If you are reading this it’s likely you have some degree of personal relationship with me — long-time friend, former soul mate, parent of a kid, on the job, acquaintance from one of “the rooms” or another, someone I’ve never yet met in person but have big, good feelings about. So, I’m guessing on your end there is a bit of clarity of sorts, a measuring stick, for “getting me.” And that makes me happy: a connection thing; some shared experience; even a ‘We’re all bozos on this bus.”
All of which ought to help when I make this statement of how I am and feel today, which is a statement of fact – like “The hills have turned green’ – not a complaint, not attention-seeking, even not bragging. Interestingly, it’s just simply like this:
I have never felt so lost in my life as I do now. So utterly lost.
I snapped these pictures yesterday on my way out hiking the Bob Jones Trail in Avila Beach. Every time I hike the trail, out from the beach and back to the beach, I stop at this place and bow to Isabella. Which has me bowing to living each day as if. As if it’s the only one I’ve got. Maybe the only one I’m gonna get. Live it as to carry on for my dead best friends – Bob, Doug, and Billy. To carry on for Linda Eastman McCartney. To carry on for an eight-year old Isabella Fow.
Usually there are fellow travelers on the bench, often moms, as it sits at the edge of a play area with four swings, a slide, and a pull-up bar. Yesterday it was all empty, and I had a joyful swing for a while, up into the wild, blue yonder. Then I stopped and hung out with Isabella just a bit, traveled down the path until turning around to take these photos. And now here we all are.
I could write novels about Bob Zimmerman, Dr. Douglas Martin, and Billy MacDonald. I loved them. I was able to write about Linda because I lived and shared that time with she and Paul. All I know of Isabella is that she was obviously living it – being all that childish joy – and the trailside invitation to join in – Yesterday, today, if I get a tomorrow. So I’m borrowing words here from the obituary of this young woman:
“Isabella Grace Fow was born in July 2005 to Jonathan and Leslie Fow in San Luis Obispo, and passed away Saturday, Feb. 15, 2014. She lived in Avila Beach and was a third grader at Bellevue-Santa Fe Charter School. Isabella was an amazing big sister to her brother, Olin, and sisters Ava Lou and Lilla. Isabella was an amazing child, full of love for everyone. Her big smiles and warm heart lit up our lives. She was an avid reader, wrote poems and stories in her journals and drew beautiful pictures of horses. In addition to her parents Jon and Leslie, Isabella is survived…..”
The fact I’m still here, surviving, to write in this mountain bench space, amidst a life filled with shenanigans of stupidity, substance abuse, and bad decisions (and, yeah all the compassionaite sweet stuff too), is grace. And how about that you’re getting to read it.
My mind found its way to Linda Eastman while on my early walk before the meditation meeting Monday morning. Paul McCartney’s so lovely wife, and bandmate, who left the planet in 1998, I guess right on time, but it felt way, way too soon. She was 57 years old.
I was always happy Linda and Paul found each other, and it made me happy she joined the band. I can’t say why, but for some reason I’ve been listening lots to the song ‘Magneto and Titanium Man’ from the ‘Venus and Mars’ album. It gets me. And especially the backing vocals on the bridge (begins, “Well there she were..”), Linda’s voice so prominent – so right there.
More and more and more and more my mind is doing what it wants, and I’m lucky if I get to tag along, never mind try to keep up. ‘Magneto and Titanium Man.’ Linda Eastman McCartney. Singing to myself on lonely walks. The Y. Crying. See.
I had this thought while walking – Linda’s gone so soon and I’m still here – old and wrinkly. What am I going to do with this day?
At the tail end of a lovely walk on the Bob Jones Trail Saturday afternoon, I heard myself say this: “Why am I sometimes utterly sure everything goes exactly the way it’s supposed to, and sometimes I wish things were different?”
Back home I scavenged through many piles of Zen/Ch’an books of Japanese Koans (Chinese Ch’an Kung-ans) and found this:
Monk Kushyman Luis-Mountain asked the Master:
“Why am I sometimes utterly sure everything goes exactly the way it’s supposed to, and sometimes I wish things were different?”
The Master answered, “Try a pepperoni pizza and call me in the morning.”
Luis-Mountain said, “I do not understand.”
The Master responded, “The Big Dipper is big.”
At that there was an “Aha.”
Ha!! Even on a lovely Saturday I’m hanging out with this stuff.
I don’t know how to be cool. I wear beat-up jeans and too big sweatshirts. I don’t feel a need for social skills. My primary focus in this world – every day, every moment – is slow dancing. (And saving the planet.) I rarely get embarressed.
On a dating site I would offer as my profile: “I rent a room in a trailer, I hardly have any money, my 24-year-old car has almost no paint left on its trunk. My idea of a fabulous vacation is to go to Starbucks with a book. At four o’clock in the morning I go outside to look up at the stars, freezing my ass off, feeling both very small and very big all at once. Oh – there’s nothing more romantic on the planet than slow dancing. Lastly, I barely give a rat’s butt about other people’s opinions…or my own………So, who’s interested?”
Not cool.
And yet I sit on a mountain bench listening to Motown, and find myself joyous and free, dancing.
Terminally hip.
Part Two:
Every day I am sitting still, as if in meditation, upwards of an hour. Every day I am reading from ‘these’ books upwards of an hour. Every day I am writing three pages in a notebook about this life of mine now.
I am never not doing these.
And I live in a trailer with my mom (said Zen Master Eminem).
Following the divorce, I stayed with my friend Kate at her house in Milwaukie, Oregon for a month before finding on line and moving into a room in a house in Encinitas, California. One of my worst living experiences – wild drug and alcohol use, 100,000,000 ants crawling daily on my floor, wonky hardly-ever there internet. While there, though, I applied for and was hired by a San Diego agency to serve as a “support person” for a young couple, both with Down syndrome, in their apartment in San Marcos. From Encinitas I could take back roads to hang out with Kristen and James, maybe 20 miles round trip, two days a week.
Then I fled the insanely expensive and rather evil Encinitas house and landed in a room in a condo development in the Golden Hill neighborhood of SD, a much nicer experience for half the cost. The one drawback was the new commute to work with the kids:
About 35 miles each way, up the 163 and up the (gulp) 15 and west on the (another gulp) 78, SD to SM. I worked Mondays and Tuesdays as my role in the support team, so up and back twice a week, like 140 miles, and for seven months – Calculator please: just under 4000 of those 26,869 miles I’ve traveled in my car.
One morning after those nine months – and the joy of being some kind of service – came to a close, I called my boss and said I can’t do this commute anymore. She said she’d been waiting for my call. I gave three weeks and was gone
Driving to the Rhody Garden in Portland, OR brought me to a place of wonder and magic. The way longer drive to San Marcos was as fulfilling and joyful – lucky, lucky me. Fortunately, I get to follow their lives together on FB, and for some reason I am tagged in ongoing “support team” emails about that mid-thirties couple – in 2022 they’d been married four years and together 13. Wasn’t it that ancient Zen Master Eminem who said, “You can do anything you set your mind to,” and especially if you lead with the heart.
There’s a P.S. here about a guitar and and amplifier falling out from the sky into the room where I type this, but it’s another of these odometer tales for another day.
Some of the few miles added to the Camry’s odometer came from driving briefly from Nehalem Street (home) in Southeast to Portland’s Rhododendren Garden, also in SE. Generally into the smallish parking lot, but if it was filled, across 28th Ave to one of Reed College’s lots. I almost always went on the day of free admission, Tuesday or Wednesday – I can’t remember everything.
Generally there were lots of tourists (people touring) amidst all the plethora of rhody colors, long winding paths, unique passageways over and through the waters of Crystal Springs Lake. The whole space was a dazzlement, an ongoing wonder just to be in it. And with plentifully people’d, as is my way, I wandered to a far boundary and a bench almost always empty until this guest accepted its invitation. This bench:
I cannot tell you all the moment by moment magesty and solace and the fact of grace I found there, so many, many times. And I won’t try. This is a story falling out from the odometer.
“That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spot light,” blogging my religion. All this chatter:
On the wings of Ebay appear three new books (like totally, new), just seeing and touching and loving, cherished, prizes, imagining a trip to Paris, or Corvallis, Oregon. Or Trader Joe’s.
Prized things, already encouraging the kid on with sheer beauty, the flowery whispers of a breathtaking witch, cackling on her wind-driven broom: “Follow me home.” Magical thinking.
P.S. — Tomorrow, as promised, the return of stories falling out from the sun-splashed Camry odometer. Fortunately.
It all started on Thanksgiving, five days ago. The winter’s chill of giving thanks, alone. How can you (one) talk cogently about mental illness when you don’t have it? Probably. I cannot speak cogently about my life growing up in Lincoln, Nebraska, cause I didn’t. I did, though, fly on my bike down Lincoln Hill in my hometown close by old Cape Cod.
I’ve always liked this image of men in white suits (it’s always men) coming with their butterfly nets to catch the mentally ill. Think the 1966 song, “They’re coming to take me away, ha-haa.” To the funny farm – something of a warm and fuzzy glow juxtaposed to all the bricked state hospitals throughout the land. Cows and chickens laughing it up.
And what’s all this about? I couldn’t tell you. Perhaps, as John Tarrant Roshi said once – “When you take the position of host you know the guests are arriving, and you get to treat them with courtesy.” Something like that. Butterfly nets, bicycles, laughing chickens.
And last Friday I was scheduled to work and I was paid time and a half and I’m lucky I have a job that’s mostly fun in which I get to say “Welcome” over and over – saving the planet little by slow. And I’d still rather not work, I’d rather lol around and dawdle through the day. Go outside for a while and just smile.
Somehow this life has scraped away much of what has been in my head. The wicked aloneness. All the music. Sleeping in a thin bed which floats on the dreams of compassion.The way bees find themselves walking on the ground – something other than expected.
How many brain cells come and go? Who is hearing the rain? “It is I,” someone in old China said, “alone and destitute.” Thoreau in the woods – “Simplify, simplify.” There’s an osprey on a pole eating a fish. A fish with cousins and sisters, at home in the ocean’s movements. “Obladi, Oblida.” It goes on, it stops going on. Splish splash only 45 seconds ago, freedom not being just another word.
What is better than the stars in the sky? Coffee? Rock and roll? Slow dancing? As Abbie Hoffman once said at the end of a talk at Salem State College – “Answers, anyone? We all know the questions.” Like I read in a new book this morning – “The Landscape beyond landscapes.” Or The Rascals – “I think I’ll go outside for a while, and just smile.” The faintest of grins.
from a mountain bench 