The traffic outside on the street and the planes above flying beneath a low cloud cover sound like a strange wind, broken, sped up, slowed down, gaseous.   The body is sore.  I will rest some more before getting up and making tea.  We are through two nights so far, Sunday and Monday night jazz.  It will rain this evening, starting when I go in, and the report for the rain turning to snow after midnight.  The light is subdued today.

I got home about 1:30, after catching the D6, riding up at the side seats in the front of the bus, the lone passenger until I tell the woman driving the long bus that the next stop will be good for me.

I get in, work my way toward bed time, a glass of wine.

In a world of attachment, where do you begin?  The inadequacy of words...

I am already too distracted today, from listening to the news on NPR, to write today.  One external thought leads to another, and soon you have forgotten yourself.  You return to waking thought experience, the light coming in early...

Attachment.  Happens easily.  You get carried away, and then comes the harder task of reducing the attachment and its hopes.  Back to the Zen, back to the quiet, the so-called monastery, back to reality. There's not much money to be playing around with anyway keeping up with social lives, with people who do things, who find happiness in little adventures.

The stoic keeps on working.  It is not unlike the Buddhist monk going round a village with his bowl, giving lessons on the deeper nature of reality in exchange for a bit of rice.

Work is very busy.  It distracts me from sorrows.

Attachment.  You watch it happen.  The mind begins to jog toward the unreal, the imagined.  And then, for one reason or another, the fantasy is interrupted, ended, that's how it goes, there you are walking alone the river bluff under the trees, worrying about your old mom and about your job, and about the career that never happened and now "too late," but those things too have attachment to them and what the world needs now is the proper perspective, the reality that Buddhist thought ultimately offers the being.

It is that my life is completely hollow, that of a total loser?   My life is just as much an experiment as anyone else's...  I have been a cretin, I have been a slob, I have committed deadly sins.

But to remember, each time one's life is driven out from the sort of illusion that they might have fallen into and under, there is the waking up, the coming out the other side.

Did ye not know, I was amongst the worst...

The minutes drag on, before work.  Leftover Chinese, on top of the Dragonwell tea with a dash of ashwagandha and schisandra powders.  I vacuum the apartment, the little fur the bathroom collects, the carpet rug beneath the coffee table where one eats, writes, has tea.  A little chore helps the clear the mind to remember that from which it was distracted.  That has always been so for me.

Nerves before work.  Nerves not being able to get hold of mom on the phone.  I'll be too tired to do much when I get home from work after midnight.  I get through to mom finally, telling her it's quiet alright if she has a glass of wine now.

You cannot be healed without understanding the disease within, without understanding how it works all through everything.



i get to work.  I set up, having left myself in good shape from the night before.  And then, it gets busy.  Very busy.  And then it gets crazy on top of that.