Meditative Prose

Wednesday, 30 January 2008

Please excuse my silence here lately. If you know/knew me in Real Life™ and I owe you an email or phone call (or both), please accept my humble apologies. Sometimes I’m not able to cope with normal social requirements like communicating with friends and loved ones, and my natural response is to withdraw and become intensely private for a while. Maybe this is why some people have suggested that my totem animal is Turtle, who, in addition to occasionally retreating into his shell, is also a nurturer and a protector.

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Saturday, 19 January 2008

I knew it was going to be a good day when I cracked my first egg into the pan and two yolks started sizzling. Actually, I knew before that: when I got up early to shave, then again at yoga when we visualized the royal blue light of unconditional love enveloping the whole world. Then two yolks sizzling. Then seeing a stranger carrying a “Free Hugs” sign down Church Street, and getting a free hug, and finding out later that Sarah got a free hug too. Then stepping into Garcia’s Smoke Shop and picking up a starter pipe and half an ounce of “Burlington Perfecto” pipe tobacco, and smoking my pipe out on the stoop in my slippers, getting a little buzzed and watching the stark bare branches of the trees move just a little. All day long, this good Saturday just kept affirming itself.

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Saturday, 19 January 2008

It’s a good thing the seasons change gradually. If I woke up tomorrow and it was seventy degrees, and the warm wind was blowing in off the lake, and the dogwood blossoms were falling, I would quit my job and sit in the park all day long like a buddha, feeling the grass under my bare feet and blessing everything I saw. Dogs would come to me and I would bless them and set them running. A dog could know my joy.

If I woke up tomorrow in Lewisburg under the big blooming magnolia near the river, with the bumblebees flying overhead and my old friends a few feet away, talking and sharing an apple, I would sit a while just listening, then burst into tears and burst into flames, and send my spirit around the world to light a fire in every person. Wars would end. Peace would break out. The parties that night would be epic.

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Monday, 14 January 2008

On Friday I forgot to bring my backpack when Sarah and I went to a cafe to read. I may as well have forgotten to bring my eyes, so we walked up Church St. to a certain big box bookstore that shall remain nameless. I knew what I wanted to read, what I have been jonesing for recently, so I made my way to the the sci-fi section and then found a whole glorious shelf of Philip K. Dick novels. I picked one (Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said), shelled out, and we headed back to the cafe to start the weekend right: with caffeinated reading.

I’ve read three other PKD books, the three that make up the VALIS trilogy, & I’ve seen probably four other movies based on his books. I haven’t read a ton of sci-fi, but this stuff hits me just right. It doesn’t depict some glorious utopian future provided by technology. By now we all know that’s bullshit and will never happen. Instead, Philip K. Dick gives us a gritty view of a future where technology might be a little more “advanced” but we still interact with it in the same ways. There are still economy cars, they just happen to fly. Cops are still power tripping assholes, they just have bite-sized hydrogen bombs that can be implanted into your skin and detonated remotely. There are still rich people and poor people, and of course you still have to go to work. The drugs are better or worse, depending how you look at it. People are basically the same, though — shades of good or bad, sharing or selfish, sane or insane — and PKD books always seem to be about relating to those characters despite the divide between our universe and theirs. And it’s never very difficult.

I finished Flow My Tears Sunday afternoon and started reading a book called Off the Map that I bought back in Lewisburg, PA for $3. It is a nice little paperback with cool cover art and illustrations inside, and I remember when I bought it wondering out loud why it only cost three dollars. The clerk at the bookstore pointed out that there are cheap ways to print books, and that’s when I noticed that the book was published by a collective called CrimethInc in Olympia, WA. The authors give only first names, and there is an anti-copyright notice inside giving permission for anyone to copy and redistribute the book for the next four hundred years, as long as they don’t profit from it. What a great idea! Literature for the sake of literature.

It is an awesome little book about a couple girls who hitch around Europe, make friends, check out different squats, and generally have a good time being free human beings for three months. I’m not done with it yet, but it’s making me really happy, and making me really look forward to the warmer months when I can have adventures of my own with Sarah and whoever we meet along the way. But it’s January in Vermont, so for now I’ll have to content myself with books & dreams: a luxuriant garden, bike trips, late-night drumming, swimming in the lake, all-day picnics, napping under trees, meeting strangers and making friends.

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Wednesday, 2 January 2008

Happy 2008, everyone. In lieu of enabling comments (which I may eventually do), I offer instead a link to email me at the bottom of the sidebar on the left there. For the time being, I’m adopting Ran Prieur’s mode of handling comments: you email me about anything at all, and if I have something interesting to say about it, I post your comment here along with my own commentary. Hopefully that will lead to more insightful comments from good people like yourself. Yeah, you.

The photo above is from my family home in southwestern Pennsylvania. The stone in the background was originally part of the house, a 168-year-old stone farmhouse and former Quaker meeting house, and has since been incorporated into a wall my dad built.

Home remains wonderfully timeless and comfortable, despite the changes from year to year. My trip home last week was all too brief and more than a little stressful. The best part was a long walk in the woods with Sarah. We followed deer trails and turkey droppings, and walked among the ruins of the stone barn that stood on a small hill not far from the main house. We saw what’s left of the stone spring house, with the water still trickling through the north wall. I could write a book about that place. Someday I will.

At one point, we sat on the trunk of a fallen tree with the intention of being quiet until something showed itself to us. The stream a few feet away gurgled pleasantly the whole time, and after fifteen minutes a mess of birds settled in the trees along the edge of a field not far away. The birds would talk to each other for a while, then take off all at once and dive and sweep over the field before landing in the trees again. Eventually they settled right above our log, and what seemed like light rain — after all, it was fifty degrees in Pennsylvania — turned out to be milky-white bird shit.

After a few seconds, I remembered that I wasn’t merely an observer and clapped my hands together twice to remind the birds of my presence. They obligingly moved on to other trees, and we moved on too — to the end of the woods, a road, a field, horses, an owl, a toy car, and a possum skull. I couldn’t really tell you what happened for the rest of my short Christmas break, besides lots of TV and beer. But those two hours in the woods were just what I needed.

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