience. The awe.

I never feel like a guest in the vastness, never feel like some small insignificant thing. I feel welcomed, every time, one with, part of. Kind of too cool for school.

I snapped this picture at 6:30 last night. A storm dropping down from Alaska swept through much of California the last couple of days – the central coast here drenched from early Monday evening and all through the night. We 3am meditators know such things.

After work yesterday I came back to the trailer to eat, and planned to accept an amazingly strong pull from the Laguna Lake open space to keep coming back. But a final downpour mid-afternoon changed my plans. More often than not I remain just fine when my plans and schemes don’t work out. I guess like you hear all the time nowadays – no worries.

Anyway, all that informational chatter beyond lucking into this crimson cloud California view and capturing its image is yackety yack. This visual is enough.

Right?

Saturday, Sunday, and Monday mornings I went out in the dark to look at the stars, in particular Orion’s Belt. For some reason it has taken me five months of living in San Luis Obispo on the central coast of California before doing this. Looking at the night sky. I couldn’t tell you why.

Sunday afternoon hiking the Lemon Grove Loop on San Luis Mountain a deer crossed my path on the downhill trail heading back. I felt lucky to see it. A feeling something like the word gentle. Further downhill I rested on my bench, the very one pictured in the logo of this blog, and played Motown music on my phone. Earlier I’d taken the other bench, high on the Lemon Loop.

Kind of like the Robert Frost poem, “Two roads diverged…,” except not really at all. Different trees, and I got to take both. The only decision being tying on the hiking shoes a couple hours earlier.

That act the difference, all the difference, between seeing and not. Seeing a deer. Gazing up at Orion’s Belt.

The seven days, the seven hikes through the Laguna Lake open space….Friday I perceived myself as nothing more than a ragamuffin, ambling along, stopping again and again, maybe the 23rd time looking at the same scene this last week, seeing with new eyes. I’m a lazybones I kept thinking, every dragonfly presenting oodles more energy than me. And there’s no judgement. Ragamuffin lazybones. 

Saturday morning, like 4:15 or so, after meditation and while sipping coffee, a distinct and clear thought came to me regarding my week of walks here, and I scribbled it in the Pages notebook – “I would/will need to walk in the Laguna Lake open space 100 days in a row before it would/will open to me, and me to it.” Like, this last week of hiking has been remarkable and amazing, and yet, these seven days simply the first, soft puff of my breath blowing on a milkweed pod, if I’m lucky setting even one seed on its way. There’s so much more. So much more.

And there’s this. For a long time I’ve been receiving ‘warnings’ that support for Windows 10 will be ending mid-October, I oughta opt for the free Windows 11, and with my usual please don’t tell me what to do, I’ve ignored it. Probably a couple of years. And now here we are. — I’m telling you this because today I’m going to try that upgrade, and you know me, technical pre-schooler. The point being, if I disappear from your email inbox a while I’m likely personally okay. It’s just this stuff. And hopefully I can get it or call in a techie wizard friend from the Y now in my life.

Out on the Laguna Lake trails later Thursday afternoon, home from work, a coffee at Starbucks. “Hey” to the baristas, Dylan and James. Day six.

There are more clouds now as autumn settles in, and the hillsides and mountain tops were in and out of light and shadow, shadow, and light. At times on the lower trail I would stand quietly still and watch the shadows express themselves from left to right, and then retreat. Off in the distance there was a lone black cow. Me alone in Starbucks, the cow alone on the crest of the hill.

I tried a couple of times today to convey, to folks asking, the astonishment and awe I feel every time I suit up (hiking shoes), and accept the invitation to these welcoming, shape-shifting trails, but words don’t cut it. They nearly never do.

Somber. I felt a little of that out there at Laguna Lake Thursday. I couldn’t tell you why, and I don’t have a need to know. Just reporting from here in San Luis Obispo.

Perhaps you remember the scene in “Field of Dreams” where Shoeless Joe Jackson, stunned by the life he finds himself in, asks Ray Kinsella, “Is this heaven?” And Ray answers, “No, this is Iowa.”

I’ve had a number of similar conversations with myself, being a solo hiker, these last few days, where someone asks, “Is this heaven, Kid?” And someone answers, “Nah. This is Laguna Lake.”

Yesterday, my fifth consecutive day in this magnificent open space, I kept a promise to myself from the day before (Tuesday) and climbed over the nearly always padlocked fence to head up on the “upper” paths. Me and Jackie Wilson – “Your love is lifting me higher than I’ve ever been lifted before.” Astonishing views of the lake, the valley, a closeness to the summit of San Luis Mountain. You think you’ve seen it all, and there’s always more.

Tuesday night I had a conversation with a woman named Lora about the opportunity to “Show and tell.” I hope this post offers you as the subscriber a smidge of that.

Everything so alive. Walking deliberately, like kinhin?

The morning alive with birds, hawks, sisters, cousins. Rarely possible to be so lazy – lazed strolling –

Every weed, wildflower, stalk of tall brown grass dancing, soft morning breeze. Women with dogs – free, free, free – ignore “Must be leashed.” Jets overhead, overhead flight path, coming, going.

Every single rock asks, “Would you like to hear my story?”

“Yes. Oh yes.”

Walking slowly. Hips, legs, feet deliberate, savoring every moment. Embodying the place of belonging utterly.

Slower and slower. Weekly, daily, these couple of hours.

Take it all in. Straight ahead, turn around, mountain, cows. Off to the right, west, geologic bulges on toward the Pacific. Vultures east, circling Sprouts, R.E.I., the 101. Staring with intention to really see. To own the day.

How long? How long to walk? How long to see – really see? To blog? To breathe like this?

Each and every step, out there in the spaciousness: Ground asking, “You don’t have to go just yet, do you?”

Nah. Not just yet.

Last week I made a decision to hike the Laguna Lake trail seven days in a row. This followed a conversation on Zoom with my Zen teacher. I began Saturday, today will be my third hike.

I was not and am not worried about repetition as ‘sameness.’ The ancient Japanese master Dogen said, “Tonight’s moon is not last night’s moon.” When I was a kid an old man named Mr. Baker would walk past my house and yard every day. Wearing the same hat, holding a cigar. But I would be different for him, playing catch by myself, throwing and bouncing a tennis ball off our slanting roof, one day over to the left and having to run that way to catch it, one day higher and needing to move back for that rebound. One day standing still, stupefied, so alive, so young. Each moment, never before, bursting forth, passing on.

Each Laguna Lake hike, never before, bursting forth, passing on. Like my mother – Irene Mercedes Costa, never before, bursting forth, passing on. Like Jorge’s dog Princess, never before, bursting forth, passing on. Like a rain storm. Bursting forth, never before, passing on.

Saturday, insane wind. Do rattlesnakes mind the wind? Does the wind mind rattlesnakes?. Sunday a gaggle of young girls with their leaders, on bicycles, sharing the path, nudging me off into the brown grass.