I start the day with a walk, wending through the back streets of Kalorama, to the avenue, over the bridge, down into the woods.  I go at a very slow pace.  Today I steered a young couple visiting from Hungary from taking the wrong road down to the paths of the Rock Creek Park, stopping them so they didn't have to dash across four lanes of traffic.  I'm going the same way, cross the bridge with them, point out the dirt path along the stream below, and then I let them go on their way, this old dog a little slower than they, after my giving of directions and possible walks.

I call my mom, as I stand overlooking my favorite part of the stream, a sandy bank with plane trees twenty feet above the surface of the creek, and she's doing well, and I can start, the thoughts that came slowly.


Murakami goes for a run every day, giving him discipline to take up the endeavors of the novel.  If I were to undertake anything more ambitious, than this slow walk down into the cool fresh airs of the woods I might not get as far as the stream and the little bridge and the paths through woods and weeds.  The water is different in the creek today, cloudier, up a bit.  Anything more ambitious and I would fall down at it, and there it all is, nature, ready to accept me.  Funny how that works.


The slow-poke makes his way back, stopping to observe two hawks perched, closely together, mates, on the very top of the mosque's minaret, at the very top of the crescent moon.

I take the back way home, up past the grand pink Spanish villa, now a road block, the E. U., up Tracy Place past Jared and Ivanka's home, past Ted Kennedy's house, Robert McNamara's.  At the corner I slow, the allow a Secret Service agent escorting a young child pass, peer for a moment up the street to see how the garden at the corner is today.  Closer, I stop by St. Jerome, the statue in front of the Croatian Embassy, and he reminds me more and more of my father.  Greatest Doctor of the Church.  Bronze statue by Mistrovic.  Of course, the little markers of one's neighborhood, when many have passed and good still remains, neighbors.




My problem is that I am a Buddhist.  I am a Buddhist and a Christian.  Therefore, in my father's terminology, I am a Theosophist, a believer in the Perennial Philosophy that probably all religions speak of through their own terms.  Always was, always have been.  Forward and backward.  What can you do.  Living in Buddhist time.

There were earlier efforts.  I wrote a book.  I wrote a book because I am a Theosophist, one looking for himself in the vast expanses of America and American life, a life that is in flux, always changing. Perhaps I was not so consciously aware of that, but that was the reason why.  And I went through a fair amount of heartache and low moods, and memories to struggle with.  I wrote a book in order to survive, to find a way forward.  Because in life, there are few clues, beyond the career cues and the bank account...


But to simply write, say, a book that is recognizably a book, in trade terms, no longer gets me going in the morning.

If that's all it was, a commercial endeavor, then I'd fall into the old trap, of inappropriate work, that which comes when the focus is on base things, economic free-market capitalism.  For that and by that regard, the common regard for what and how deep reality is, I am a fool, an idiot, not quite knowing what to do, but show up for work, a job of physical, mental and verbal behavior (as, for some of us, a job should be, a balance, as it is something we might well have to do for the rest of our lives, and it might as well be good for the health.)

That's the problem.  Getting up.  Starting the day.  Using it to some good end, when you have no good idea of what you are or should be doing.  The simple act of writing.  Plain, bare, monkish.

But to do that, just that, you have to be looking in the right direction.  And perhaps, living in Washington, D.C., and sort of subconsciously trying to keep up, I was thinking of it all wrong, where that direction might indeed be.



Walking along, in the morning:  thought of conversation with woman who'd been to Botswana with The Peace Corps.  Over the bar we'd brought up JFK.  "What a visionary, so ahead of his time," she says as we chat from my end of the bar to hers.  (She had put together some clips to show people... President Kennedy, the inception of the idea of The Peace Corps.)

He lived in pain, after a certain point, every day of his life.  My thoughts as I walked down the street in the shade of the trees, mansions, embassies, ambassador's residences on both sides.  Jack.  Every day of his life.   And these were not mild pains.  Even as far back as 1946, hobbling up flights of stairs in the tenements, first one step up, then the back leg, his first campaign.  Grueling.  Asked if he might want some help, no, thank you, he would say, politely, I'm fine.

I often walk past the old buildings, aged mansions, often with paint peeling, a vacant front door locked against time, front awnings rusting, cracked glass and wrought iron, weeds grown up, ghosts of old regimes and systems of government power.  Back in the early '60s, such buildings, embassies, ambassador residences, chanceries, would have been well-kept, optimistic, striving, clean, vibrant.  The old days.

Does it take a certain amount of pain in life, like Jack's...  to see things a little bit more clearly than the next person...  as if to realize, "we are all in pain, great pain, one way or another."  Vonnegut's anxiety, Kerouac's lonesome stranger, Hemingway, really, name one pioneer who had no persistent inner pain.  Pain leads to poetry.

But imagine, everyday, at the center of you, your very spine...

If you understood pain, if pain, mental, physical, psychic, or otherwise, was your companion every day, it would be easier to absorb the vicissitudes, the tragic news, of life.

The bar is a tragic space.  Gallows humor, black humor, Irishman, immigrant, African American...  It is never far from such reflections, the death of a parent, a friend, a pet, ill health, decline, the fucked-up-ness of the world...  A drink held in one's paw, a right to drink, a companionship set up there...  a fellowship of the ailing.


Walking along, or later, doing yoga and meditating...

It is not just the air and the water and the earth that is polluted, now, it is our minds, it is our speech, it is our actions, it is our spiritual life, our political lives, our personal lives...  polluted by the polluting spirit, make a buck....

What better time for a Buddhist revival...


There are days I don't mind so much being alone.  Buddhist thought requires lots of space and concentration.  Working at night can be disorienting, so I need to adjust, too.  It takes three days, usually, to find my way back to a writing space where I can at least slightly understand what the shape of things might be, what I might be working on.

"But aren't you sort of being worthless, just sitting around being Buddhist?"


After a shower to get the pollen of the woods off, I did my yoga, working up a good sweat, and later as I meditated I thought of how far away we've gotten from Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, that something like right speech and right action and right behavior might not be such a bad aim after all.  Think what it could do for a pub, a barroom, a wine bar..  Make things a lot easier.



The world is so full of bad ideas.  And the worse the idea--take World War One--the bigger it is pumped up, it seems.  Take Donald Trump, emblem of the biggest ideas in America, the tycoon, the supposed "Economic Powerhouse," the "builder of America."  "The Entrepreneur," to which we must be apprenticed to.  The idea that our co-workers, as immigrant as ourselves, are the enemy, taking jobs meant for us, not them...

The big ideas come.  And only in time shall the Earth see the fruits of such things.

Have I, too, had, at a younger age, big ideas, attempts at entrepreneurial ways, grand love stories that end with a singing of Ode to Joy? Have I not found that ultimately they were false.  Vain.  Childish.  Typical.  Romantic.  Illusions. to be stripped away, as transparent as the sadness of any pleasure palace.

However, the core of a person is Buddha and Buddha truth, and this is what survives, old shells sloughed off, molted out of, which is a beautiful thing.  False selves, once thought to be you, just part of the bundle, the skandhas of human existence.

The big ideas, the really big most stupid ones, like the Industrial Revolution and its exploitations, like Colonial sins of slavery and imposed hardship, are a relief, as they turn us away from really having to ponder our existences, our truer realities.  Then we don't have to think, but just be dumbed down puppets.

The big ideas stand in contrast to the simple freedom of the Zen Temple or the monastery, whereupon one is freed from having to think and buy and earn and get along with the whole craziness and the ecological nightmare.



Before taking a shower before work on the eve of Labor Day, having failed again to get back to school, I look at my old Lincolnesque face in the bathroom mirror.  To be a writer one must come upon an awful tragic fate, the birthright of being born into a reality that one must finally understand, a great correction or a realization, though all of this is hard to put into words.  These are fates we live through, because we are writers and used to such things.  Melville focused on this with the odd and interesting character of Ahab, and Ahab is glorious, played by the noble Gregory Peck in the movie.  The great tragic truth is noble and awakening, and it takes a long long time to get there, but once it is there it is present, present in the now the mystics talk about, as we can change neither or present nor our past, but live with it, make the best, keep a good attitude, be of good cheer.

Ahh, but it's not your fault, this great grand Kerouacian loneliness.  It is the way the Universe, the thing of Truth, made you, with such a sensitivity as your inheritance, your true character as it is revealed in space and time and continuous just as space and time is continuous, exactly so.  And each little event in life, each little turn in the road, often lonesome, with particles of this and that blowing around, often invisibly, is made sense of through being, of course, a whole, an entirety, a complete thing.

As a kid you start drawing.  Then, one day, you largely put that down, and look of other things.  And then, in your teens, you come upon the great human endeavor of writing.  It just seems to fit.  What can you do.  You will not write that well, but, you learn, and you keep your own high innate standards as best you can.  And like a sea voyage, the work progresses.  Perhaps you don't sense the progress of this until you sense the end, vaguely, a coastline far far away, but there somewhere.  That end might not be the final end, but it holds truths just like death holds truths, both in and out of our own spheres of comprehension.

You knew, all along, what the right thing was to do, and there will little sign posts along the way, teachers, if you will, who teach you through the examples of their own lives, just like Jesus, Rabbi, teaches us, and in the same way like the animal pets in our lives teach us, through the generosity of their existence, their being, their creatureliness.