Friday, June 26, 2015

It has always been, how shall I say it, hard, strange, unwelcome, unpopular, to write.  You're standing outside the system, thinking you can beat it.  You believe your observations to be necessary, but why should anyone care, they have things to do.  There's no payment for it.  Of course not.  Perhaps if you create some new trend...  But it's a feeling, no one ever told you what to do.

Maybe this just ain't my town.  There was no positive reason I came here.  Little purpose in my being here.  No decision behind it more than 'well, you have to do something.'  Lots of friends, but isolation.  Don't ever feel up for going out on a date before eleven at night.

But if there is a purpose to it, you have to go through such sensations of the mind.  The writer's life is part of the physics of the world, a part of the Buddha's first noble truth of suffering, running perfectly in synch with it.  All the small dissatisfactions...  Fitzgerald's sense of 'bravely we beat on, boats agains the tide...'

You come out of it realizing that writing, as you saw it, is not the point.  So why stress yourself out?  Attempt to adopt the simple life you see in your mind's eye sometimes, like when you went out on a hike with the boss to a ridge line out in the national forest, on a border between two states.  Realize the wisdom innately within you, and keep the writing brief as possible.  One tick per day, as one day is a tick, and the act will in fact help keep your life simple, and where there is simplicity and realistic behavior, there is some form of contentment and peace, boring as it sounds.


If you were, on any one day, nail down the meaning of life, or write out the story of the Buddha within, what would happen the next day?  Well, perhaps you could count on yourself being just slightly wiser.

Clearly the world, and you and I am in it, see life as the struggle, the effort, an opportunity to go do things which represent life and living.  Work out your dream and give it shape.  It could be like Martha Stewart's dream house in Maine, it could be a successful date, it could be a trip to the beach, desirable things.  Find what it is you in particular really like, a new electric guitar, like the kind the Beatles had when they started out...  But then sometimes, like less and less, you see the flaw of that which is not readily available and free.  Then you see that the work you must do is within yourself.


This state, of obscurity, is liberating rather than confining.  It lets one find the voice, fold the yoga practice into the dough of the conventional desires of life.

No comments: