Morning Pages Pouring
Friday, Aug 30: “It’s what I thought the first time I read that blog back when you started it …that you should have your own news outlet it and really be hammering away @ that aspect of your creative essence! There seems more than the painting something REALLY DEEP AND PROFOUNDLY POWER FILLED SCREAMING TO…
Seventh Morning, San Diego
Back here this morning at the in-laws, some 13 miles out into San Diego County, the sounds of the early morning – the dawning music – so very different from our last five mornings at the beach. Upon first awakening, and noticing stars out and up from the back slider, so as to indicate no…
Sixth Morning, San Diego
Today is my sister Nancy’s birthday. She’s still younger than me. She is there, celebrating her life anniversary, back in our hometown of Wareham, Massachusetts – hard by the salt water known as Buzzards Bay. Nancy refrained from coming back to our hometown for many of the years of her life, thought it was lacking…
Fifth Morning, San Diego
Well, first this feels like a tangel this forest – Wow, start again, start over, try to match each word I am considering with what I am copying down here. In this morning’s Morning Pages, where now filling three pages is feeling like something near an extraordinary challenge. Sitting here in the, at the dining…
Fourth Morning, San Diego
This is how I want to live – exactly like this. Is that the best way to say it? Perhaps, this is what feels like the perfect life, as it is experienced in the moment – moment after moment. These last two days, pieces, parts, and times of the days. It’s all only one man’s…
Third Morning, San Diego
I can always tell when it’s 6:30 in the morning in Ocean Beach, California. That is when the first airplane passes overhead. Like, real close overhead. San Diego’s Lindbergh Airport is only a mile or so away, as the seagull flies, and is unique as an airport in that it offers only one runway. Just…
Second Morning, San Diego
I keep jumping up from the curvy cushioned chair in which I am sitting and reading and drinking coffee in hope of seeing the flocks of loudly chattering wild parrots which fly and roost and chatter in this up-the-hill neighborhood of Ocean Beach in San Diego, California. But I never do – see them –…
First Morning, San Diego
I’m writing with a pen lifted from the Mark Spencer Hotel in downtown Portland. I’m writing on an oblong table in a large breezeway room at the in-laws in San Diego – out in the County, some 13 miles from the Pacific Ocean and the edge of the continent. I’m writing this down in a…
A Week of Stories
I spent the last week with my wife Susan in San Diego – specifically two days with her parents out in the County, and five glorious days in San Diego’s Ocean Beach. Our first morning, at Ann and Bill’s, awake before all others, I performed my usual morning routines and rituals which end with writing…
Strolling for Joy
I walked out the back door this morning, right around 7:00, with the daily intentions to empty the coffee filter, check on our tiny vegetable beds, and open and walk through the garage studio. Pretty much every morning, after meditation and coffee and reading in the recliner, I do these things. Like today. We have…
Inspired to Keep On
From The Morning Pages: Late to the party this morning, got hung up reading a bunch of my old Blog posts. I, for the most part, dig them, there is a voice – my voice – and there is both a gentleness and a fairly clear sense of loathing and doom. Again, the idea…
The Value of Me
I have a painting – this one, oil, which is now framed and under glass – and I painted it with a palette knife on a piece of 15 x 11 watercolor paper. The painting slightly influenced, in my mind while I was making it, by the work of Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell, primarily…
My Last Post
I truly thought my last post – ‘Taking Help Part Three’ – would inspire and generate lots and lots of comments. It feels important, like I got to channel some big stuff. Have you read it? Do you have thoughts about its ideas?
Taking Help – Part Three
It was nearly 35 years ago when a kind, goofy, full-of-life man named Dick Morrison gave me this suggestion — “Your Higher Power didn’t bring you this far to suffer.” His comment was in reply to one of an endless supply of moans and complaints, cries against the unfairness of life, I was regularly wailing…
Taking Help – Part Two
Cash Only In his book “On Writing Fiction” author John Gardner reminds us that reading fiction involves “a suspension of disbelief.” Not a usual collection of words but easy to understand – if you truly want to enjoy this story about a young wizard and his friends you need to believe, at least here and…
Taking Help – Part One
Will It Go Round In Circles I wonder when my story began? In a delivery room in St. Luke’s Hospital in New Bedford, Massachusetts sometime early the morning of January 19, 1949? A Wednesday. That’s the easiest answer. Or was it the winter-turning-into-fall of 1969 when my outlook on life – perhaps stance is a…
I Am What I Eat
Two disclaimers before I begin: One – This is my story. I tell you these things to tell a story. There is no intention of suggestion, encouragement, preaching – none of that. It’s just another story on Couch Surfing at 70. Two – For all I know, I could drop dead tomorrow. Picture this:…
Your Stories
As promised, these are comments in the form of dislodged memories and other thoughts and thinking from subscribers in reaction to the “Flying down Durant with Doug” post. And as always, I bow to your commitment. And heart. “Jim Morrison was always my muse, light my fire playing on my families’s car radio at…
Addendum of Sorts
9/16/18 Verbatim ‘Morning Pages’ I have a distinct sense, which feels to be clearing with time, that the “Couch” Blog is in fact something special – special for me as an opportunity to move closer to focus and devotion and intention, loyalty even, than what I have usually wrung from myself in the past.…
Flying down Durant with Doug
The scene is this – It’s midnight, give or take, a Friday or Saturday, I don’t remember. We leave our room on the sixth floor of the Durant Hotel. Before dark there is an in-your-face, up-close perfect view of UC Berkeley’s campanile from our room’s window. But now it’s dark. We’ve been to a disability…
Kind of How it Goes
A couple of weeks ago a friend named Eric stopped by the house. He lives up near Seattle and was down in Portland for the weekend. Talking on the phone a week or so earlier he was describing a room he’d rented in a house under construction – the floors were torn up, he was…
Coming Attractions
Hello there my Blog subscriber. Just a quick non-post post, a few odds and ends I’d like to note. First, I have just come to understand that my replies to comments you have graciously taken the time to leave are not automatically being seen by you. You don’t know I’ve replied, or someone else…
From the Tool Kit
I’m not big on telling anyone “You ought to try this.” But….. Along the highways and the byways of my life, from ultra cool apartments I’ve rented, gifted mattresses on floors where I’ve laid my can-I-crash-here head, the house belonging to Susan I’ve called home these last eight years. Within and from these places, out…