Please let me riff out (with these ears) for just a bit. Terry Kath and his most joyful fluid wildness – and the rest of the kids.
“I don’t need your social standing, I’d rather stand outside. Way outside.”
That pretty much covers it.
This is just dancing.
1971.
I walked by a wild rose Sunday morning, something like 100 miles to the closest beach.
When I was a kid back there in Wareham, Massachusetts, hard by the peninsula of Cape Cod, there were these wild pink roses growing everywhere near the seemingly endless beaches in my hometown. And all over the Cape. Pink, always pink, popping out from green shrubbery. I’m pretty sure their formal name is Rosa rugosa. Here’s a quick little blurb, and a photo:
“Wild roses that grow near beaches are most famously known as the Beach Rose or Rugosa Rose (Rosa rugosa). Thriving in coastal dunes, these incredibly hardy shrubs are famous for their salt spray tolerance, deeply veined wrinkled leaves, and sweet fragrance.”
“Sweet fragrance” it says ending the description, and that is the thing. That is “it.” Was it 100,000 times I leaned in and inhaled that sweetness? Only 10,000? Perhaps 783. Some vast number of times all through my childhood and pretty much whenever I’ve got a chance since.
So, Bang!! I’m ambling down the busyness of NE 15th Sunday morning before the PZI Koan gathering and just off the sidewalk there a small bush’s worth – in Portland, OR – and I’m happy and joyful and walk past and then – Wait!! – I pull a uueey and walk back and lean in and take a deep inhale and it’s not a fib at all to say my 11-year-old self is there again at Little Harbor Beach, hoping over the hot tar lot to roses, roses everywhere, and hopping back and skipping over the heated, sugary sand and into the so warm waters of Buzzards Bay.
Inhaling my childhood.
Back from a day of outdoor lazybones ambling around in the Southeast, I’m lounging in the recliner with a late coffee (finished) and a paperback (ongoing) and something has me glance from the book to my left leg and there I see a tick crawling on my tan cargo shorts. I move the peanuts and throw down the book and grab the tick between my right thumb and forefinger, jump up towards the bathroom, and the first thought – my honest to goodness very first thought – is with the Buddhist Ten Grave Precepts, specifically #1 – ‘I vow not to kill.’
So I make my best apology – because I take the Precepts seriously – and bring my hand over the toilet and open up and – nothing. No tick. No Precept violated. I go back through the studio, take the recliner apart, hands and knees over every inch of the rug, behind books, behind Morning Pages, my clothes shaken and then shaken inside out, nothing. I take the trimmer and shave my head. I step into a crazy hot shower for a long time. I step out and dry and look all over again. Nothing.
I’d spent Thursday hours in the Rhododendron Garden, then hiking on the tar path out and back along the Johnson Creek, and lastly through the wilds of Errol Heights – old SE stomping grounds – and while I never strayed from any tar or dirt or wood chip path, all those spots are filled with the kind of greenery that maybe hopes to reach out and touch someone’s hand. Or leg.
I went to bed Thursday night knowing I had a guest. My one true hero in life, Kathleen Hanna, suffered horribly for six years before being properly diagnosed with Lyme Disease. I’d prefer not to share that particular experience with her. I guess it’s a que sara sara thing. And like they say, “The Great Way is not difficult when there’s no pick and choose.” Not sure about tick and choose.
Tuesday afternoon I looked at the ’26 Drew Davis (San Luis Obispo artist) calendar I have on my kitchen wall. For the week of the 14th through the 20th I had three notations – Tuesday 6pm, David (my teacher, Tuesday Koan group); Wednesday 7am, David (every other week early Wednesday Zoom connecting); Saturday 8:15am, David (every other Saturday morning 15-minute sign-up).
When I met with (Roshi) David yesterday I told him what all comprised the pencil makes on the calendar this week, and said – and I was so giddy! – how full my life felt. Like, totally. If that sounds crazy, I’m sure it is. Yay!!
Periodically I continue to send out applications for minimal work, Indeed or Craigslist. Every once in a while I have long phone conversations – Sunday with my son Cameron in Montana for one hour, him doing most of the talking; Monday with Kate in Missouri for one hour, probably me about 65% of it.
Later Monday I realized Kate was the only human being I had spoken to that day. No one else. And very early Tuesday on the cushion I had the most powerful awareness of just how profound and wonderful and easy and filling and joyous that conversation had been. And the realization that if I keep talking that much every day, why, golly, I just don’t know whatever I’ll do with myself.
I have not received one piece of mail in the last three weeks. Not a single piece of mail. Not a post card from Haiti or Copenhagen or San Luis Obispo, not an invitation to join the resurrected Yippie Party, or a donation ask from Public Television. Not a phone bill, not a Medicare bill, not even a ‘this-is-not-a-bill bill.’
And now, the above fallen out from my swiss-cheese’d mind, I do remember one piece of mail. One single piece. A letter, a postmark from Chino, CA, inside a check far beyond the selling/shipping price for my book “Ring Around the Rosy,” which I may have mentioned here. See! I am popular.
I’m often teeter-tottering on the oh-so-thin-rail between being left alone and pretty much entirely ignored, and my not cultivating in any way the ever-blooming garden of human connection. Barely a hoe’s slight ziggy-zaggy drag through that rich loam.
(Sigh)
Makes me think of Dylan – “Oh, Mama, can this really be the end. To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again”
One of the surprises falling out of my over-from-Idaho, long-gone storage boxes was the book “Instructions to the Cook” by Bernard Tetsugen Glassman. Monday afternoon I came upon these sentences in the Prologue – “The Zen cook used what he had rather than complaining or making excuses about what he didn’t have.” And, “So the first principle of the Zen cook is that we already have everything we need.”
It’s good for me to read things like that, even when they’re not earth-shattering. Reminders. And those particular sentences are so relevant in my life today. The details of explanation are boring. There’s so much I don’t have. There’s so much I do.
There’s a story where The Buddha is out walking with a bunch of folks and stops, points to the ground, and says, “This would be a good place for a temple.” The God Indra, one of those walkers, takes one blade of grass and plants it in the ground and says, “The temple is erected.”
What’s not sacred? What’s not enough? How could there ever be too much gratitude?
Good questions, kid.
It was the late winter of 1983 when David Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’ made its way into the musical airwaves, and I know that because I’d just been hired for a job at which on a Friday afternoon a couple of months down the road my life would be interceded by a slice of magic so gigantic that I find myself still reverberating like a crazed monkey screaming off a steep precipice 43 years down the road.
It was The Drug and Alcohol Resource Program in Stoneham, Massachusetts, there were five of us, and the guy who’d been hired as the therapist, a totally straight nice young man, looked at me with a big smile one day while we were painting and arranging and getting ready to open the doors to teenagers and said, “The serious moonlight.” Yeah – the serious moonlight. What was better than that in 1983.
A week or so later, it was a Friday afternoon, the boss Maggie had a pal of hers, a Methadone counselor in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston, come up to give us a training on how to talk with junior high kids about smoking pot. At least that’s the training my four co-workers received. But not me.
It’s a longer story, hovering entirely within the land of mystical, for another day. Fromamountainbench is always on watch for the good stuff. I’ll just say now that this life of mine took a one-eighty the next day, and it’s not a stretch to say I’ve been trembling like a flower – always under the good old serious moonlight – since. Falling into the arms – the serious arms – of the world.
It’s reverence when I tag the songs along with the chatter. Here:
Back in the days of alcohol, drugs, and beginning to hone the skills necessary for a life of drifting I strolled into the lounge at the Hawthorne Hotel in Salem, MA, right on the Commons, to sit and hear and watch Bobby Hebb sing ‘Sunny’ and a bunch of his other songs. I was just a kid.
A number of years before, younger and setting off on that colorful substance path, a sophomore at Cape Cod Community College, I was visited in my shared cottage by a boy named Bob Davis, who showed with pockets of pills – reds, blues, black beauties – so as to help get the show on the road. He also shared with me music new to my ears, and in particular the albums of The Electric Flag.
It has always struck me as good fortune and very cool that I got to sit in a room with the man who wrote and sang ‘Sunny” and hear him sing it right there. And, time flowing in all directions, to have Bob D roll into the West Yarmouth winter rental with a pocket full of Tuinals and turn me on to a different, and for me, more engaging version. Yeah, this very me – terminally hip and chock filled with soul.
Such a song – “Sunny, thank you, thank you, thank you for that smile upon your face.” Like saving the planet.
I’ll tell you – this is me talking to my imaginary friend – having nearly no money has its disadvantages, but not working probably has even greater advantage. Sleepy crud wiped out of the eyes, sit on the cushion, coffees, a zillion books, pens and notebooks, my Pages and comfy clothes and just six steps up into the sweet, clean air of another day as if a birthday present.
I have come to a place where I will live in near-poverty rather than seek and subsequently accept a position of employment that isn’t “Me” today. A position for which I have interviewed the interviewers and determined that this (job) matters, this (job) is worthy, this (job) offers the experience to entirely value this very me, all these June ‘26 present ingredients of me into the cornucopia of what actually goes on – the fulfilling of important destinies – in and for which my very molecules have played some part. Other than that ( very job) I choose to eke out a rather quietly wild life within the (elusive) confines and boundaries of rent, food, and mandatory monthly expenses. As evidence of that possible promise, a couple of weeks ago I typed what follows in quotes, it points toward a place of frolicking for free:
“What if this very space is the whole world, I never step out and from this, everything, other than walking out into the sunshine and day and brilliant emerald green of all but Japanese Maples and Copper Beech, which glow and glow and glow on maybe forever, and so it’s all here in my room and it’s all there in the towering oneness of a Copper Beach. With 10,000 pencils and coloring crayons and all the joyous glee of a six-year all spinning out on the lawn, sneaking through the close-by patch of woods, ‘Hey kid, make sure you cross that fire road with yer eyes wide, wide open. We can’t go and be missing stuff, right?’ And meanwhile every book holds itself up as a high-five, and the phone doesn’t ring other than when it rings, and I can swear folks just don’t know what they’re missing, and, yeah, it’s that thank your lucky stars things, except what’s it mean when no one knows.
“Which is all about I don’t have to leave this basement space to have it all, and it’s only six steps up out into the sunny, thirsty world where – you know by now – I get to have it all.”
You may remember the song ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ from Gil Scott-Heron. Earlier I read a paragraph in the book Jen bought me that hinted at both the song and the reality. It said I will not be invited out with the cool kids anymore. It said I will lose stuff and be alone. It said I will speak in tongues.
It was one of those reading experiences where there’s an abrupt “Bang!” close by, and Dick M steps out from the grave yard and says, “Toldja you’re right where you’re supposed to be.” Who knew, right? I’d live to be 77 and find myself speaking in tongues.
There’s a Warren Zevon song with the lines, “The days slide by. Shoulda done, shoulda done we all sigh.” I feel exactly like that and exactly not like that. Here, this morning, I’m kind of hanging in the so familiar “Don’t know” place.
Ain’t a TV camera in sight.
