I’ve been a forsythia kid my whole spring-time life, and this beautful bundle greeted me in Laurelhurst Park Thursday.
I also got two job rejections Thursday, and passed on an invitation I’ve been waiting for nearly five years. They say you can’t feed your sweet tooth on a picture of marionberry pie. Still, the photo above is all I got when it comes to hoping to share even a sneak peek of how it felt standing there – the blue breeze swaying yellow; the tree green reflecting yellow; my eyes barely a thing but yellow.
I had a lovely cup of coffee at Starbucks earlier, texted Jorge, and back and forthed a long conversation with one of the baristas who said I’d looked familiar since I’d first walked in – one month now – and we figured out that she’d held the same position at the Starbucks in the Mission Hills neighborhood of San Diego, a place I frequented most often while she was there.
Threads, weavings of time and place. Forsythia and coffee. Pretty much just feeling my way along.
Oh – spinning heart and mind. Yesterday I received a wild offer from out of the deep, deep blue – to which I said, “Yes.” Last night, middle of night, my only company was, “No.” A while ago, on the cushion – home for quiet – kids, neighbors, hooligans, minor birds, beaurocrats, bobcats, and for all I know, wallabies, were howling and yowling “Yes” “No” “Yes” “No” – and somewhere in the faraway background The BeeGees with, “Blaming It All On the Nights On Broadway.”
Composing here now, having bowed to the cushion nine times and enjoyed two large coffees, I’m like Alice – falling, falling, falling, stepping throught the looking glass, only my tail lingering on the other side of no tomorrow.
I don’t believe I’ve told you that as of yesterday I am officially back within the coverage of the Kaiser Medicare Advantage plan, and have been assigned, as my Primary, one Dr. Wu.
In last night’s Koan group, it’s been a shining anchor on this journey, I stayed behind to meditate again when everyone else went off to the discussion groups. Out the window behind me as I type now I could hear the continuous sound of traffic on Cesar Chavez Blvd. Sitting, otherwise in quiet, it came to me that Tuesday/yesterday is/was Cesar Chavez day – which may be a California thing. It came with the calendar in the other room.
Also while sitting I flashed on a time with my great friend Dr. Doug Martin, with whom I went to a downtown meeting for then Los Angeles state Assemblyman Gray Davis, and that morning got to shake the hand of Cesar Chavez. It was the late ’70’s or the early ’80’s. And, drifting in meditation, the time at Salem State College when a bunch of us were picketing a local store in support of the grape boycott and the store’s owner came running out with a gun and chased us away.
I’m just telling you this. Fact, fact, fact, fact. My headlights are a lot brighter than usual when I meditate. There’s no screening out or in, and no pronouncements.
I came upon this artist in the Rhododendron Garden Monday afternoon. After being ‘the speaker’ at one of those meetings, 7am. After scrambled eggs and a bath and my telephone interview a clear ‘No’ both ways, and after delicious coffee at my new Starbucks (San Luis Obispo to Portland) and after lunch and a long, long time on my sacred bench in the Garden – the shining sun sending me off to dreamland.
So I’m off the bench and strolling around, at one with geese and ducks and colors in abundance, and I came upon this artist. So’s I went over and said, “Hey,” and “So lovely,” and she thanked me. And I marveled at her little traveling pack of water-colors and a brush, and she said she’d taken it all over the world. And here I was maybe 30 blocks from home, dancing on every possibility the breeze was swishing by. She let me take a picture:
Which, if you consider this anonymous photo:
Catches it really good, sittin’ on a bench with a sketch pad in her lap.
So, this is nice. Nice art and human-ness and the natural world, and it’s here as today’s post, in part, because in Monday’s Morning Pages I gave considerable ink to an urge to raise my sorry and weary self up from own history as an artist and – Please – begin to rock and roll again. After the enlightenment, the laundry. “Take out the papers and the trash.” Squeeze some of my own colors out on a funky palette and pick up a brush. I mean, I am unemployed and everything, and I can see Mount Hood out the bedroom window, and there’s nature all about calling my name. Be nice to talk about a bunch of it with my mouth entirely closed. And this keypad off on a snooze.
At the end of Friday’s job interview I asked if they wanted me to email references, and was told that wasn’t necessary. Which could mean no longer interested or, my initial thought, no need, we’re already sold. Funny thing is, I woke Saturday to that same place – I’m already sold or, no thanks, no longer interested.
What happened while I slept? In fact, the possible job wasn’t the only important current life reality I experienced as a potential seismic shift of feeling upon waking. Nights in Portland. Nights on the built-in bed. Night after night with vivid recollected dream.
I have another work interview with a different agency in a couple of hours, this one on the telephone. I’m going to begin by explaining why they may not want to interview me – an hours thing.
Job, no job. Either. Nature areas are so glad I’m back.
I have a job interview this afternoon at 1pm, the position title is ‘Facilitator/Coach’, it’s working with folks involved in the criminal justice system, stepping down from higher to lower levels of, I suppose, observation. I don’t have a real sense of it. In the Zoom interview last week I said I hoped I would receive an offer for an in-person performance – I said I liked interviews ’cause I get to play in them. Probably a goofy comment trying to land a job.
I received by email the address of the interview yesterday, and also a note that the interview would begin with a “role play” in which one of the interviewers would act as a disruptive group member and me as the, um, ‘Facilitator’ of the group. Sort of weird to tell me 24 hours ahead of time. But, I live in a world of ‘Don’t-know mind’, so I’ll put on some of my very few articles of clothing not a t-shirt or jeans and roll up Glisan by 1p and see what happens.
It’s a 12-hour a week job, which is the outer reaches of as many hours as I want to/am willing to have a job with a boss and a time card and that work stuff. I could use the money and can also exist in a world of poverty just fine. It’s getting to help people – and I think I’m pretty okay doing that – therefore helping to save the planet. I will be surprised if there aren’t other candidates with more direct, related experience. So I better have a few tricks up my sleeves. Or roll up my sleeves with what you see is what you get.
I’ve decided I’m going to go to the Rhody Garden in a little while and go sit on my bench. Just sit there, wide open to the day, perhaps gather just a smidge of that wonder and magic I know there to bring into what feels like maybe a funky interview. And here’s something – the Dr. John song “Such a Night” came to visit me early yesterday and hung around the whole day, and I made a deal as host to work it into this afternoon’s check-me-out setting.
I’ve been looking for a larger rug than the two small twins I bought a couple of Saturdays ago. I tracked one down – 10 x 10 – my offer of $40 was accepted because the guy’s moving Friday and it has to go. But I did not go for this rug yesterday, no, I made a plan to meet a young woman selling a hand-painted small table for $20 in a Fred Meyer parking lot over in Northeast, my suggestion, and she showed with her beau and he tossed it in the Camry’s trunk and I said maybe we can have coffee sometime and they said sweet and off they went. I stayed and looked at FB Marketplace on my phone, and the rug guy had messaged with his address which was nearly around the corner. Bang!
So I messaged I’m like right here, brah, and I drove over and could not find the address and parked and messaged a couple of times saying I was going to head home, and as I was driving away saw it (his address)and swung around and knocked on the door and just then my phone rang and it was him and he said he was on the way home and apologized five times for leading me to think he was there. And you know what? It’s just fine, I said. I’ll wait, I said, and you have nothing to apologize about. The world needs kindness and compassion and patience, right? So I sat in my car and he showed up and I said a few words and he said, “You’re for sure from Massachusetts,” which was kind of wondrous, him being born in Boston and everything.
So we went into his place, boxes and stuff everywhere hauntingly familiar, and he said the rug was likely way too big for my car – and it absolutely was. You don’t have to buy it, he said, and I’m sorry I said because I said I would and he’s got a deadline. And he said, well, I have a smaller one I need to get rid of too, in fact, he said, the non-carpeted room in his new place would probably work for the big one, so he pulled the rug you saw and see up there in the picture out from under a bed and vacuumed it with this crazy, science-fiction-like vaccum, and carried it out to my car and tossed it in and when I got home here to the attic I placed it lovingly on the floor and took the picture above and sent it to him, with endless thanks. He had offered to give it to me free, I gave him a twenty.
He’s now a contact, Bryn, my first new person, and our plan to get a coffee feels when, not maybe.
I was talking with Gina yesterday about wonder and magic as they relate to the Rhododendron Garden. But, man, I go through the day, through the world, with my eyes and my ears and my heart wide open, and where isn’t it! As the God Indra said to the Buddha, “The temple is erected.”
I never turned the ignition key in my Camry yesterday. I meant to. I planned to. The plan was to go to the Moreland Theater – old-time, one big screen – for a one o’clock show, which would have been me going to a movie for the first time in nearly five years. The day had other plans. The motivational speaker Les Brown asks, “Can we meet conditions as we find them?” The Zen Roshi John Tarrant says, “Things are not as they appear, nor are they otherwise.” It’s somewhere in all that.
The sound went out on this computer – a frequent fun feature since I installed Windows 11 – so I did what I do and restarted and, yay, the sound came back, and, boo, nearly everything was wiped away. Including my file with passwords. Annie Hall would say, “Ladeeda.” I went clawing through boxes of important papers but couldn’t find the password sheets – meeting conditions as I found them, I have since hand-written a new one – and eventually I peered through a couple of back-doors and got many things available again – including this blog space so you can read this, and the Pacific Zen Institute site, allowing me to sign-up for and attend my long-standing Tuesday Koan group last night.
I did stay here in the attic and stream a movie my son Cameron had been wanting me to see, and late afternoon with the rain subsiding, went for a pretty long walk, my newly-bummed right knee cooperating good enough. When I came home from the walk I found an email in Gmail – which was also gone for a while – asking if I’d like to have an in-person interview for the part-time job I Zoom-interviewed for last week.
Which may be conditions finding me as I am. I said yes.
March 3, when I arrived in Portland and had a four-hour window to wait on my about-to-be-landlady, I drove to The Rhododendron Garden, bought an annual pass, and strolled through places I knew, out to my bench – I’d dreamed of it five years. I honored my return with great attention. This past Saturday I stopped in again after coffee – four Garden visits now – and brought my vast attention along with me. I looked with my ears, and knew the place through my feet. My eyes were dancing.
David Hinton, translator of ancient Chinese poetry and classic Ch’an Koan texts, translates certain ideograms as “Absence” and “Presence.” Presence the 10,000 things – everything – burgeoning forth from Absence – the place of no thing. Call it The Dao. Call it Heaven and Earth. Call it winter and fall. Presence burgeoning forth in spring, living summer in all its glory. Dying back with the coming of autumn, and the empty enactment of winter.
I share this Ch’an/Zen/Buddhist/who cares stuff because when I entered the Garden Saturday at noon, 18 days from my initial foray, the magnificent spaciousness of spring burgeoning forth was everywhere, in everything – the song of ducks, the soft breeze off the lake, every tree so bare just those 18 days in the rear view, now beginning its flowery-green journey to May.
And these eyes, forever changed.
This below is simply pointing at it. It ain’t it. And yet…..
It was just after 4:30 Friday afternoon I leaned back on a comforter smooshed against the wall, crosswise on the bed, and returned a call I missed from my friend Kate in Missouri. Kate had called around 1:00 and I must have disconnected pulling the phone out of my pocket, walking down Woodstock Avenue, tagging along after and then walking away from a ghost. Flustered. Broken-hearted. One of those times when breathing feels optional.
I attempted to leave Kate a late-afternoon message and there was an unexpected beep and just about then I fell into a dreamy sleep – an in between how it is…..and how it is.
Now it’s 5:20 as I type and I was hearing rain on the skylight. This morning, some 17 hours ago, sitting on the cushion under the skylight, I had a realization I was actually missing the rain. I flashed on the inevitability of sunshine in Southern and Central Coast California, and how easy that was. Things are not so easy here, though each day has come to fetch me with offers of gifts and quiet praise. We all said it back in the day – “Keep on keepin’ on.”
I shaved some of the hair off my head today. I believe the physicality of tired has landed on this door step.
from a mountain bench 