It costs me, in terms of allergy symptoms, lethargy, to be outside, but I had to be outside, as if I needed to be taking my part in the crucial return of humanity to living in and with nature as much as it still can.  My imagination is fired up full-steam, the yoga is rigorous and expansive into better and better poses, holding them longer with increasingly good form.  I am intrigued by the light of late afternoon, energized by the golden rays that come late in underneath the last clouds of day.

Being out above the river's mystery sheds light on my own.

Green buds of thoughts, to match the leaves of coming Spring.

With the river, my own mysteries, why is my life just so, as it is.  Is it good I have no woman to go home to?  What is my journey?  Maybe everything is fine, as it should be, as it was intended to be.


Sunday morning, Mom calls early, waking me up.  I've been out in the reservoir bank meadow and all around on the bluff and by the deer, listening to Dylan, even sitting down and leaning on the rare old Sugar Maple up here, in the middle of the night, "Murder Most Foul," and when she lets me go from the phone call, I fall back to sleep and into bad dreams.  One of my friends, Drew, is caught up with by the law.  A set-up.  I  have to drive his car back from the golf course where he frivolously took us, before his legal past, or so the authorities have it, catches up with him.  And another bad dream, the details slipping away from the mind, as mom is calling again.   The call, with her questions, now that it's 11:30, "what am I supposed to do today," she asks, and then gets angry I'm not up, hanging up on me.

So, Jesus, I get up and pour a cold cup of tea from a wine bottle from the fridge, get her on the phone, and then with my nose stuffed up, in need of blowing my nose, suddenly as I drink my tea my stomach is upset, I can't breath, I need to throw up, not having woken up in slow enough, not stopping to take care of a few things, here in my lifestyle as such, after talking her through what to do with today.

Time is running.  I get dressed and on the bike for a run to the Sunday farmer's market.  It's an awkward temperature, do I need a coat, what little tables do I visit, what do I want anyway?

I get back, take my courier bag off and lock the bike up against the green metal pole of a parking sign behind the building, go in, put the groceries away, and not feeling so hot, having watched countless cyclists in their gear on fancy fast bikes, whizzing by, I go in, take off the coat, put the groceries away, two frozen blocks of ground beef, two packages for lamb sausages, a frozen quart of bone broth, an expensive piece of frozen black cod.  I fall without any more energy to muster, into a nap on the couch, not feeling so hot.  I don't even want to write anything.  Maybe I'm done writing.

I wake up finally with more energy around 4:30 and gather myself in shorts, college tee shirt and hooded SUNY Oswego sweatshirt, off to the bluff again, mom's phone off the hook as I walk down.  Eventually, late afternoon, the sun comes out again.  It's not the enthusiastic work out of the past two previous days, but it's a work out.  A three minute head-stand is better than none.  I take a walk in the sunlight.  I need to pee, but there are people out along the path.

When I get back to the apartment, the same deer I saw earlier eating grasses up on the hill is resting with her head up.  I have a little project in mind of hosing my mountain bike off from all the dried mud and dust it has collected on its frame and hydraulic brakes and the crummy old chain.

I think of Kerouac again, at Big Sur, where he has his stream, and Alf, the sacred donkey, and the deer becomes a kind of Alf for me, along with my yoga, along with my little poems I come across on this little edge of land and trees that give way just a little to nature, nature not pavement.

It's actually intended to be, and is, a book on healing.  Maybe he didn't do such a good job at all aspects of health and healing, bedeviled by a few consistent hangers-on, and of course the alcohol.  But at attempt, to heal a worn and sick soul, with the usual nature, water, air, sunlight, the crashing sounds of a sea below.



I call mom later, getting through to her, my 9:30 PM little happy hour after checking on my bike, washing it off,  and my deer friend still there in her quiet.  I read mom the little poem I wrote, "I came up an ancient city," musings on an old hollow tree stump.  A poem she was very pleased with.

I have dinner, with my little bottle of red wine, two healthy meatballs from Stachowski's, just a simple tomato sauce, and falling again to sleep on the couch.

I'm awake at four in the morning in the pitch darkness when my smart phone rings, Mom calling.  "What am I supposed to be doing..."  We talk for a while.  "But there were people here...  Am I losing it?  Should I just go back to bed?"  Yes, Mom, Mary will come later.  "But I don't need her.  Don't drag her into this..."  And soon, more or less, she realizes the conversation has either served its point or gotten pointless, and says she'll just go back to bed, after grilling me with the repeated question, "so, when exactly am I going to see you."  I explain to her that it's perfectly normal, that people used to get up in the middle of the night, for an hour or so, to go check on the livestock, or to go out and even say hello to a neighbor, such were towns and little city neighborhoods a long time ago, before the great compartmentalization of everything, everyone separate, blocking and blocked off from each other in a mechanized world, and it takes a lot of concentration to run machines, even just to get to work on time.



But I have to recover from her call, to regain my verbal balance.   I've bought some superglue to put back the little pieces chipped off the old green ceramic tea pot that evokes bamboo, from my old scholarly neighborly friend George who did a lot for me as he went through his own dark night of the soul, and I go through mine, not asking any questions yet about being out of work, as the whole world is, freed from the night shifts unhealthy and tiring ways, just trying to be healthy, to get out into the light, and figure, with this time, the little narratives in my psychological make-up.

Hospitality, in retrospect, I'm proud of all my efforts toward making people feel welcome and well-nourished.  There's nothing wrong with such a healthy thing.