elsewhere
Start from the knowledge that control is lost. Here, now, I’ve lost it, I’m naked. Breathe that in.
*
So his front end leaps over curbs, and his back end stumbles, and he falls in the street. If he walked, he would be fine. He just doesn’t know how.
*
He gave us the look that he always gives when he has just found himself on the floor: Why did you guys put me here?
*
(Thought: [if] otter hell is the life of a three-toed sloth, then sloth hell must be the life of an otter?)
*
What if we can’t stop the suffering? How do we practice from that point?
*
Blogging is a strange affair. On the one hand, in my experience it can be an effective aspect of practice; on the other hand, it can easily slip into what the Pali texts call papanca: the proliferation of thoughts, spreading out in all directions, without any prospect of finding a limit. The trouble with papanca is that it begets further papanca, and this can go on forever.
*
It was a fifteen mile drive to the graveyard, and I was still in the thick of a torrential acid trip and an escalating storm. I took it slow. Driving while tripping on acid requires incredible concentration. You really have to squelch all distortions of your perceptions and see what is really there. Do or die. You have to focus on your motor skills and reactions, and also, there’s the fear. THE FEAR. Just the routine underlying fear that’s always there when you’re tripping on acid. You are in an alternative state of mind where you really can’t be sure whether every atom in your body will suddenly unravel and fly apart sending electrons spinning off into space with the release of such intense energy that your brain can’t even comprehend what the end is like . . . but . . . I made it out there. I stood there in an ice storm looking down at the graves of my mom and my brother. I was completely wasted.
*
Who knew there were such mysteries inherent in taking out the garbage? Who knew that a lemon peel was so central not only to my sense of self, but also in the binding of a contract that delimits myself in relation to others? Who knew that taking out the garbage was a form of reassurance that “for one more day I have been a producer of detritus and not detritus myself”?
*
Snow all the way into the distance: I feel like a man losing his sight. The world dims with snow.
*
Teetering nervously in the gateway of an unknown garden where I’ve ventured only a few times, in the extremes of love and fear and grief that I’ve mostly managed to avoid. Could I, dare I, come here more often?