me and the Buddha down by the school yard

Boy, Tuesday, my mind’s alive with sentences and images – in and out and in – the hushed noise of the 94 freeway down the hill. This will be a poetry day for me, I feel that, shapes and sizes to be determined. I woke up and I got up. I’m still here. There’s that. My car will remain locked in the back lot. A winter storm is coming, and unlike other Tuesdays I don’t have to drive in and through this one. This storm. This Tuesday.

While sitting in the dark – in meditation – yesterday, my mind was wild with Tuesday. No better way to say it. And after sitting and perked coffee and in the small blue recliner, I looked across my room over to the pillow end of the bed, and on the white comforter was the scissor-cut sheet of paper with my hand-written words, “Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid.” I wrote that either the day I got told about the divorce or the day after or the day after that. Mid-April. And I’ve carried it with me every day since, other than my brief trip to Idaho to see my son Spenser – the Buddha, sitting under the bodhi tree, would say, “I see you Spenser.” So I looked across the room, my head filled with Tuesday, and the thought comes to go (right now) to the internet work site and ask, real short notice and all, if there’s anyone willing to cover and work my Tuesday six-hour shift. And yesterday while working my Monday I receive two ‘We’ll split it” Yes’s, and it’s another time of mighty forces coming to my aid – I see you hand-written paper – which is a direct path to right now, my mind alive with sentences and poetry and stories the first Tuesday I have not worked since early August. This latest Tuesday storm not finding me out there anywhere other than a quick dash to next-door Starbucks.

I don’t need the money I’m not making today, my world is just bursting with abundance. So I come to Tuesday with my soul blowing in the wind and with madly-electric brain cells and the never not-there obligation to be wildly human and compassionate. Oh boy – are there mighty forces or what!

I’d like to leave something for posterity that people are amazed by. I’d like it if the people amazed are my two sons, in Missouri and Idaho, and they read what I wrote and left for the planet and they say, “My dad wrote that.” That will be enough. Anything else will be gravy. I suppose not working on a Tuesday is gravy. I’m quite clear waking up and getting up another day is gravy. Having a locked 20-year old car, with new all-around struts – gravy. My mind not only not clouded over by all these years, but filled this morning with sentences and images and stories, both real and could-be-real. Gravy.

I bet the Buddha said – “I see you Gravy.”