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 table in Silka’s apartment up on a Newport Ave hill in Ocean beach. On a Monday morning, our last full day here, our last full day in Ocean Beach. And thank you, Lord Dedith, it has been a wondrous three days already.
And now, this new and final Ocean Beach 24 hours, I have awoken out of wack – really and truly out of wack. I don’t know what to make of my mind, here early at 7:17 a.m. It began more than an hour and 45 minutes ago, after sitting meditation, with coffee brewing, when I found myself pretty much unable to read. I put up Austin Kleon’s “Show Your Work”, part way through the next to last chapter, and quite suddenly I was unable to read. I would read two or three or even four words and then lose the rhythm of the thought being expressed in the sentence by the author. So I began re-reading again, the words, and so began a start and stop and begin again reading words comprising sentences and distinct thoughts, and I had to start over after a few words over and over again. And I was clearly and immediately aware of the condition of struggling to read – it was clear and it was a little frightening.
Right now it is a little frightening, it is like my mind is in a significant fog now, beginning upon waking this morning, and so far up until now. Reading got just slightly easier when I switched books to Henry Miller, though still choppy, and carrying over to these pages, where some of the words in the first sentence were different from the words I was thinking and writing down. Like this – thinking of one word and seeing on the page another.
Like that, so since the first sentence (above) I have been extra carefully clear to write each word I’m thinking, so the writing has been slower and kind of staccato deliberate, and it is not normal, not the way I usually fire stream of consciously when writing these pages. This clearly is not comfortable, and not normal.
When I sit in meditation every morning I always have two anchoring thoughts – one thought, sitting, is “Just this.” I couldn’t remember the other thought this morning, (which I have been saying at the beginning of sitting for years), and I still can’t now. My penmanship here is horrible, though it has been getting worse over the years. It does feel, and look, further along the scale of worse this morning.
I’ll say here I have been conscious for quite a long while now, I’d say some number of years, that calling to memory words and ideas and people and thoughts has diminished – my ability to do so. It’s a little concerning. And this morning so far is even a little more.
We’ll see.
