Category: Uncategorized

I think my mind broke the other day. All by itself.

I was on the Bob Jones Trail in Avila Beach on the central coast of California. I was much of the way back from one end to the other. Out of the woods, which is most of it and includes a vast area of Coast Live Oaks, big and gnarly and curvy and which I’ve been convinced from the beginning dance wildly in the middle of the night when no humans are around and end up back where they started by dawn, though maybe moved a fifteenth of an inch or so – if anyone bothered to check.

So I’m out of the woods in the area that runs alongside the San Luis Obispo Creek, the section that has reeds like cat ‘n nine tails. I happen to glance to my left and a tall piece of grass on the bank closest is slowly swaying in the breeze, and – bang! – I see it completely. There’s nothing else. That’s when my mind broke. Every single thing in the world was exactly in tune with everything else, working exactly perfectly.

I haven’t been able to shake it. I haven’t wanted to. My teacher says, “Move on.”

A rare Saturday post:

Welcome, welcome to the blog. Like I get to say from the front desk at the Y to each member walking through the door. Like the baristas say at my Starbuck’s on Broad Street, maybe not exactly like that. Anyway, you are seen. You are appreciated. Like that.

I hope to carry on here what I started beginning back in August 2018, when I promised ‘couch surfing at 70’ would be a space to share something like my “daily weather.” Here now, ‘from a mountain bench’ will be like that – no longer married, more cows.

I feel my mind which will be reporting on this weather is more spacy here in 2025 – spacious and loose. It’s all I have to play with. And share.

Hopefully someone, somewhere, will take a minute and poke around and see if ‘from a mountain bench’ actually sends this post to you on a mountain breeze.