trudging

I have a card, mailed from San Francisco, a colorful painting of five cardinal-like birds – four different colors and one repeat of yellow with red trim. All with the identifiable cardinal crown. All perched on a blue branch. My friend David sent the card, I’d say a year ago, and in Golden Hill I had it blue-taped to the wall, and here in Hillcrest it sits on the small computer desk, at the left edge, and it’s not inaccurate to say it is forever cheering me up. Check it out.

Yesterday my teacher suggested I not read any of what I’ll call “my books” – Zen stuff – for a week, and notice what shows up in the emptied-out space. This morning I sat stupefied through the first cup of coffee, and during the second read poems out from the “City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology.” A recent gift. More San Francisco. A spider appeared up from the bottom edge of the footrest part of the lop-sided recliner, and I disembarked carefully and fetched Ann from her yoga practice, and she came with a tall, clean drinking glass and after a fit-and-start and the spider trapezing from inside the uncovered glass down to the ‘right’ partner of my pair of ancient New Balance sneakers, the three of us paraded out the apartment door and down the steps into the 4am world, the spider jiggled out to new digs, the constellation Orion gleaming above.

Maybe none of this happens if I’m reading Zen Koans. And it surely does fall within the generous embrace of, say, trudging the road of happy destiny, where the trudging’s the thing. Postcards, poems, and perpendicular spiders. Trudge, trudge, trudge.