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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.

Life is interesting. I wrote in my Morning Pages the other day that I should feel lonely and I don’t. I was called to speak at one of ‘those meetings’ last Monday night and I said I’ve been in San Luis Obispo more than four months now and I’ve spent way more time with cows than with people. It got laughs but I didn’t say it for laughs. The grass is green, the hills are brown, I hang with cows.

Talk about flowers bloom on a withered tree. Talk about show don’t tell. Like, who needs words? I call her Angelina.

I do have a job around and interacting with lots of people, I do go to a couple of ‘those meetings,’ I do go to Starbucks nearly every day and feel joy from and offer joy back to a bunch of baristas with whom I’ve become quite close, in a coffee shop way.

The fact is, this Friday, mostly I feel called by the hills and mountains with their trails, and the woods and the beach in Avila, and my practice, which holds the coffees and cows and hillsides and vultures and scheduled people and my daily scribbles and all the lonesome minutes and hours and afternoons.

I can report, though, that Jorge, the only person I consider a friend at the Y, asked me Tuesday if I wanted to meet up and get a coffee Sunday. I said ‘Yes’ and that’s the plan, and I guess even at 76 practicing patience is simply little by slow.

From the Morning Pages, verbatim:

This is my (this) Sunday best. I got up with the phone wake-up at 2:59. Went to the bathroom, threw water on my face and my head, made the bed, bowed to the Buddha and the two kitties Mercedes and Lily on the bureau, drank water and came to the cushion in the darkened living room space and sat for 34 minutes.Then I bowed to the cushion nine times as suggested by Shunryu Suzuki and repeated the Four Boundless Vows into empty space.

Somewhere along the way I know I need to wash my sheets (did), and never judge how my sitting ‘went.’ Once, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I confronted a man and said, “Tell me how this program works.” He grinned and said, “Just fine.”

From the front seat of my car I told Gina Fiedel that I had finished the book – “Hunger Mountain” by David Hinton – which she had recommended, and that my experience was that the book had read me.

From the Morning Pages, verbatim — Gina asks, “What was it when the book was reading you?” Answer as Koan: “Blue bird in a tree.” That’s exactly it. “Cow giving birth.” “10,000 things dancing.” Being logical not it. Wild antics teasing. My cushion weeps, last night’s rain.

Give a dollar to a man on the street. Morning coffee perks, Winnipesaukee loon. Vultures singing. There’s no me to protect, to justify, to give a logical answer. Poetry no logical answers. “I’d like to fly on the back of a red-winged black bird.” Cat ‘n nine tails reflecting the new moon.

I stopped in the middle of the path, which was for the most part empty other than the rain-encouraged fragrance of eucalyptus, to have a wordless conversation with a blue jay skittering through branches in a willow tree.

I’m sitting in my car at the base of a mountain, reading Chinese poetry, listening to Sly and the Family Stone.

Yesterday in Starbucks I told the barista Morgan that when I arrived in San Luis Obispo my heart was entirely broken, and I came to his coffee shop every day and it put its arms around me, and saved me.

Saved me for this Monday afternoon, cloud-grayed sky, dancing alone at my mountain bench. But not slow dancing.

It’s said, “Flowers bloom on a withered tree,” and that’s exactly how I am, who I am, when I make the life of baristas brighter. When I act all goofy and child-like around little kids at the Y. When I call someone out of the blue in Queens, New York, who says he told his wife that very morning he was going to call me. When I sit on the cushion, and thrill to 4am coffee, read books I don’t want to understand, and generally feel the grace of each and every dawn.

I said to my landlord/housemate today that it felt quite okay to give up my two Saturdays a month at the Y – which I requested earlier – because I don’t spend money on anything other than peanut butter and books. It makes me really happy to be able to say things just like that. Even if I left out coffee.