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I never turned the ignition key in my Camry yesterday. I meant to. I planned to. The plan was to go to the Moreland Theater – old-time, one big screen – for a one o’clock show, which would have been me going to a movie for the first time in nearly five years. The day had other plans. The motivational speaker Les Brown asks, “Can we meet conditions as we find them?” The Zen Roshi John Tarrant says, “Things are not as they appear, nor are they otherwise.” It’s somewhere in all that.

The sound went out on this computer – a frequent fun feature since I installed Windows 11 – so I did what I do and restarted and, yay, the sound came back, and, boo, nearly everything was wiped away. Including my file with passwords. Annie Hall would say, “Ladeeda.” I went clawing through boxes of important papers but couldn’t find the password sheets – meeting conditions as I found them, I have since hand-written a new one – and eventually I peered through a couple of back-doors and got many things available again – including this blog space so you can read this, and the Pacific Zen Institute site, allowing me to sign-up for and attend my long-standing Tuesday Koan group last night.

I did stay here in the attic and stream a movie my son Cameron had been wanting me to see, and late afternoon with the rain subsiding, went for a pretty long walk, my newly-bummed right knee cooperating good enough. When I came home from the walk I found an email in Gmail – which was also gone for a while – asking if I’d like to have an in-person interview for the part-time job I Zoom-interviewed for last week.

Which may be conditions finding me as I am. I said yes.

March 3, when I arrived in Portland and had a four-hour window to wait on my about-to-be-landlady, I drove to The Rhododendron Garden, bought an annual pass, and strolled through places I knew, out to my bench – I’d dreamed of it five years. I honored my return with great attention. This past Saturday I stopped in again after coffee – four Garden visits now – and brought my vast attention along with me. I looked with my ears, and knew the place through my feet. My eyes were dancing.

David Hinton, translator of ancient Chinese poetry and classic Ch’an Koan texts, translates certain ideograms as “Absence” and “Presence.” Presence the 10,000 things – everything – burgeoning forth from Absence – the place of no thing. Call it The Dao. Call it Heaven and Earth. Call it winter and fall. Presence burgeoning forth in spring, living summer in all its glory. Dying back with the coming of autumn, and the empty enactment of winter.

I share this Ch’an/Zen/Buddhist/who cares stuff because when I entered the Garden Saturday at noon, 18 days from my initial foray, the magnificent spaciousness of spring burgeoning forth was everywhere, in everything – the song of ducks, the soft breeze off the lake, every tree so bare just those 18 days in the rear view, now beginning its flowery-green journey to May.

And these eyes, forever changed.

This below is simply pointing at it. It ain’t it. And yet…..

It was just after 4:30 Friday afternoon I leaned back on a comforter smooshed against the wall, crosswise on the bed, and returned a call I missed from my friend Kate in Missouri. Kate had called around 1:00 and I must have disconnected pulling the phone out of my pocket, walking down Woodstock Avenue, tagging along after and then walking away from a ghost. Flustered. Broken-hearted. One of those times when breathing feels optional.

I attempted to leave Kate a late-afternoon message and there was an unexpected beep and just about then I fell into a dreamy sleep – an in between how it is…..and how it is.

Now it’s 5:20 as I type and I was hearing rain on the skylight. This morning, some 17 hours ago, sitting on the cushion under the skylight, I had a realization I was actually missing the rain. I flashed on the inevitability of sunshine in Southern and Central Coast California, and how easy that was. Things are not so easy here, though each day has come to fetch me with offers of gifts and quiet praise. We all said it back in the day – “Keep on keepin’ on.”

I shaved some of the hair off my head today. I believe the physicality of tired has landed on this door step.

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.