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So, in my dream, I’m hiking at the Laguna Lake open space. There are more fellow hikers on the paths than usual – maybe it’s a Saturday. I’m thinking two thoughts about that. One, I like it when there’s hardly anyone else around – it just feels quieter. Two, the entry gate sign warns of rattlesnakes, and so many people walking the paths, lots with their dogs, means there’s nearly no chance of coming upon a rattling snake as I stroll the circumference.

All that’s in my dream. So, I’ve made the turn down from the high path, a left at the cow gate, and am moving along my favorite of the trails, towards the lake, when I notice movement ahead. As I come closer I see the clear outline of a snake undulating out from the grass on the left across the path toward the grass on the right. Stepping closer, I am sensed, and the snake pauses, coils up, and turns toward me.

And I keep walking. Perhaps I’m four or five feet away when I stop. We really look at each other – me and the rattle snake, the rattle snake and me. After a moment, the snake raises its head, looks with its eyes directly into my eyes, and speaks in a voice as clear as the blowing wind:

“Wake up!”

It’s interesting.

In its own way, Christmas has reached back to take my hand and gently guide me along the path of the most wonderful time of the year. I feel the Christmas spirit within me. And falling out from me, like flashes of moonbeam.

Not like when I was 14 and going to the 5 & 10 on Main Street and with my paper-route money buying my mother two 25 cent drinking glasses, which felt so big to me. I picked these out. Not like when I’ve been wildly in love most of the past 15 years, spending endless minutes and hours really, really giving everything to a special gift. Some delight in a shop window calling me in. A t-shirt I’ve come upon – exactly perfect. Every small thing wrapped and crammed into a stocking – love, love, love.

That’s not here this year. No special one to dream about, and share those dreams. My boys each 1000 miles away – money and cards and phone calls, if I’m lucky a real-time video. Nothing like a 25 cent glass under the tree. Nothing like a gift I’m just bursting to see the most important person open Christmas morning.

And yet. Christmas has its way with me. “Happy holidays,” I say. “Merry Christmas,” I say. The living wreath on the dentist’s door. The welcoming tree in the Y’s lobby. The $52 Christmas stocking I held in my hand in a special downtown store just the other day – it was so incredibly lovely and wonderful and all its own special – knowing I’d buy it in a second if this was a different time.

And yet. I rejoice with the next Christmas song to come on a San Luis rock radio station. To stroll and drive around the colored lights all about in this trailer park. People streaming into the Y wearing goofy holiday sweaters. Human reindeer. Me too.

Christmas, the way it always does, has invited me, for about the 75th time, to come in and sit in front of the fireplace. Hallucinate joy and good cheer a while. And like I always do, I’ve said, “Yes. Thank you.”

Dec 16, 7:45p – It’s Tuesday night, no Koan group with David Roshi off to Japan. The landlord/housemate’s car exactly where it was when I left for work, 12 hours ago. I didn’t see him before I left – which is the norm – and I did not see him when I got home around 1:30. His door was closed. And now it’s 8p and I haven’t seen him once. Or heard the dry cough he’s coughed throughout all the days the last three or four weeks. Usually when he’s holed up in his room I hear something. But not today.

If you are reading this, with possibly a growing sense of dread – which you may be feeling through my fingers – you’re maybe wondering why I haven’t knocked on his door, called out his name. It’s a good question. Four or five weeks ago, when I was worried for his increasingly unfamiliar, unfriendly, ignore me, noise-cancelling headphones always on, entirely different than when he first recruited me to come live here behavior, I came in from a hike and asked how he was doing. He got angry, said I was way up in his business. Leave him alone. A couple hours later I came out of my room to the living room to apologize – not for my human being-ness, but for the trouble. He said he was going through stuff and it was his business and “don’t try to fix me.” I’ve pretty much left him alone since – I wash dishes, sweep the floor, put out the trash, bring in the mail, stay in my room.

I’ve certainly seen him here and there a bit each day, we’ve had mini-conversations when I’ve walked into the living room to wave hello or say goodbye. Sometimes he’s taken the headphones off and talked for a minute. When I came in from one of those meetings Monday night he must have had the headphones off because he called out, “Hello Buddy.” 

Now it’s Tuesday night and I haven’t seen him for 24 hours, or heard him since I was sitting in meditation at 3:15 this morning.

In yesterday’s post I said I felt like I could get in the car and go and be and exist anywhere. Maybe that’s coming. I was also thinking early this afternoon that tomorrow (yesterday as you read here) I’d go to the thrift store he really likes and get him a gift certificate as a holiday present, something I’ve planned a long time. One thing’s for sure as I’m typing this Tuesday night – there’s going to be at least one more paragraph:

Dec 17, 5:55am – A light I left on was off when I woke to sit in meditation earlier. I heard a muffled cough at 5:48am. The worst felt like a 50/50 proposition when I fell asleep. This morning he was perking coffee.

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.