It's somewhere in between, at this hour.  A long walk to the river, after I woke, after a long shift full of lasting aches, a solitary Memorial Day, perhaps as one should to commemorate, then a long nap, and then awake at 1 AM, and now it's past 3 AM.

Kerouac found refuge in a public library in California.  He found Dwight Goddard's Buddhist Bible.



The writer will always be an outsider, a contrarian.  He will always be Sam Clemens' Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, in pursuit of a path a bit off, different.  He may be a proper gentleman, courtly enough, considerate, but also prone to juvenile delinquency, not the best of rule-followers.  Independent.  Like Dostoevsky was to his time and place, or Turgenev, or Chekhov, too I suppose.  Flaubert.  Proust.  When we read them we might not realize how radical they might have been once upon a time.

Fortunately there is something about the species we are that we recognize things in common with these types.  We know them to have the same deep questions and urges that we all have within, reflections of the energies of the collective unconscious.

More often than not, a writer's task is to translate.  To bring the things that he or she finds worthy of reading, and putting them into practice.  Like a crow, the intelligent and curious creature, able to identify with all sorts of beings, is always a collector, and always willing to vocalize something he finds important, bright shiny objects worth consideration.  (Hemingway was a great magpie, holding on to old theater tickets and the like...)  Of course, there are the things humanity finds, the spiritual accounts of our existence here in our time on the Earth, after being, as the Buddhist tells us, first gas, then rock, mineral, single celled, a plant, a tree, all made out of the same stuff of an evolving on-going creation, even the stars contributing to us atomic elements born in their furnace fires, the increasingly complex atomic structures that too give birth to life and its basic composition.

Reading, of course, is an act of translation.  How to take the high ideals and understandings of an all comprehending awakened Buddha and put this into meaningful use in daily life, even as a creature prone to grave errors.



In reading the different Buddhist writers on Buddhism, Pema Chodron, Thich Nhat Hahn, I had a sudden inkling emerge, that I hadn't been all wrong in my life and its path.  For instance, it does after all take huge considerations over a very serious matter to bring children into this world.  And I have somehow managed not to.  Are all of us cut out for the serious responsibilities?  What will, what should we pass on down.

Thoughts are organic, as much as trees are.  As TNH writes, it is very important that an oak tree remain an oak tree...


(I find the news less important, unfortunately, more a distraction from the necessary calm that one needs to sustain in the circumstances of existence.  It doesn't help, the advertisements, blared too at us, out of necessity...)


I suppose that the translations we make out of the traditions of thoughts beautiful show up in our own examinations of life and the world around that a writer engages in, in whatever pace or volume he can...

The problem arises that one might realize the nature of distraction, the wide spread habit to avoid useful meditation.  Music.  Drinking.  The spending of energies in unhealthy ways...  And this makes me look at my so-called profession in  different light, the light of mindfulness, the state of being not dulled, not distracted, but awake to the fundamental conditions of living beings.

This and many other towns make a living in distractions, a good way to make a buck.  The focus is turned away.  And yet still on a day off people will still go down to the river for recreation, for nature, for peace and family...