Didn’t See That One Coming

Sansaku: Didn’t See That One Coming

1/31/24

My point of urgency is not the blood draw tomorrow, but the massive atmospheric river and the trip to Arizona.  I woke around two last night, thinking I should stay and care for the house.  Which means the body.

The image in the dream was something special.  The snake too large for the hole in the pot it slipped through.  Totally phallic.  It looked like a cobra and then a humongous worm.  Never seen anything like it.  I tried to look-it up, but the computer was a word-processor.

I threw a blanket over the alien consciousness and took it outside.  Not much fear, but I was being careful.  Beside the pot, a snakeskin.  In the dream I knew: an act of regeneration.  The past it left behind.

I’ve added two pounds to the weights I swing around.  Twenty pounds in all.  And in the late afternoon, instead of drinking a beer to temper the news, I’ve been making a cup of green tea and reading.  I took the old lighter weights to the family room.  Now twice a day I’m dancing.

My response to the insanity in the world and the cancer in my body is to slow down and grieve, take time to praise and enjoy, be the best version of myself I can be, and live in the moment.  The goal is now.

When thoughts of the storm and traveling stress me out at two in the morning, I try not to feed them.  But I made a few lists and told the recorder to remember.  There are clay buckets to empty and a key for the neighbor.  And because of the doctor, I’m checking blood pressure.

The triggers or inducers to ecstasy, according to Laski, include what we’ll encounter on the road trip.  Mountains, sunrise, sunset, wild weather.  The coming of Spring.  Regeneration.  The dream comes around.  Out of death comes life.  Didn’t see that one coming.   

Going for the Mystic

Sansaku: Going for the Mystic

1/30/24

Irma’s mood was level and tempered.  Even when tired and stressed, she mostly stayed the same.  I was sensitive to feeling and could feel it.  She said that Garon was weaned during her best years and I was nursed during her most volatile.  This explained a thing or two for me.

I’ve always been susceptible to mood.  George had a temper and easily tipped.  When he did, Irma stayed calm.  She didn’t snap and punish.  I was paying close attention.  She held the words that hurt.

Empathy can be a problem.  I’ve always felt what others feel.  It’s fucking intense and can overwhelm me.  Because of this, I was mutable and changed with every breeze.  I caught other people’s mood.  Discerning what was me and not me has taken a long time.

Mood enhancing substances and behaviors are big business.  And since nothing compares to love, it’s the ultimate product they’re after.  Our psychological education is horrible in this respect.

My early experience with religion found it messed with mood in both directions.  School for the most part depressed.  This is why exciting subjects and good teachers meant so much.  I loved them.

Kay Jamison wrote a book about exuberance, the champagne of moods, and my copy is heavily underlined.  “In her landmark study of ecstasy, Laski found that the most common ‘triggers’ or inducers come from…”

When asked what I do: I walk around in circles.  I’ve studied inducers.  Last night, the problem with the leaky porch roof seeped into my dreams.  Irma was there.  We watched a roof being built.  Later on, I found a few safe spots.  The college was one.  People I love were there.

This practice enhances my mood.  And I’m going for the mystic.

Guilty as Charged

Sansaku: Guilty as Charged

1/29/24

I went outside at 6 today.  Looking for my shadow.  The moon was strong and lighting up the snow.  A simple game of Simon Says.  I raised my arms and made a circle round my head.  Moonshadow followed.

Physics falls apart at the quantum or smallest of levels.  Consciousness enters the picture and there’s no objective reality.  It depends on who’s there and how closely they’re watching.

I’ve been watching the evolution of my personality through the fifty years of journals.  It’s a remarkable record of someone unaware who thinks he’s aware and someone who’s dreaming but thinks he’s awake.

Over the years I’ve slowly disinhibited.  For the first ten years, I feared if I died the journals would disclose what I wanted to hide.  I’ve had more than my share of relationship troubles and trouble forgiving myself.

When I started my career in counseling, there was so much to learn I devoted the journal to learning.  It’s full of quotes and anecdotes, but also a trip through hell.  After that, the journal gets hard to read.  I’m writing so fast the pen starts to blaze and catches the paper on fire.

For many years I wanted the journal burned when I died.  But I’ve also thought it might be of value as a whole.  I’ve charted dreams for fifty years.  Now I think Chyako should sell them.  At twenty bucks a pop she might make ten-thousand.  But let the reader beware: hard to read.

Sansaku is my attempt to synthesize and it’s been evolving along the same lines as the journal.  It started off tight.  Heavy punctuation.  Dense.  Now loose and less inhibited.  Closer to the way I walk and talk.

Last night’s dream: A friend had notebooks full of extenuating and mitigating circumstances.  He wasn’t guilty as charged.

Ecstatic and Free

Sansaku: Ecstatic and Free

1/28/24

I’ve been grinding on a jury summons.  They want me to appear at 8AM tomorrow morning.  I’m not a scofflaw, but I was giving it some thought.  I doubt they’d track me down.  There’s a number to call the day before the trial.  A disembodied voice lets me know: “No need to appear.”

Playing a round with a golf pro, he told my friend to swing like he had no fear.  Then he looked at me and said: “That’s not your problem.”  He’d seen me hit long drives that went out of bounds.  I took what he said and applied it to writing.

In about ten days we’ll be staying with friends in Phoenix.  I’ve never seen a tour event.  I don’t care who wins or loses, but I want to watch and feel the way they take their stance, address the ball, breathe and swing.  I want to hear the strike and watch the flight of the ball.  Some of the greats will be there.  I plan on getting close.

No content in last night’s dream, just a flow of good feelings.  They were strong and firm, but gentle and loving.  I suppose it’s how I felt when I got into bed.  The book I’m reading, Grace and Grit, has turned a corner.  The dominant emotions: acceptance and forgiveness.

“I’m being followed by a moonshadow.”  So many ways to interpret the song.  The cancer that chased Ken and Treya Wilber came on hard.  Not mine; it’s been slow and gentle.  Never imagined I’d feel okay, but I do.

I’m aware I’ll lose my hands and eyes, my legs and mouth.  A time will come when I can’t touch, can’t see, can’t walk, can’t talk.  But now is not the time for despair.  A time for celebration.  Winter’s warming up.

The get-out-of-jury-duty card has made my day.  Simple things like that.  I went from feeling I lacked cojones, to feeling ecstatic and free.

Not One of Those Days

Sansaku: Not One of Those Days

1/27/24

Full of AA slogans on the walk, I knew what it meant.  It started with this one: Some days I’m credit to AA and some days I just don’t drink.  My clinical nose was twitching and I broached some sensitive subjects.

I could’ve avoided and he would’ve colluded.  But Zach was on my mind.  Last night, reading Grace and Grit, Ken Wilber confessed to incredibly heavy drinking and buying a gun for you know what.  Inner development applies to self alone.  We don’t know enough to judge.

I’ve earned a few of the cold-shoulder stares I get from some friends I let down.  We all have crash and burns.  But the forest survives and after a fire the soil is that much better.

I’ve read we’re 99.9% the same, but given the butterfly effect and sensitive dependence on initial conditions, who knows where we’ll end up.  If 99.99% the same, still the .01 matters.  A number that matters to me.  Next week, a blood draw.  Counting my blessings, no matter what.

I slept an hour later and the dreams went chaotic, like the melt-water run-off in town.  Building a salad on top of pizza is something I did at the college.  The pay was bad, but they gave us free lunches.  The counseling team is meeting next Thursday.  I’m bringing pizza.

And I dropped off the Martin at Jimmy’s music store.  He’s a Timberline alumnus.  The guitar needs new strings.  But I had trouble finding the place and took too long.  I kept a good friend waiting.  I don’t like to disappoint.  This is one of the edges I travel.

I was holding an L and doing pull-ups on a high bar in the basement.  It reminds me of the trance-dance body time.  Some days I’m a credit to the vow, some days I fake-it to make-it.  Today, not one of those days. 

Wholeness and Home

Sansaku: Wholeness and Home

1/26/24

I’ll summarize a text from Trace: “I presume you’ve heard about Zach.  Another fucking crushing loss, the fucker shot himself at Jim Shuler’s house.  Pissed and hurt and sad.”  She loved and cared that much.

Chyako didn’t know Zach.  He’d been a four-year student at Timberline during my early years.  The most impactful time for me.  I showed her photos from a couple of yearbooks.  A good-looking kid.  We didn’t have a homecoming, but Zach and Eva were king and queen material.

I wasn’t as close as I could have been.  He reminded me of a friend from grade school.  We were always chosen captains of opposing teams.  It meant we kept our distance.  I thought him a little too lucky.

In the morning, Trace texted me the lyrics to a haunting song I’ve been playing and replaying on YouTube.  I’ve been writing to the tune of “Lay Me Down” by Crosby Nash.  “Lay me down in the river, wash this place away… Maybe I’ll be whole again… Lay me down, lay me down.”

We need to be known to know ourself and it was 24/7 at Timberline.  We worked, ate and played together.  We all lived on campus and were talking mirrors: You want to know how you come across.  Are you sure?  I’ve never been given such shadow-empathic and accurate feedback. 

A lasting image: On head-check duty.  I knocked and opened the door.  He lived in one of the A-frames and was lying in bed with a girl.  They pretended to be studying.  Storytelling is fundamental to our species.  Everyone who knew him had their stories.  Last night, I told a few.

The theme to my dream: Looking for a home.  It fits with what little I know of him.  I hear that alcohol played a role and he wasn’t aging well.  Lay down, Zach, I’m hoping you find that wholeness and home. 

The Story Behind the Story

Sansaku: The Story Behind the Story

1/25/24

The theme to my dream last night: the story behind the story.  The content was the movie, “Oppenheimer.”  I haven’t seen it.  In the dream, the characters who mattered were all behind the scene.

I watched “Fried Green Tomatoes.”  Ruth reminds me of Irma.  The smiling photo in the movie perfectly resembles ones of Irma.  I can love a movie for a single line.  When Ruth died, Sipsy said: “A lady knows when it’s time to leave and Miss Ruth was always a lady.”  Fits Irma to a T and now that I think of it, Corder and Idgie are kin.  Non-conformists.

Writers write about writing, counselors talk about counseling, and seekers seek the path.  Affirmation and ritual have paved the path for me.  Without the journal practice, I can’t imagine.

I’ve never transcribed the whole affirmation.  Too many stories behind each line.  The part about my eyes ends this way: “In both my head and heart, vision is healthy and clear.”  And it did over time.  I didn’t plan on a cataract operation and stints being placed to drain the excess fluid, but now my vision is healthy and clear.  I still say it every day.

Louise taught me the art of self-hypnosis and many of my suggestions derive from her.  I doubt she memorized and chanted them like I do, but then again, I could be wrong.  She was way out in front and taught me to imagine the perfectly beautiful form and function of the body.

Watching the news and reading the headlines, problems with the border top the list.  They don’t approach the metaphor.  Boundaries imply relationship, identity.  I try to make mine healthy and clear.

I suppose Sansaku is a form of affirmation.  This art isn’t a means to an end, because the end is the process itself.  The story behind the story. 

Surface and Depth

Sansaku: Surface and Depth

1/24/24

Two wands.  A hawk feather fan that belonged to Yoko and she used for tea ceremony.  The other is beautiful horrific.  Jamie shot the wild turkey and gave me a leg, the long toes and talons.  The purple colored scales, those claws, could belong to a small dragon.  It was in my dream last night.  Upset at something someone said, I threw it.

When I picked it up, one of the toenails had broken and bled.  I rubbed blood on the leg and then on a polished sandstone floor.  Bad magic is not the way to use it.  A reminder.  For me, a tool for visualization.

Ramakrishna wrote that the winds of grace are always blowing, but we have to raise the sails.  I took this from a book written by two of the founders of the human potential movement, George Leonard and Michael Murphy.  I copped a couple of seminal ideas from them.  “At the heart of it, mastery is practice.  Mastery is staying on the path.”  The other big idea, how affirmations work.  I immediately began a practice.

We constantly talk to ourselves and this is a straight-forward way of suggestion.  Said in the present tense, as if we have already achieved what we’re trying for, the focus is on inner growth and transformation.

As a species, we tend to be outrageously suggestible.  The crap we’ll believe is unbelievable.  We’re easily conditioned.  AA applies this understanding with slogans.  I’ve said the one I use ten thousand times.

I’d just been diagnosed with glaucoma and had to take drops.  I made it a ritual.  A natural time to say an affirmation.  The seed crystal came from the book: “My entire being is healthy, vital and balanced.”

It took off from there and started to grow: “My vision is healthy and clear, inwardly and out, dark side and light, surface and depth…”

So Be It

Sansaku: So Be It

1/23/24

I can sleep with cancer.  Leaks in the roof and crap like that don’t bother me as badly as they once did.  The roofing guy got back to me in close to a minute.  He’s easy to work with.  The crew will be here soon.

A friend contemplated Cat Steven’s unforgettable moon shadow song.  What’s left when hands, eyes, legs and mouth are gone?  Essence.  Our fundamental nature, without which we lose true identity.  What’s that?

I’ve been reading Ken Wilbur’s Grace and Grit.  An account of his wife’s death by way of cancer.  He wrote that the Witness exercise was a summary of ways the greatest mystics have used to move beyond the body and mind.  “I have a body, but I am not my body…”

It’s the moon shadow song and a fundamental insight.  “If you persist, the understanding that’s contained in this exercise will quicken and you’ll notice fundamental changes in your sense of self.”

I’ve been using cancer to build resilience.  It’s that time once again.  I’ve got a blood draw coming in a week.  If the PSA is rising, I’ll be singing that song and doing the Witness exercise.

I consider optimism a quality of mood, not a belief that I’ll get what I want.  It’s quite obvious I don’t.  It’s paired with depression, the mood of hopelessness, why bother.  By nature, optimistic.

Positive psychology studies the higher emotions.  Factors that influence mood.  I’ve never made a list of them, but have read several books that have.  Gratitude is always on the list.  Sansaku, a blessing song of praise.

I also have an affirmation I say every day.  It takes about five minutes.  My favorite line and one I stole: “I take the path ecstatic human beings have always walked… A loving, patient, playful path…  So be it.”

Kind of Random

Sansaku:  Kind of Random

1/22/24

I need to text the roofing guy: Bums me out the porch still leaks and it looks like they damaged the gutter.  With all this wet, it’s not the time to act, unless you’re in the neighborhood and want to see.

I tell myself, don’t make it a big deal.  Just do it.  I can make almost anything complicated.  Brenè Brown stresses we’re emotional beings who sometimes think, not cognitive beings who feel.

Fairy tale wisdom: Where you stumble and fall, that’s where the treasure is buried.  That’s about anywhere for me.  And while I don’t consider cancer a stumble, it’s definitely a place to dig and thickens the plot.  Yalom noted that cancer can cure a serious neurosis. 

Jay Haley said crazy folk are masters of metaphor.  It’s the world they inhabit, their native tongue.  They don’t mind hospitals because they can avoid dealing with all the normal crap that normal people take for granted.  They don’t like ordinary reality.

There’s got to be alternatives to crazy.  I take two fantasy trips every day.  One into sleep and dreams.  And the other is an imaginary world, not unlike the ones JRR and JK discovered.  Mine’s just closer to home.  I’m about to go rogue.  This is kind of random.

Once Chris met her, she intuited correctly she was named after Christina and asked her.  No reply.  Chris continued: “What happened between you and my parents?”  Christina answered: “Ask them, only one at a time.  Then come and tell me what they said.  I’ll add the rest.”

There’s a saying worth remembering: You won’t be grateful when you’re happy, you’ll be happy when you’re grateful.  We watched a movie full of slogans last night.  This could have been one of them.