Soul searching.

What did I do to that talented and handsome kid with all that opportunity, back when there was plenty of wide open space...

The choices you make...  Go live up on the hill, not with your friends down by campus...

Isolation equals wine...

Feeling useless...  No  energy to do yoga.


The first day off, I can't even write, the aftermath mind of the seductive Turkish woman the night before.  Almost invariably, through some form of hypnosis of soft questions over the bar, convoluted as I hear them in her accent and soft purr, she ends up being over served.  I've been outside before later in the night, trying to put her in a cab, and she presses up against me and murmurs about hair meeting hair.  I've talked into dancing when my instincts at work tell me I should be cleaning.  I wake with a similar embarrassing state of erection in the morning, and not getting action in years,  give forth some exercise, finishing in a tea cup, then, of course, the Tantric Buddhists are right, no energy with which to write from.

I get out to do yoga under the pines, so so, but still getting it done, a few minutes of lotus.  I wolf down the cheesesteak from the Korean market, roll and all, hot peppers with a hint of soy sauce.  Followed by some laziness, reading on the couch.

By the time I'm able to walk down into Georgetown to climb the Exorcist Stairs, The Tombs is just closing.  I'm out for a walk, but hungry.  I end up at the late night shawarma on Wisconsin below M.  Nice guys, from Afghanistan.  I eat my little dinner of meats over romaine on a little table across the street, overlooking the old canal.  Rats come in and out of the stone walls and along the sidewalk.
I walk back to the last corner on M, seeing how the shops have all changed down in Georgetown's business district, always changing, and at a faster turnover, it seems.  The large space inhabited by The North Face has been recently vacated, leaving racks and hangers still attached to walls.  And I've always felt like an alien visiting here anyway.


And on the second day, I don't sleep well with construction noise, the beeping of the Bobcat bucket loader digging away at the hillside behind the new concrete foundation.  I sleep in, get my rest, ten hours, and then I wake up feeling guilty.  "Oh, this is my problem...  I'm a big damn bum..."  The day has sailed past while I had my uneasy sleep with all the noises of the day and the airplanes...   Feeling behind, then you don't want to make any social life for yourself, because you have work to do...

Then the emotions, calling mom.  How's she today?  It's Harbor Fest in Oswego...  Yesterday, all I did was look into my iPhone all day, checking Facebook, a hundred times.

But I can feel, after the rest, that it's easier for me to slip into holy man mode, hermit mode...  Maybe the rest, maybe the shame for being unable to sleep, feeling tired because of the wine, then unable to get up out of bed...  I'm feeling it easier to turn away from the rest of the crowd's karmic incarnation attitudes and remember a bit of my own, the people I naturally get along with, often musicians or other artists.  Away from work, outgrowing hanging out.



I read from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Informal talks on Zen meditation and practice.  The artist cannot hold himself to the ideal, the ideal of the art he might wish for, but rather simply practice...  I make note.  Maybe that's what got to Kerouac, his high literary ideals.







And then I hear from my old friend Ken Kilkenny, jazz guitarist, back from up where I'm from more or less, and a kindred soul, and feeling a similar karmic incarnation as he, my soul feels lighter and finally some ease, as I think one might deserve after the work week out amongst the worker bees with their focus just so, cyber security higher degrees, business and the like...

Yes, if one takes better grasp of his own karma, reflected in the shapes and character of his life, then he can rest better and better see the work he has to do, and understand the nature of earlier choices.

And what should I expect of the work week anyway, we aren't all cut from the same cookie cutter...  and there will be, as always, people who get us, and people who don't, so go, young man, then, go and do your yoga, go moan for man, as old Jack Kerouac says, remembering to see things by your own light, and yoga and meditation and sitting that awkward way that requires a warm up, lotus zazen cross-legged Buddha, one of the whole points of yoga anyway, and remember that you are different, different from all those people more subject to all the controlling things of society's obligations...



Perhaps it's in our collective karma now, the things we do and have done to whales and captured animals put to the circus, and all the other things we've done contrary to the good karma of Moses who saved each species two by two...  Now it's we ourselves who are the blasted ones, the hunted, the captive, the Gaul dragged in front of the Romans...  And one who directly faces the shit of collective karma, suffering for all, he's the one who can counteract it in some small but hopeful meaningful way...

Can one even find his own karma in all this mess?  Can the whale remember why she came into form as a whale, or the monkey, the monkey, the whole great interconnected web of karmic life in all its creatures and hungry sentient beings?  Can the barman remember that God made him just so by a  template, by the art form that God practices, toying with a little Jesus joke as far as serving wine and bread, a minor poet on the side...  That would take some peace and quiet, one should think..  to remember one is simply not just a bum wino in some alien construing wrought in the image in the eyes of people who fancy themselves in more control of life...

Wist ye not, don't you know who you are anymore...  (Keeps you out of the sauce, less jangled nerved.)


So maybe that was it, why you made your little life choices, sort of going off on your own, basic karma reasons, that somehow you can sense...  I went up to live on the hill above town, beyond Emily Dickinson's house, to find my own karma, my own individuality.  It's a hard thing to do.  The truth hurts sometimes, realizing that I am not like the others somehow...


Did I learn much about karma this year of doing yoga under the California Pines up on the bluff over the river?  I began to do a good five minute head stand, plow, warrior, tree, and even finally a pretty strong lotus pose, feeling strong and anchored as I did so.

Jesus, and the Buddha too, travelled a lot, met a lot of people, in the course of finding out their karma,  their truth, their individuality, the originality, the uniqueness, and in doing so, finding the Universal Truth, each expressing it in his own more or less divine way.  To be exposed to so many, as I've been, behind that old bar of The Gaul, and the one before it, old original Austin Grill, seems to naturally highlight the differences between your own personality, your own individual truth and that of all the people who come to bars with common desires and common problems, wanting to relax and socialize, creatures that they are.


And I reflect.  My choices...  Perhaps some of us have that sense, while being youthful, of uncertainty of our own particular karma, or rather not being certain what that karma might truly be, other than we have to start out on a long path.    What are the fates that await us?  Where is our truth, in which direction does it lie?  Is it in your karma, to have a life with the Princess?  I would respect anyone for displaying a bit of caution, as I seem to have, without necessarily meaning to, and still regretting.

It begins to feel, in poses, karma is not of our own conscious making, our own conscious choice, but that of the deeper, the Universe, That Which Is...  And when you realize that, you get stronger all of a sudden.  You find it out on your own.


It's eighty five out, but under the high pines's shade it's quite comfortable.  I lay down my gray yoga mat on the soft clean pine needled floor, picking up a few small branches lost in the storm.  A woman in a black house dress with a baseball cap walks two Jack Russells.  "They're well behaved, very calm," I call from my distance.  "Yes, until they see a squirrel."  I gesture with my hand, a squirrel climbing down the tree, as I saw a few days ago...  A few needles stick to my feet, but no bother.  I begin with a stretch backward, and then, sun salutations.

Doing a tree pose, I imagine my body as having grown out in rings around my core of charka alignment, and this, it turns out, helps me hold the pose, oddly enough, an invisible set of concentric rings just like trees have rings, and soon I'm standing solidly, first on the right leg then on the left, and reaching with my arms above.  Inner phylum, outer bark, a lot in between.  The trees talk to me, and having little else going on, I can understand them a little bit more than the preoccupied.


I didn't have a lot of other focuses going on, I guess you could say, and so, I suppose, I could put a greater percentage of my being into these explorations of what my truer personality, my truer karma might actually be,  (as opposed to all that I had accepted upon myself good naturedly as a steady barman worker bee...)

No, I wasn't focussed on a lot of things, a lot of things one probably should be focused on, but then that didn't seem to be my thing, not holding a lot of truck within, so my karma played itself out, some sort of teacher persona occupying my personal space if I was honest with myself.

To a great extent I'd been fooling myself, seeing only a surface, and not the correctness, the reality of the depths, the surface being but a play of light on the whole.  What takes, what doesn't take?  You know better when you stop, when you stop and do enough yoga to bring you back to your own body, joyfully in your work at it, and then when you grow better at the lotus pose for accomplishing the meditations that are useful for perspective, when you admit to yourself that you are not just like the others, identical, and not for all of their agendas, having rather your own, just as you have  your own soul, just as all people are individuals...

'Cause in the old days, I had a much harder time, easily led astray, involved with things that weren't for me...



It is a long path, a long road, while your karmic incarnation here in this life figures it out.   There is a lot of stumbling, a lot of confusion, a lot of the foolish.

The night is spent up late, after the post dinner nap on the couch, reading the Bhagavad Gita.

This all has something to do with my father, his legacy...