Hmm, and it is a relief to not have to put on the act of sommelier...  the extra work of talking up wines...

The day starts with mom calling.  I'd risen, around one, after being up in the early part of the morning to write, then going back to bed for the second half of sleep...  I've retrieved some cold green tea and gone back to the bedroom to get my iPhone...  We chat for twenty minutes or so, each on our cell phones, each struggling to hear the other, my voice dry and cracking still, and mom lonesome.

"Girls just want to have fun."  And I am too boring for girls who just want to have fun.  That's the truth.




But then, after thinking all this, you then stop and say, okay, thank you, mind.  Thank you for thinking all these things about my psychological make-up and all such things that one might approach through logic.  Thank you, mind, I will make due note of what you say, and I will go back to trusting my heart for what matters and for the things that I might "should" be doing...

Being an earthly representative of Christ and the Saints and the Prophets before them, the writer works through peace, through a tranquility that almost has to be guessed at, existing, like the physicists models of reality, in theory, and therefore real by being proven not wrong, a useful model.  And in his quiet place, a fortuitous thing will happen, and the true mind will stop with its mutterings of complaints and received ideas, and start to again to do its work.

A flock of birds, twenty of them or so, cedar waxwings, have taken to the great old Elm tree over the neighboring yard with its magnificent crown rising evenly over the yards.  It is in blossom now, and the birds flick about, in a gentle and relaxed fashion, sociably pulling with their beaks at the fresh leaves in the afternoon sunshine, plucking their sustenance.  Remarkable they appear through an old pair of binoculars in perfect focus, their markings observed in fine detail, the mask around the eyes, the tiny bit of crimson tucked away in secondary feather, their little oriole-like caps.  And the writer calls his mother on her landline, as she has always encouraged my birdwatching.  I am tired still.

Peace is vital.  Peace is the message itself.  The birds have peace now in the Spring.  Their movements from branch to branch might remind one of thoughts sent by nature through the mind, alighting here and there, plucking the fruit, the berry, the blossom of thought, not needing to know anything specific or particular, just the balance of nature, as they themselves balance, winged and comfortable, supported just so, even as the most modest of slowest of breezes sends a ripple through the lake-surface of the leaves.  The writer is always at peace, in order to do his work.

I go check on them, and the waxwings are still there.  They are quiet, a peepful song whistle, a calm bird.  The robins have joined the scene observed in the back yards, ruffling along the ground, in the leaves, the camellia blossom petals half fallen now.