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.
I took the long way around back from hiking the Johnson Ranch trails Wednesday, including one marked “Closed.” That “No” sign I stepped around, giggling and spreading my arms into the morning, honoring my punk bravery, until I saw way down an official vehicle parked on the private road right where the trail crosses, and turned around, all full of it, honoring my chickenshit.
My detour fetched me stark white egrets on both sides of the second-chance path – silent, intense measured prancing, noticing even me, the white stunning against the green and brown and blue; a hillside of black cows grazing far over by the 101.
Later, motorvating up that highway, early Springsteen crazy loud, the Camry’s six (cylinders) whispering over the rush of the open windows and Garden State rock and roll – “North. North, kid. Pack it up. Pack it all up. North.”
(Pssst – I’m falling apart in all the right ways.)
Steely Dan – “Drink your big black cow and get out of here.”
Sunday night, 6:45, I stepped outside and into the middle of the trailer park street to look at the stars. Orion’s Belt, my fave, has been absent on my journeys out after meditation, 4am, cause the earth spins and it looks like the stars in the sky have moved, and for all I know I’m the one that’s moved. No Orion’s Belt.
Sunday night, on the other hand, there she was, off in the southeastern night sky. With the big, big ring of stars that circle around her. But, it’s funny. Orion’s Belt, those three stars, were twinkling. Honest to goodness twinkle, twinkle, twinkling. Like all the other stars in the sky.
I felt like a kid looking up there – outside after dark, done with tv (streaming ‘Scorpion’), all brave and everything out in the middle of the road. Rewarded, gifted with a sky full of twinkling stars. Life, vast and wondrous.
At 4am I do keep getting to see the Big Dipper.
It’s so big. It’s all, all of the all of this – so big.
Let me begin by saying it has become akin to impossible for me to be influenced by anything said or written which appears as “life instruction.” There were those days, and now there aren’t.
Here’s an example. In 2008 I was in a winter rental, parenting my son Spenser, in North Truro out near the end of Cape Cod. We’d been practicing leaving Spenser alone, so on a rainy March Saturday morning I drove over to the library. Wandering through the stacks in the basement, the title of a book reached out – “Wherever You Go There You Are.” Skimming through I saw a bunch of quotes from Thoreau, and having both swam in and run around Walden Pond, I used my card and checked it out.
Over the next few days I read the book. It changed my life. The direct result of reading was I began meditating – 10 minutes in a chair each morning. Before helping Spenser out to the 6:30 bus. This occured nearly 18 years ago and there have been maybe three days through that time of no meditation. It, the meditation, is different here, now, and this life I have today is not separate from it; I would not be sharing this story without it.
Which brings me back to “Wherever You Go.” yesterday and I’m reading through it, and now there’s that book’s knock on my door and no one’s home. It’s like reading directions to a microwave.
Sorry.
After a number of pages I put “There You Are” down and picked up “Original Teachings of Chan Buddhism” by Chang Chung-Yuan and read this — “The (golden) lion symbolizes ‘shih,’ or appearance, which has no reality without the gold. On the other hand, gold lacks meaningful expression without the form of the lion as its appearance. The existence of each is dependent on the other. Yet the gold and the lion distinctly exist by themselves. When by mutual solution gold is lion and lion is gold, the dichotomy between reality and appearance disappears.”
I always promised nothing more than a report of “my daily weather” in my posts here. So, some of sitting on a firecracker.
From the unpublished book, “Poems Written in My Car Parked by the Mountain”:
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“Sitting on a firecracker”
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I giggle, I cry
I dare not squeal,
Keepin’ it real.
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Never not talkin’
too much.
Explodin’ life,
and no wife.
I write a blog post for every (week) day in the hopes it’s like throwing a window wide open so people (you) can lean out and look into the bright sunshine, or the 3am dark.
Through your eyes. Through my index fingers.
The song says, “You only get what you give,” and hopfully both the writing and the reading are the giving and the getting.
And
Last night about 10,000 raccoons gathered outside and below my window for a game of ring-around-the-rosy. I almost wrote 10,000 dragons, but that would be silly. I knew they were raccoons.
I’m not trying to win any popularity contest.
Later yesterday afternoon I found myself carelessly wandering through 1000 blades of tall, green grass at the outskirts of water-logged Laguna Lake. Much to my surprise, and joy, I saw the cows had returned, grazing by the path up to San Luis Mountain, way, way over there. Of course they saw me too – it’s like looking in a mirror.
The clouds and bright sky and brilliant, emeral hills were wild.
I had a post for today waiting here from last weekend, but I threw it out a few minutes ago. This is way more now. That previous post did include a song, so I’ll tack on a different one here – my all-time favorite singer.
Thanks for participating.
On the return half of a Friday morning hike on the Bob Jones Trail, snuck in between the rains, this thought settled entirely within my January 19, 1949 essence – I am utterly clueless about every bit of my life now. Right here, then and there, on the trail. The gathering of ancient Coast Live Oaks shimmering their total understanding in the southwesterly breeze. I don’t have a clue – not the tiniest morsel of a clue – regards (ing) any single possibility of a ‘What now? What’s next?’
I think I’ve been leaning into this, hinting to myself, in my writings, here in the blog with some of my posts the last month or so. Trailing my own personal crumbs Gretel has been tossing about along the way – I may be moving, my housemate’s wildly unpredictable, I don’t want a job, I’m so alone and yet feel disconnected from everyone, I feel like I’ve always lived here, that I’ve come home, and Encinitas and Oakland are on my mind.
I miss sitting on the sea wall at Ocean Beach in San Diego. I miss walking the Cape Cod Rail Trail in Orleans, Massachusetts. I miss sacred time on the bench in the Rhody Garden in Portland, Oregon.
And I have no plan at all – which was the subtle zap walking the Bob Jones the end of last week. None of this is ‘poor me,’ and if it reads that way, I apologize. I tend to tell it like it (me) is – previously on surfed couches, now from a mountain bench. And this is like it is. I’m just so utterly clueless about my life.
It’s not scary. I don’t think it’s bad. It’s just how I am.
A Japanese woman came into the coffee shop the afternoon before next year. She was wearing a shiny gray rain hat. With napkins she polished the family table and her own chair almost endlessly. She bought and brought her son coffee shop eggs, and shared a homemade, out of her bag, thick, steamy drink with the man, perhaps her husband, though she wore no wedding ring.
The coffee shop on the afternoon before next year was filled with happy and grumpy people. Many of the men had beards.
As I was preparing to leave, one of my favorite baristas, who I almost never see, appeared behind the counter. Holly. Also, while preparing to leave, the Japanese woman with the shiny gray rain hat and no wedding ring, stood and walked directly to my table.
“Don’t prepare the room,” she said to me.
I went with my book and pencil and glasses and said “Happy New Year” to China and Isiah and Holly, and I left.
from a mountain bench 