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 EMERGE… something that didn’t emerge when you were following that course before … something left unsaid -unexpressed -something true from your heart that took you down the other path of working with Bobby’s and MLKs people -the wounded disenfranchised the voiceless the powerless…bring it Buddy -you have a good 30 years left in you … show us what we missed! We are in the most crucial time in the history known to man…it’s now or never man!!” – Keith Amato

“I have nothing against ideas per se – I am an intellectual, after all – but when they become didactic, self-righteous, or just opinion then they get tiresome.” – Ursula K. Le Guin

It just does – the writing, the reporting and observation, drawing and the natural world – and it’s possible the rumbling, cracking, house-shaking thunderstorms rolling through in the middle of the night, foreboding dark seared with brilliant lightning flash, it feels possible they have played some role in my sense that today could be a good one. A step toward a new door, maybe even through one. I get an extra 15 minutes for sure, since I now don’t need to water the four mini-patches of vegetables in the backyard. Nature thoughtfully took care of that for me sometimes between or all through 3 a.m. to 5:30 a.m. I use the latter as the end point of the rain because it was raining when I sat down in my meditation chair in the color-less living room at 5:26, and stopped when I stood up to bow 13 minutes later.

Actually I stood up, walked to the kitchen and turned on the coffee, then returned to the living room and bowed nine times. Shunryu Suzuki, in the respected meditation book “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”, says we bow to the cushion on the floor, or in my case the dining room chair, nine times. This to honor the act of sitting – the opportunity – the Buddha. And when I was done bowing I could hear through the screen door no more rain falling on the front porch. I’d opened the front door before sitting to allow cooler night air to drift into the trapped heat of the house, it heating up into the high 90’s the last two days.

While I was sitting in the recliner drinking coffee and reading an interview with Ursula K. Le Guin on writing fiction and poetry I had a thought – it leaked out of a vision that walked into my head, or maybe it was some unidentified noise out in the beginning-of-dawn morning, the thought being that if I got up and walked over to the screen I would find a coyote sitting on the other side of the combination screen and glass door. Sitting on its butt, is it called its haunches? – just sitting and staring at me. And in my vision/visual thought neither of us spoke and a minute or so later the coyote pushed itself up with its hind legs and walked down the ramp and off into the morning.

I saw this clearly in my mind. And, my suspicion was, there was something in that encounter for me, like say a new-to-me place of imagination – for a story, or possibly a painting, or perhaps an insight for something, something entirely else with my life. Unknown to me just right here and right now. Then I snapped out of that vision and went back to the coffee and reading and read Le Guin say, “Dictators are always afraid of poets.” Which is only a confirmation for me to my answer to my wife Susan when she regularly asks me what we should be doing to fight back against the horror and cruelty and evil of life in our land today.

And I say make stuff and share it.