Saturday, March 12, 2005

A devoted pair of Canada geese have found a safe place to nest in the llama pasture, where Apple won't go after them. No new llama today. Maybe someday.

Evening. Wind. Chill. Drafts. Inadequate wood fires. Blankets. Reheated pizza. Burned cookies. Diluted grape juice. Great big mug full of strong feral blend to fight the mean reds. Meanest reds.

I've been wallowing. Wallowing.

Jeanne's January Tarot reading said it was OK to do so: "You're going to have a low spot. You'll feel you made a mistake in a recent choice, or that your whole life may have been one great big mistake. You may keep chasing these feelings away, yet they keep coming back, and during this time you'll feel the sun in your life that you could always say 'Yes' to sooner or later seems to have gone permanently behind a cloud. The cards do advise you to take a bath in these feelings, let them all out and wallow in them. But when you look in the mirror and say 'Who then is Sam?' you'll quit limiting your energies and powers and let go of all that mistaken stuff and move ahead. Remind yourself of all your talents and good points and the real self behind it all and let others think, say, and do whatever it is they believe (or need to believe) as it all affects their lives; actually you are unscathed, for you have ceased to believe any of it."

I spent the afternoon listing all the precious material Things I've ever kept or lost for whatever reason, since infancy. Not done with it yet. I'm going to post it tomorrow in an Inventory category. Then I'll move on to People. That's harder.

Watched Breakfast at Tiffany's with supper. I haven't seen it for a few years. Always makes me feel like I'm 10 or 11 years old, whatever age I was when I watched it in the theater. Thought how I felt like Audrey Hepburn grown up into Patricia Neal.

I have studying to do. There's a promising howl about the windows. Now I'll have to turn on the space heater in the plant room.

Somewhere around here there's a book that explains all this; there must be.


9:16:24 PM    comment []  


10 March 2005; 12 hours past New Moon.
Dear Blog: For days I have stewed in my unhappiness, diverting myself in writing complicated poems that entertain me in the making and annoy others in the reading. Each morning I make plans for the day, and the planning seems to suffice, for the doing never comes to pass.

Tonight I felt particular sorrow. I spent this afternoon photographing my face at the request of a far-off friend, who wants to sketch it. Forty photographs I took, and each revealed someone I do not want to know. The sags and grooves around my throat, the jowls and desperation have turned my once-boyish aspect into my aged mother's angry countenance, no matter how I contort it. I was instructed not to smile, to show who I really am. But my smile is all that ever saved this mug.

I chose four photos, cropped out my neck, removed all color, sent them on. But I was painfully sobered, my heart chilled. My thoughts returned, as always when I am sad, to my lost home--my farm, my well-loved woods. When I am burned, like my mother and grandmother, I want someone who loves me to bury my ashes in the north clearing there, next to my dog Rudy, who lies in a grave covered with dozens of tennis balls.

How can I go on breathing with such disgusting thoughts?

So I asked my Household Guide to lead my hand to a book that would open to a transforming passage. I reached blindly to the shelf and pulled out a tiny volume and read:

It is no use reading the scriptures unless you practice what they say. The Books have been there from time immemorial! (Spiritual Talks by the First Disciples of Sri Ramakrishna, Calcutta: Art Press, 1936, p. 275.)

This made me smile, and reach for another book, and another random page:

A yogi, I roam the mountains;
Like a great Mandala,
My body is full of bliss.
Cleansed of desires and pride,
I feel well and happy...
Happy and joyous do I live.
Without desire for scholarship or study
Of more books, I have no inferior feeling--
With Mind-Essence I feel only happiness. (The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa, trans. Garma C. C. Chang, NY: Oriental Studies Foundation, 1962, p. 638.)

And little by little my spirit lightens. I make a cup of lemongrass tea and while it steeps I pull down The Tibetan Art of Living, Tao Te Ching, Choice Theory, The Physics of Angels. I stir honey into the hot tea and lick the spoon. The flavor bursts across my tongue. What flowers fed these bees to make such stuff? Glorious!


9:11:17 PM    comment []