I crawled into bed Sunday night at a quarter past six. Exhausted – physically, mentally, emotionally. Exhausted with my current address, and exhausted with no future address. I nearly fell right asleep.
Beginning Friday morning through Sunday afternoon I had had at least half-hour conversations with my son Cameron, my son Spenser, my friend Gavin, my friend Bob, my friend Jorge, and my friend David. I was exhausted with my own voice.
In my fantasy my fairy godmother says, “We have a shack for you deep in the woods. We’ll send a car.” And I go there and I don’t speak a word for 100 days.
Sometimes I sit around doing nothing and think my being an introvert and on the cusp of anti-social are why I experience aloneness, especially the way I’ve experienced aloneness here in San Luis Obispo, one of my three reasons for choosing to leave.
It seems like an easy hop, skip, and jump from one to the other. And yet, I don’t think that’s it.
Saturday morning I was sipping coffee and reflecting on with whom I have shared my most intimate thoughts about my life now, including the tapped-me-on-the-shoulder decision to move back to Portland. Immediately six names came to me: Gavin in Oakland; Kate in Missouri; Gina in Santa Barbara; Jorge, my one really true friend here in SLO; Mike in New Jersey; and David in New Mexico. And I can honestly add Bob in Massachusetts, though life on his end has kept us out of touch for a while. And of course my sons Cameron and Spenser. I love each and ever one, and they know it. And each and every one loves me back, and I know it.
That’s pretty fabulous, right?
Somewhere in my past I heard/read that most adults are fortunate to have two best friends.
When I have my own place I will fall all-into a deep study of Chinese poetry. I may, for all I know, legally change my name to Ch’an Cushman. I’ll begin cooking and eating broccoli and cauliflower again. Buy cinamon. Really, there is a growing excitement for more control of my food – bringing myself back to ketosis.
And my gifts – the me of me that/who will be in that world, on those streets. Back up there, (and) “a revelation,” there’s no soul here. No wonder I couldn’t go three days without talking Motown.
End of scribble — Wednesday early to the Bob Jones Trail, carrying the teachings of my teacher from earlier, bluebird, squirrel, glittering creek, me dancing and grooving and squinching up my face to every four year (or month) old passing on a bike or in a carriage. My posse. Then I’m on the pier, see below, it’s 85 degrees, Feb 4. Cue R.E.M. – “The end of the world as we know it.”
No wonder I can barely go a day without listening to Motown. And dancing.
Here’s a text – unedited – I received in the coffee shop Wednesday from a 43-year-old woman with an intellectual disability I supported as a ‘job coach’ at “The People’s Food Coop” in Ocean Beach, San Diego —“Are you proud of me that i work at U.C.S.D.H. (hospital) on Monday’s and Wednesday’s and Friday’s and are you still proud of me that i work at people’s market on Tuesday’s? I like you as a friend Buddy. love, Jolene.”
“Like Vimalakirti she shuts her mouth, following the old way. All day long, she sits within the gate. She does not tell anyone her inner treasure….When she sees the Blue Mountain through her veranda, and recognizes it, she feels she has spoken too much.” – Ross Bolleter, “Dongshan’s Five Ranks.”
In other words, like Uncle Buck, I have zipped closed my mouth and tossed away the key.
Tossed.
Over and over and over, a powerful internal inclination to keep quiet.
I am not like other people. I’m just not. I’m not like everybody/anybody else.
I did, though, have conversations yesterday with folks in both Santa Barbara and New Jersey who did have very nice and sweet things to say about this very me.
My friend in New Jersey told me I am filled with happiness, and have a serenity most folks would dream about. It made me happy to hear that. He also said that one of the happiest times in his life was when he was living out of his car for a bit, a comment falling out of possibilities.
We also talked about the joy of not knowing. The intimacy.
This was my three-song YouTube playlist Saturday morning, which fell directly out from my Morning Pages: ‘I’ve Got Work To Do’ by the Isley Brothers; ‘Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine,’ Bob Dylan; and ‘Goin Back’ by The Byrds. Right there, scribbled down within three Pages. Musical vocabulary.
Saturday morning I gave a month’s notice at the YMCA. Sunday morning I gave a month’s notice to my landlord.
There is a line in ‘Goin Back’ – “A little bit of courage is all we lack.” Oftentimes I do not know where it is. Sometimes I do.
I was holding this painting in my hands later last night. I’d brought it off a wall near the laundry machines Tuesday to bring into the Koan group – as the only thing I wanted to say – but the group fizzled away when Zoom broke. It’s true. So this flower’s been sitting on books, leaning against the wall in my room. I’d guess I created this into the world in 2019. Or it created me.
Again, it’s pretty much all of what I want to say this morning.
Except this:
Kristen and James and the kid. Probably 2021, maybe early 2022, me lucky enough to hang out with them in their San Marcos home a couple of times a week, and get paid for it. Wonderful humans.
This week it’s been about my, and no doubt your, senses – nose, eye, ear, fingertip caresses. Here, in my nine months shared with Kristen and James, it was all that and all that was always bathed with warm feeling. Really fine energy. Joy in the journey. We do what we set out to do. And its the doing that’s the coolest.
These things are what I talk about when I repeat what I’ve heard: I do my best living the right way and the world comes to fetch me.
Yesterday I wrote here about the sensory quality of a fragrance as a lightning path to long-ago enlightenment. The nose knows, you could say. Today I’m hung up on the ear, home to the day’s, any day’s, vibrations. Certainly that’s how it was for me at the Johnson Ranch yesterday.
See here. See the sun-colored hair, Feel its ever-softness. Sense the odor of its perfectly round patty. And this, oh, glorious organ which is my ear:
Munch, munch, munch.
Munch, munch, munch.
Munch, munch, munch.
Oh, could I ever be so devoted, so single-pointed, so endless? I stood entirely still, and willed up all the silence within me. Far from the highway; far from the airport; far from the city.
Munch, munch, munch.
Perhaps my mom could have skipped the lawn-mowing lessons if only we’d had a young cow like this. Perhaps this young girl will sign up to be my second San Luis Obispo friend. She did have a conversation with my eyes, as well as my ears.
On the way back I was stopped by another sound – the wind tustling and fluttering the browned-out, not-yet-fallen large leaves of two California Sycamores loarding over the flowing stream, golden in the sun, which wasn’t there last summer.
All this and you may be wondering when the kid’s lobotomy is scheduled.
from a mountain bench 