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End of the week update. My life feels incredibly rich, I become stunned a lot. My body is really achy and tired, like 28,000 stairs so far after I’ve done my best to avoid stairs the last 10 years – it’s a knee thing. My relentless – wait, better Ch’an word — Utter – search after furniture to grace this space goes on, one small metal amazingly funky dresser with me now, two 4 x 4 rugs, a straight-back chair the landlady donated, offering to pay sellers extra to transport and help an old kid out, no volunteers yet.

Lots and lots of Starbucks time, hardly any people time, ripped a knee a little with the dresser, otherwise lots of walking amidst the park greenery and in some of P’town’s far out neighborhoods. Ha! I keep coming across these signs on front lawns all over:

“Presidents are temporary – Wu Tang is forever.”

Not sure I get it, then again, not getting it means it’s gotten me. Sign me up for the clan, Daddy-o.

Not sure how many “Right” things I have actually done in this sort of ancient and still here bedouin (“pastorally nomadic”) life of mine – for sure, coming back to Portland is one of them.

It’s been so cold up here in the attic nearly all the days it’s been home, and in the coffee shop Tuesday I felt in a coat pocket for a gel pen and came out with a $50 Amazon gift card each of us on the Y membership team received for meeting a membership goal my last month there, and there it was, and I googled how to use it and so ordered a very nice set of flannel sheets and they arrived 6pm Wednesday and it was so warm yesterday at 6pm I was kind of almost sweating while I put them on. Life in a northern town.

So, for your enjoyment,

here’s the official greeter when I come home to 2819 these days. If there’s an explanation, I haven’t asked. Sort of a James Taylor, “Don’t let me be lonely tonight,”

I don’t know what else to tell you, if I’ve told you anything at all. There’s a Koan where Manjusri, who’s the enactment of wisdom, announces to the gathering of followers that the Buddha is going to take the high seat and express the Dharma, like get ready for a big deal, kids, and the Buddha takes the high seat and sits there in silence a few moments and steps down. I like this quote from translator Shishin Wick Roshi – “What more could he say?” I’m betting the skeleton digs that.

Here’s another line from a Koan translation, this one from David Hinton – “all those secrets Lord Sun simply won’t stop rising to reveal.”

Flannel sheets in a heat wave; front-door greeter like California me, hold the Amazon freebie; Lord Sun sharing a secret sauce just rolling around heaven. And Sweet Baby James:

secret code up to the State Farm office, and the county food lady asks if I have a hundred bucks. There’s a sleek new dresser, so small, just over there, a young woman named Ash carried it from her rendevous car and threw it in my back seat, and yet, swollen knee, here on the road to nowhere. I have ordered checks with this address, and my landlady disses my daydreaming – geez, it’s just two weeks. Billy Preston asks, “Will it go round in circles?” and back to the landlady who’s a total Dead Head, when the cat in the attic’s all Alice Cooper and James Brown.

And Stevie Wonder – “You haven’t done nothing.”

Job interview at 11 this morning. “Papa’s got a brand new bag.”

Tuesday – How could you not be a tough cookie working in a laundramat? Zen master, I’m enchanted, between one summer walk and a second. No alarm necessary, scrub (blue) jay hopping from one side of a roof to the other. Meanwhile, my degree of Monday socializing in the coffee shop is sky high. Yesterday I began doodling again. And someone reached out about a dresser. And twice yesterday I made a special effort to hold the door for a traveler with arms full.

This poem – “News of warmth bursts the plum – spring comes to the cold branches.”

I couldn’t quite come up with an understanding of Saturday on Saturday. How it was, how I was, how I am. The day felt like it was scooting about 90 minutes ahead of me from 9a to 5p. Most every time I left home to go one way the Camry turned and I went another. And then arriving exactly on time to that new place, examples of crazy serendipity too numerous to mention.

It lingered into Sunday morning, a freaky chance meeting with a man years ago beloved by my son Spenser, and me, and loved back at us equally. The joy seeing me after all this time was clear in his eyes. It must of been in my eyes too.

Then, the same and yet another Sunday, my SLO friend Jorge and I continued our every-other-Sunday meetings yesterday, this time from a serious distance through his Cal Poly insights of Zoom workings. Really, really wonderful and lovely.

Since I’ve been back here in Portland, and it will be two weeks tomorrow, the sense of actions happening and me catching up a bit later has been woven through most of those days. It’s kind of amazing.

Thursday afternoon at the Kentucky Zoom group the teacher was talking about meditation. Short version – There’s no wrong way to do it.

When the time came for attendees to speak if they wanted, I raised my hand and held this up and said, “My meditation is sometimes like this”:

Then I held this up and said, “But way more it’s like this”:

And then the coolest thing happened. I turned the buddha and I turned the kitty so they, too, were facing the monitor screen, like me, and so as to not leave anyone out, I brought this one over from the other side of the desk to face the screen too:

Audience, left to right – blue kitty, buddha, me, fabric kitty. And then another of those Portland ‘Bangs!’ because in a lightning-like particular moment I felt exactly like I was in a movie theater. We all were. Like totally. The four of us, watching the meditation show. Straight outta Lexington.

Tuesday night the teacher at the Pacific Zen Institute Koan group asked those attending this question – “When is the last time you whispered to someone?” Hearing that filled me with a sense of wonder, and intimacy, and it has stayed with me since.

It’s been a long time for me – my San Diego relationship just wasn’t that. I did, though, find myself in a two-person group with a man named Chris after the teacher’s talk, and he said the last time he had whispered to someone was earlier in the day when his granddaughter was sitting on his lap in the library and they were reading animal stories.

I’d like to whisper to someone – probably something sweet, something special – and I am going to hold the possibility of that invitation close.

It was right around five o’clock in the afternoon yesterday when I realized my mind was blown. Not like blown out, call the cats in white suits and butterfly nets, but into some non-verbally state of stunnedness. I was looking out the kitchen window, my landlady was maybe in her room sleeping after an overnight shift, I hadn’t seen her for more than 24 hours, and I was looking out at real dark clouds in the distance and there was this kind of ‘Bang!!’ sense, I’m living in Portland again. I live here. It wasn’t a thought three months ago, and yet one week ago I was just beginning the big physiological bang of lugging heavy bag after heavy bag and a guitar and bundles of clothes and pretty much my worldly stuff outside of 19 boxes and loose art in a storage in Idaho from around a corner and up a bunch of steps to the porch and front door and through two doors of hanging curtains and then up a whole bunch of wood steps to the attic.

And at 5pm Monday afternoon I’m living in an attic in Portland, Oregon and looking out some lady’s kitchen window and there I was, me and my blown mind.

Yesterday I transferred my Camry car insurance from California to Oregon, effective the end of the month. I saved $150 over the next 12 months. Yesterday I also set in motion transferring my Medicare me insurance from down in CA to up here in OR, effective the beginning of next month – I lost $600 over the next 12 months. Hmmm. Then again, gasoline for the Camry is about 50 cents less a gallon up here than down there. Also then again, the CA sales tax is 7.25 while the OR sales tax is 0.00.

But, honestly, who’s counting. I wore my ‘Kathleen Hanna for President’ t-shirt to one of those meetings Saturday morning and someone made a (good) fuss over it, so Sunday I went on line and bought the same one in a different color – and approximately 75 less washings – for $31, just because. Saturday afternoon there was a piece of art I fell in love with on Division for $800 and I didn’t buy it. I haven’t bought a microwave yet either – there ain’t one here. There also ain’t a shower here, so I’ve taken my first baths since probably 1966 and it’s been kind of cool, especially yesterday morning when the sun peeked out for a while and the psychedelic material over the bathroom window brought a world of rainbow to my liquid trance.

I can’t make this stuff up – no way near enough brain cells. Oh, my first afternoon back in Portland, exactly one week ago on last Tuesday, my about-to-be landlady running late, I cruised over to the Rhododendron Garden – for who’s bench I’ve ached all these away years – and bought an annual pass. $35. I went there yesterday in the afternoon, and while sitting on the bench watched an eagle flying in lazy circles overhead. I posted a bunch of Garden photos on my FB page, which you could see here: https://www.facebook.com/buddy.cushman/

It’s supposed to rain four inches the next few days, and fortunately I have a bunch of Ch’an/Zen books and a guitar calling my name. And none of this is fiction.

I just want to write something now. It’s late Saturday afternoon, 5:05, and my whole life late Saturday afternoons have been my favorite time of the week. My whole life. And it has not rained today, and nearly all this day has been blue sky-y, dramatic white and gray-white clouds passing at their own pace. Which is exactly the way I’ve ambled through this day. I was just out behind my landlady’s house – Laura, 59 – and she was gardening in her lovely and rather unique garden and I had just come back from a sunny stroll down and back up Division Street, which is close by to the attic, and during which I said out loud to no one other than me – “I’m ambling.” And Laura’s two cats – Leroy and Ramona – were out in the day with her, for hours, and Leroy in particular rubbed my legs and smushed his nose and cheek against anything offering pleasant resistance, and by now any regular subscriber knows I’m in love with cats probably 73 years, so to be February fetched by Laura’s Saturday email in response to my post in search of new digs and find myself in an attic in a house with cats and a landlady who isn’t crazy about my getting up so early and drinking coffee and subsequent bathroom trips, above and next to her room, and who also says she feels like we found each other and she is glad I am here, and, um…….pretty great.

Now, writing this, it has been nearly exactly four days I’ve been back in Portland, and I keep finding myself stupefied by the all of it. And I’ve got to get Oregon plates and I need to switch my Medicare and probably car insurance, and while I bought two 4 x 4 colorful rugs from a woman at Morrison and 11th today to perk up these lovely brown floors, I am totally in need of a dresser and a bookcase and a most serious wicked comfortable chair.

And even days before the clocks all jump forward in about seven hours, I changed my alarm from 2:59 to 3:59, and still woke up at three Friday but slept all the way ’til four this morning.

And It’s just four days as I type.