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I was holding this painting in my hands later last night. I’d brought it off a wall near the laundry machines Tuesday to bring into the Koan group – as the only thing I wanted to say – but the group fizzled away when Zoom broke. It’s true. So this flower’s been sitting on books, leaning against the wall in my room. I’d guess I created this into the world in 2019. Or it created me.

Again, it’s pretty much all of what I want to say this morning.

Except this:

Kristen and James and the kid. Probably 2021, maybe early 2022, me lucky enough to hang out with them in their San Marcos home a couple of times a week, and get paid for it. Wonderful humans.

This week it’s been about my, and no doubt your, senses – nose, eye, ear, fingertip caresses. Here, in my nine months shared with Kristen and James, it was all that and all that was always bathed with warm feeling. Really fine energy. Joy in the journey. We do what we set out to do. And its the doing that’s the coolest.

These things are what I talk about when I repeat what I’ve heard: I do my best living the right way and the world comes to fetch me.

Yesterday I wrote here about the sensory quality of a fragrance as a lightning path to long-ago enlightenment. The nose knows, you could say. Today I’m hung up on the ear, home to the day’s, any day’s, vibrations. Certainly that’s how it was for me at the Johnson Ranch yesterday.

See here. See the sun-colored hair, Feel its ever-softness. Sense the odor of its perfectly round patty. And this, oh, glorious organ which is my ear:

Munch, munch, munch.

Munch, munch, munch.

Munch, munch, munch.

Oh, could I ever be so devoted, so single-pointed, so endless? I stood entirely still, and willed up all the silence within me. Far from the highway; far from the airport; far from the city.

Munch, munch, munch.

Perhaps my mom could have skipped the lawn-mowing lessons if only we’d had a young cow like this. Perhaps this young girl will sign up to be my second San Luis Obispo friend. She did have a conversation with my eyes, as well as my ears.

On the way back I was stopped by another sound – the wind tustling and fluttering the browned-out, not-yet-fallen large leaves of two California Sycamores loarding over the flowing stream, golden in the sun, which wasn’t there last summer.

All this and you may be wondering when the kid’s lobotomy is scheduled.

I hear you.

I set out later yesterday afternoon for a stroll through Meadow Park, maybe a half-mile long curvy, tarred, oblong path through trees and a (thanks to the rains) running stream down a concrete causeway. But, mostly grass. Bright green emerald grass glowing in the sinking sunlight. Rolling, fanning out, playground for dogs, families, little kids and lost souls.

The grass had been cut earlier in the day, eyes and nose testifying to that fact. Yes. The fragrance of freshly cut grass. Hmmm. For me I am often transported to my past as much if not more by the life of a lawn’s bouquet, or another smell, than the tracks of a city’s professional equipment. Even more than what my eyes say.

When I was little back in Massachusetts I remember it was my mom and me taking turns cutting the lawn. She taught me to slightly overlap the cut of the previous row, so as to leave no channel of sticking up, uncut grass. We always had an electric lawnmower, which increased the invitation for mindfullness. And gray ducktape wrapped along the orange cord here and there, further testimony my mindfulness could (can) always use some work. I made my fair share of childhood moolah cutting other people’s grass by what I learned from my mom.

All this, something of a magic carpet, zooming east 3000 miles, the lawns and grass there swadled in snow Tuesday afternoon. When the fragrance of a freshly mowed lawn sets my mind dancing.

“Jenny said when she was just five years old there was nothin’ happening at all.” — The Velvet Underground

I know the feeling.

Coming to this sacred blog space, it’s Monday night, and (in my writer’s mind) there’s nothing going on at all. Hmmm….I did the 8am meditation group – it’s lovely name White Heron Sangha – and got a Starbuck’s coffee right after. Looked around on line a couple hours for other places to exist, drove over to Avila Beach and walked the lovely Bob Jones Trail, ate something back here, took a nearly ice cold shower (not on purpose), did laundry. Now it’s 6:30, I’ve been watching a YouTube documentary on all-girls groups of the 60’s, the over-there guitar is winking at me – oh, I did some Duolingo Spanish before the hike – the guitar’s winking as in, “Like Bro, you showin’ up or what?”

And there’s no post for 12 hours from now, so I come here and quote The Velvets ’cause that says it. Nothing (upstairs) happening at all. Last week I was hiking the Johnson Ranch trails and out of nowhere the Sam Cooke song, “A Change Is Gonna Come,” sweeps into my head, and I know it’s true, and it ain’t The Velvets and it ain’t not The Velvets too. Yeah, dig it.

So, feeling sort of homeless amidst all this nothing going on, the planet kind of hades in a handbasket, there is this:

“Despite all the amputation you know you could just dance to the rock and roll station.” — The Velvets ( with perhaps Sam Cooke, heavenly tambourine).

I was telling Jorge over coffee yesterday how much I like Trader Joe’s. When I walk into the Trader Joe’s here in San Luis Obispo it feels like attending a party. Some people go to night clubs. Some people go to fancy restaurants. I go to Trader’s Joe’s.

There’s a palpable zaniness within the Trader Joe’s here in San Luis Obispo. Sometimes I drop in when I don’t really need anything, just to be enveloped in that zaniness. It’s fun.

When I lived in Oakland there were two Trader Joe’s – one in the Rockridge neighborhood and a smaller version on the eastern tip of Lake Merritt, that one a bit more frantic. Understandably. The Trader Joe’s in Encinitas, where I spent my share of time during the three months I lived there, was larger and more polite. More money maybe. There were a couple of Trader Joe’s in San Diego, one in the Hillcrest neighborhood, one on Point Loma, both crowded and people squishy.

Yesterday I told Jorge that my favorite of all Trader Joe’s is on Cesar Chavez Blvd at Holgate Ave in Portland, Oregon. My favorite by a mile. Often, when I would pick my son Spenser up from his day program at On The Move, we’d pull into the Trader Joe’s parking lot on the way home. Spenser had many admirers and followers there, always making a big deal to see him. I was well liked too.

I’ve recently decided the next time I move someplace I’m going into the zany Trader Joe’s here and buy four or five of their multi-colored shopping bags to use for packing all the books I’ve published and never sold. Because that seems pretty cool to me.

Ongoing Friday in concert:

The wildly integrated Beach Boys.

Nothing appears in this blog space accidentily.

I’d like to point out, much to my delight and hopefully yours, that on my hike at Johnson Ranch Monday on my birthday I was able to pause a while and most gently pat a calf standing along the path – she all black and fuzzy and available – on the top of her head, between her ears, a looking into each other.

Most fabulous birthday present.

Monday, which was also Janis Joplin’s birthday, was sunny and hot and green all over. Every time someone approached from the other direction I would step off the path until he, she, they passed. Includes dogs. The Buddhist nun Pema Chodron often speaks of loving-kindness, and it seems there are maybe a billion chances to practice that every day.

Pema Chodron was born in the summer of 1936, which makes my winter birthday (feel like) child’s play.

Like playing handsies with a black cow.

Butterflies flutter about me. Dragonflies cruise past, I swear I hear their laughter. Mountains and hillsides dance in the sunlight, as I do. All this, even on the hardest days. Holding close the bodhisattva vows – I vow to do no harm. I vow to do good. I vow to do good for people. Lost in the space between my ears. My birth certificate, hands on her hips, tilting her head, says, “Look what you’ve gotten us into.” (What do you say to that?)

My photo, Errol Heights, Portland., early summer 2021. Spirit animal on the journey south. And who knew there’d be one north?

Not knowing. Par for the course.

Why this photo and not from dozens of others – my former wife Susan and me – I don’t know. I sit still, and guests arrive. Something like that.

Deep in the heart of Covid, no doubt. And the tangible, physical sense of gratitude I felt then, and do today, of experiencing that time with someone else. A most treaured person. Not alone.

I think that’s all I have to say.

I snapped this photograph cruising around Sauvie Island just north of Portland in Oregon, likely in the spring or summer of 2009. Not long after I’d moved into Portland right around this time in January of that year. In fact maybe exactly the day of my birthday.

Amazing. I was just 60 years old then.

From that birthday to this one – the times I’ve had, the places I’ve been. Stunning, breathtaking.

A river of tears. A playground dazzled with sunlight and singing.