still waiting

12/22/2022 0 By BuddyCushman

This is the deal. I woke up and got out of bed at 2:53 this morning. Sliding out of bed seemed slightly better – more wonderful even – than staying under the warm comforters. All of a sudden my day became stretched by more than an hour and a half. Not exactly alchemy – but not exactly not. After the bathroom, a sip of water, prepping coffee and asking for just a little bit of help, I sat what is rightly called “zazen” – meditation – for 19 minutes, a soft gong ends it. I did a little walk around my little room and sat zazen for another 19 minutes. A few bows later, I made two large and thrilling cups of Starbucks Italian Roast, each with a splash of the heavy cream us Keto kids adore, read two different Zen Koans, neither of which whispered to me the way they most often do, switched to notes I’d made yesterday, along with a brainstorm, all about my face and what it says to the planet. Then I wrote my Morning Pages, sat another period of 19-minute zazen, and – oh my head!!, it wasn’t even light out yet – I sat in the recliner, my notebook dangling on the old wooden art palette – rainbowed with oil colors on the other side – and did one of my 45-minute timed writings, again keeping my focus on the whimsy of my facial demeanor. I was writing about a Koan I had created myself, just this morning, before dawn: “Hummingbirds flutter on the path. What is the unwelcoming face?”

Cool, right? I left my room in the condo for my morning walk, it was cold though I was clear “cold” is a relative term, with bomb cyclones and wind chills and otherworldly gnarliness most everywhere else. I got back, checked the internet a bit, drove over to the Hillcrest neighborhood of San Diego to cop a few things at Trader Joe’s, walking out to the middle of the Vermont Street Bridge to look for hummingbirds – didn’t see any – and bathe in the ambiance of the warming San Diego sunshine. Shopped, listening in the car with greatest joy to the Velvet’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties” (wicked yay!!!), drove back and put stuff away and sat right here to start typing all this, stream of conscious-ly, and, um, here it is. Still waiting for a title.