Category: Uncategorized

Ongoing Friday in concert:

The wildly integrated Beach Boys.

Nothing appears in this blog space accidentily.

I’d like to point out, much to my delight and hopefully yours, that on my hike at Johnson Ranch Monday on my birthday I was able to pause a while and most gently pat a calf standing along the path – she all black and fuzzy and available – on the top of her head, between her ears, a looking into each other.

Most fabulous birthday present.

Monday, which was also Janis Joplin’s birthday, was sunny and hot and green all over. Every time someone approached from the other direction I would step off the path until he, she, they passed. Includes dogs. The Buddhist nun Pema Chodron often speaks of loving-kindness, and it seems there are maybe a billion chances to practice that every day.

Pema Chodron was born in the summer of 1936, which makes my winter birthday (feel like) child’s play.

Like playing handsies with a black cow.

Butterflies flutter about me. Dragonflies cruise past, I swear I hear their laughter. Mountains and hillsides dance in the sunlight, as I do. All this, even on the hardest days. Holding close the bodhisattva vows – I vow to do no harm. I vow to do good. I vow to do good for people. Lost in the space between my ears. My birth certificate, hands on her hips, tilting her head, says, “Look what you’ve gotten us into.” (What do you say to that?)

My photo, Errol Heights, Portland., early summer 2021. Spirit animal on the journey south. And who knew there’d be one north?

Not knowing. Par for the course.

Why this photo and not from dozens of others – my former wife Susan and me – I don’t know. I sit still, and guests arrive. Something like that.

Deep in the heart of Covid, no doubt. And the tangible, physical sense of gratitude I felt then, and do today, of experiencing that time with someone else. A most treaured person. Not alone.

I think that’s all I have to say.

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.