How do you tell your mom that you have failed...

When Jesus gets into Peter's boat...(a subject the modern skeptical world of sleek-lined efficiency of  increasingly intelligence-based economies does not wish to explore.)  He has nothing else.  He's emptied out.  He's understood the concept of suffering, the bundled skandhas.

It's an opportunity for him, this necessary state of losing everything, as it is construed sometimes, or going out seeking for the truths that lie behind and beyond the realities of daily life.  You have no other choice.  You got nothing else, you're close enough to being broke and done with the usual.

But I do know that going in and tending bar all those years, handling it all until you could go home, I know that was work.

And so it is work too to write, as a timid mortal, having to face that which was made by God, to which we were not privy, not there when "the foundations of the Earth" were set in place.  So is it largely useless for us to speculate as far as being able to know any truth, but to observe.

To describe that place where Peter is, a sinful man, when he is approached by that savior, that is work, and it is hard work, requiring efforts we won't see as being able to pay off any workmanlike reward.  Well, it looks like work, it feels like work, so you keep doing it.  It might promise your image to be earning by the sweat on one's face and profile.  It's not the thing that is taught in classrooms ever, because it is beyond that professional scholarly world, were speculation is left to the far edges, mainly as an intellectual exercise.  It reeks of flying to close to the sun with wings of melting wax.

Hemingway turned to the simple work as his worked matured into his old age.  The old fisherman, Santiago, in The Old Man and the Sea, the self-portraits of the posthumous that we worked on with enough vigor and doubt and insight, A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, The Dangerous Summer, where he as a workman, working at writing, is so clearly on display.


When do I call mom?  When should I made the effort to go visit with her?  Do I call her now?  Perhaps she's already broken down into a lonely tantrum of old age isolation...  I soothe her then?  Talk her in off the ledge?  Or, will I be calling her too early, so that she will call back half an hour later to tell me and ask me similar issues...

I get jittery at the slightest of caffeine, even with the Moroccan Mint green tea.  My stomach easily turns queasy, as if I can not, at the beginning of my day, breath properly through my nasal passages, careful of that one sip that cannot take in a good calm breath with it.

If I call mom too early, without rest and dreams before the previous call, I will lose the inner train of thought and not be able to command the slightest control over the sea that is the mind, with life within.

Writing is done by practice, as with everything else.  It is work.  It does not need interruptions, nor probing questions about what one is doing, will one be coming by later, etc.


Does one surrender to it all, to the Buddha coming onto one's little life of survival, to be taught that much of what one thinks is true does not really matter as far as an intelligent response to life and all its issues.

The fresh powers of the writer's personal morning do not last long.  The heavy weights only swing into place easily with the fresh start.  What one hopes for is some kind of encouraging thing that happened the night or the day before, like an old dear friend from a distance making sense of your own trains of thoughts, bringing in a light you cannot always so well see as far as clarity.  To attempt to edit yourself, but then having a fine mind from outside lay it all down for you, this is quite an experience, I tell you.

The writer is shoveling fuel into the furnace, sentence by sentence, thought by thought.  He writes in a way that makes his body feels good.  Perhaps he's hunched over, workmanlike, like Jerome.  Maybe his fingers run over the keyboard type keys with a satisfying silent hum, just the write pressure, easy, not too fast, not too slow, just the right flow to match the light up above behind the brow and within the temples, before being distracted, by news for the sake of conversation.

The thoughts that come when inspiration's breezes finally blow in the Doldrums are not common ones, but rare of earth, sacred creatures to be preserved and protected through a scientific cataloging.


And so, after all that, who can you really talk to?  Almost by very definition, your thoughts shall be dismissed in the practical chambers of commerce.  "It's not for us to say...  What is this work that you are doing?  Is it helping you, or anyone else?"  What can you say?

But there are people who you can talk to, another rare one, another half-crazy perhaps.  And yes, it is a burden, so you need such people, such as have a bit of the holy strange light about them, idiots of like shade, with  whom one can share the deeper thoughts with less reluctance, having learned of the reluctance of others to wish to participate in such speculations and new systems of thought.



I try calling mom, after turning on the radio for news from NPR at three o'clock.  There is something wrong about living alone, and for making other people suffer the same, least of all your old mom.  The air is still in the apartment, dull.  I do not get through.  We are both sad now.  With the work of this sort, actions are required as well, such as acting on compassion and the ten virtues.  Am I crazy, I ask myself.  And the pressures have gone nowhere, not by taking a look through the latest on Facebook.  Sad again.


When you've run out of your productive spree, which probably didn't last that long anyway, there's further sadness.  What else to do with the day?  Your own actions are limited, given your meager situation, your geography.   You, maybe you let yourself get distracted.  Something outside entered in as you sit there in your steady slow heartbreak over being made a human being in a marketplace for human beings.


At four, when I get through to her, Mom is doing okay.  She's been looking at her large art book, Christina's World.  Oh, yes.  We have a nice conversation about the textures of Maine farm life, the old buckets, the hay, the straw, the kittens, the old wood, a different world from how we live now in dry wall.  Andrew Wyeth imagined her out in the field, in a sort of vision.  He was shy to share it with her, the old woman with her joints and limbs disabled enough so that she had to drag herself across the floor.  I'm out for a walk.  The light is golden, the sky is blue.  There is a wedding party, local African Americans, spread out like a picnic, the young women in wreathes of baby's breath.  I pass them distantly, waving shyly, I'm just passing through, happy for happiness and a nice group of people out on a Sunday.  Yes, mom, you have the back-up wine, the Cavit, remember.  Oh, yes.

Later, at six, waking me from a nap after my walk and talking with neighbors, she is back to her less healthy narratives.   "My sister has everything.  I have nothing.  Everyone hates me.  My mother always said, 'I was the bad one,' that she'd win and I'd lose...' I'm all alone.  ... kill myself..."  I manage to talk her down, telling her that this is a narrative, like everything else, and not to listen to it, because it's not true, and she is soon calm enough, and I remind her of the back-up of the wine.  Not even sure if I have enough myself to get me through the night.  The index finger is still not ready for playing barre chords for long without a feeling of being cut into along the healing line of the laceration.  It is work to calm down the animal human being.   She turns apologetic.  No, Mom, I get it, I completely understand.  Back in June, the Feds were sending me $600, but now I don't know.  A lot of uncertainty...  I'm sorry, she says, and we remember all our drives, out to see the bluebirds at Sterling Nature Center, beyond to Fairhaven beach, along the big lake and the rolling glacier laid mounds and hillocks and low wet lands scraped by fingers of rock and ice.

I play with a capo.  Remembering in the night finding a song by Justin Townes Earl, who just passed away, in a suspected overdose, his version of Paul Simon's "Graceland."  It's a beautiful song.  I really wasn't much at all aware of him, but that's how it goes.  He was 42.  I suppose it takes some of us something to calm ourselves so that we might be more comfortable being imaginative, utilizing our strange unaffiliated talents.  Perhaps it takes a good amount of wine to get with Jesus sincerely enough, or any greater wisdom.