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For some reason the book “Hunger Mountain” by the author David Hinton was face-up on the passenger seat when I hopped into the Camry after having coffee with Jorge. Man, was I supremely chatty Sunday. The kid across the table was all ears.

I talked with him about my sense of being utterly lost, with its breathless aloneness, and especially here at Christmas; with a feeling I could hop into the car, which holds everything I own not in a storage unit in Idaho, and drive anywhere – go anywhere, be anywhere, exist anywhere. A job I sorta love, an unemployment I’ll long for. The growing dislike of living in other peoples’ homes, here in the milieu of “There is nothing I dislike.” Yin and Yang – Yin my new girlfriend I haven’t met yet; Yang a bunch of stuff I wished I did different way back when.

How I fall in love over and over and over again with the world – just exactly as it is right then – on the Bob Jones Trail and while wandering as aimlessly as one can wander on a clear path through the Laguna Lake open space. 

On Sunday Jorge described to me where his gym is, where he lifts, and I drove slowly down Pismo to those exact coordinates and couldn’t see it. There was the bakery with no retail, the dreamy abandoned sand-stoned house with its picture window out to San Luis Mountain, otherwise crumbled up in attachment to a large metal’d garage-like building. This one-way street. The Beatles roaring out of the CD’s speakers – “Tell Me Why.”

Just another Sunday

I read from Joan Sutherland’s “Through Forests of Every Color” to the morning meditation Sangha group Saturday, a first for me. Why I was paying notice to my literary passenger after Sunday coffee, and am now skimming through “Hunger” for something else cool. To read.

“My walk has hardly begun; and already, I’m lost.” – ‘Hunger Mountain’

I had this lovely vision Saturday morning of a butterfly flying in through the open window of my room – any old butterfly – landing on my shoulder, whispering things into my ear with a voice that doesn’t use words.

The open window of my room.

Any old butterfly.

Last Wednesday, as I clicked the ‘Publish’ button to share “singalong junk,” a message flashed on the screen – “You’ve published 100 times on fromamountainbench.” I was kind of surprised to see it. One hundred’s a lot.

It doesn’t feel so long ago when one day – Oh whimsy, sweet, devilish whimsy – my long-standing blog “couch surfing at 70” just stopped doing its August 2018 thing. No one received a post in their email that day, or any day after, and maybe a month later I stopped swimming against the tide of why and said, to myself, “Now what?” Not long after, this showed up:

And “from a mountain bench” burgeoned forth out of the space that was ‘couch surfing.’ Then last Wednesday the ‘Jetpack’ tag-along-stats held up its “100” sign – “You’ve shared your personal goofy, sweet, sorta weird, mostly confused, experiential, wondering, wandering, gypsy-ish, and, (re #102) vastly lost self here in front of all these people 100 times. One Hundred!!”

I’m older now – um, as are you – and call this metaphorical, and so, so real, mountain space home. Wait! Check this out –

“For whom do you bathe and make yourself presentable? The voice of the cuckoo urges you to come home; hundreds of flowers fall, yet the voice is not stilled; even deep in jumbled peaks, it is calling clearly.”

That’s a verse from “The Five Modes of Tung-shan,” which I was hanging out with back in San Diego’s Golden Hill neighborhood, way before San Luis, even way before I met Ann. If that’s not a perfect description of me right here right now today, I’ll run to the closest mirror and take a picture of me taking a picture of me taking a picture of…….

This is 103. Thanks for hanging out.

If you are reading this it’s likely you have some degree of personal relationship with me — long-time friend, former soul mate, parent of a kid, on the job, acquaintance from one of “the rooms” or another, someone I’ve never yet met in person but have big, good feelings about. So, I’m guessing on your end there is a bit of clarity of sorts, a measuring stick, for “getting me.” And that makes me happy: a connection thing; some shared experience; even a ‘We’re all bozos on this bus.”

All of which ought to help when I make this statement of how I am and feel today, which is a statement of fact – like “The hills have turned green’ – not a complaint, not attention-seeking, even not bragging. Interestingly, it’s just simply like this:

I have never felt so lost in my life as I do now. So utterly lost.

I snapped these pictures yesterday on my way out hiking the Bob Jones Trail in Avila Beach. Every time I hike the trail, out from the beach and back to the beach, I stop at this place and bow to Isabella. Which has me bowing to living each day as if. As if it’s the only one I’ve got. Maybe the only one I’m gonna get. Live it as to carry on for my dead best friends – Bob, Doug, and Billy. To carry on for Linda Eastman McCartney. To carry on for an eight-year old Isabella Fow.

Usually there are fellow travelers on the bench, often moms, as it sits at the edge of a play area with four swings, a slide, and a pull-up bar. Yesterday it was all empty, and I had a joyful swing for a while, up into the wild, blue yonder. Then I stopped and hung out with Isabella just a bit, traveled down the path until turning around to take these photos. And now here we all are.

I could write novels about Bob Zimmerman, Dr. Douglas Martin, and Billy MacDonald. I loved them. I was able to write about Linda because I lived and shared that time with she and Paul. All I know of Isabella is that she was obviously living it – being all that childish joy – and the trailside invitation to join in – Yesterday, today, if I get a tomorrow. So I’m borrowing words here from the obituary of this young woman:

“Isabella Grace Fow was born in July 2005 to Jonathan and Leslie Fow in San Luis Obispo, and passed away Saturday, Feb. 15, 2014. She lived in Avila Beach and was a third grader at Bellevue-Santa Fe Charter School. Isabella was an amazing big sister to her brother, Olin, and sisters Ava Lou and Lilla. Isabella was an amazing child, full of love for everyone. Her big smiles and warm heart lit up our lives. She was an avid reader, wrote poems and stories in her journals and drew beautiful pictures of horses. In addition to her parents Jon and Leslie, Isabella is survived…..”

The fact I’m still here, surviving, to write in this mountain bench space, amidst a life filled with shenanigans of stupidity, substance abuse, and bad decisions (and, yeah all the compassionaite sweet stuff too), is grace. And how about that you’re getting to read it.

Graced with grace.

My mind found its way to Linda Eastman while on my early walk before the meditation meeting Monday morning. Paul McCartney’s so lovely wife, and bandmate, who left the planet in 1998, I guess right on time, but it felt way, way too soon. She was 57 years old.

I was always happy Linda and Paul found each other, and it made me happy she joined the band. I can’t say why, but for some reason I’ve been listening lots to the song ‘Magneto and Titanium Man’ from the ‘Venus and Mars’ album. It gets me. And especially the backing vocals on the bridge (begins, “Well there she were..”), Linda’s voice so prominent – so right there.

More and more and more and more my mind is doing what it wants, and I’m lucky if I get to tag along, never mind try to keep up. ‘Magneto and Titanium Man.’ Linda Eastman McCartney. Singing to myself on lonely walks. The Y. Crying. See.

I had this thought while walking – Linda’s gone so soon and I’m still here – old and wrinkly. What am I going to do with this day?

At the tail end of a lovely walk on the Bob Jones Trail Saturday afternoon, I heard myself say this: “Why am I sometimes utterly sure everything goes exactly the way it’s supposed to, and sometimes I wish things were different?”

Back home I scavenged through many piles of Zen/Ch’an books of Japanese Koans (Chinese Ch’an Kung-ans) and found this:

Monk Kushyman Luis-Mountain asked the Master:

“Why am I sometimes utterly sure everything goes exactly the way it’s supposed to, and sometimes I wish things were different?”

The Master answered, “Try a pepperoni pizza and call me in the morning.”

Luis-Mountain said, “I do not understand.”

The Master responded, “The Big Dipper is big.”

At that there was an “Aha.”

Ha!! Even on a lovely Saturday I’m hanging out with this stuff.

Part One:

I don’t know how to be cool. I wear beat-up jeans and too big sweatshirts. I don’t feel a need for social skills. My primary focus in this world – every day, every moment – is slow dancing. (And saving the planet.) I rarely get embarressed.

On a dating site I would offer as my profile: “I rent a room in a trailer, I hardly have any money, my 24-year-old car has almost no paint left on its trunk. My idea of a fabulous vacation is to go to Starbucks with a book. At four o’clock in the morning I go outside to look up at the stars, freezing my ass off, feeling both very small and very big all at once. Oh – there’s nothing more romantic on the planet than slow dancing. Lastly, I barely give a rat’s butt about other people’s opinions…or my own………So, who’s interested?”

Not cool.

And yet I sit on a mountain bench listening to Motown, and find myself joyous and free, dancing.

Terminally hip.

Part Two:

Every day I am sitting still, as if in meditation, upwards of an hour. Every day I am reading from ‘these’ books upwards of an hour. Every day I am writing three pages in a notebook about this life of mine now.

I am never not doing these.

And I live in a trailer with my mom (said Zen Master Eminem).

Following the divorce, I stayed with my friend Kate at her house in Milwaukie, Oregon for a month before finding on line and moving into a room in a house in Encinitas, California. One of my worst living experiences – wild drug and alcohol use, 100,000,000 ants crawling daily on my floor, wonky hardly-ever there internet. While there, though, I applied for and was hired by a San Diego agency to serve as a “support person” for a young couple, both with Down syndrome, in their apartment in San Marcos. From Encinitas I could take back roads to hang out with Kristen and James, maybe 20 miles round trip, two days a week.

Then I fled the insanely expensive and rather evil Encinitas house and landed in a room in a condo development in the Golden Hill neighborhood of SD, a much nicer experience for half the cost. The one drawback was the new commute to work with the kids:

About 35 miles each way, up the 163 and up the (gulp) 15 and west on the (another gulp) 78, SD to SM. I worked Mondays and Tuesdays as my role in the support team, so up and back twice a week, like 140 miles, and for seven months – Calculator please: just under 4000 of those 26,869 miles I’ve traveled in my car.

One morning after those nine months – and the joy of being some kind of service – came to a close, I called my boss and said I can’t do this commute anymore. She said she’d been waiting for my call. I gave three weeks and was gone

Driving to the Rhody Garden in Portland, OR brought me to a place of wonder and magic. The way longer drive to San Marcos was as fulfilling and joyful – lucky, lucky me. Fortunately, I get to follow their lives together on FB, and for some reason I am tagged in ongoing “support team” emails about that mid-thirties couple – in 2022 they’d been married four years and together 13. Wasn’t it that ancient Zen Master Eminem who said, “You can do anything you set your mind to,” and especially if you lead with the heart.

There’s a P.S. here about a guitar and and amplifier falling out from the sky into the room where I type this, but it’s another of these odometer tales for another day.

Lucky me:

Some of the few miles added to the Camry’s odometer came from driving briefly from Nehalem Street (home) in Southeast to Portland’s Rhododendren Garden, also in SE. Generally into the smallish parking lot, but if it was filled, across 28th Ave to one of Reed College’s lots. I almost always went on the day of free admission, Tuesday or Wednesday – I can’t remember everything.

Generally there were lots of tourists (people touring) amidst all the plethora of rhody colors, long winding paths, unique passageways over and through the waters of Crystal Springs Lake. The whole space was a dazzlement, an ongoing wonder just to be in it. And with plentifully people’d, as is my way, I wandered to a far boundary and a bench almost always empty until this guest accepted its invitation. This bench:

I cannot tell you all the moment by moment magesty and solace and the fact of grace I found there, so many, many times. And I won’t try. This is a story falling out from the odometer.