The truth is, though, that we are all connected.  Life is interconnected.  

So I get up.  I don't look at Facebook too much, just to share a post by B. Alan Wallace about the appearances of joy and suffering, wholesome habits to cultivate, unwholesome ones to be rid of, and one of the Dalai Lama, so without comparing myself so painfully to everyone else and their successes, I come quietly down to the table.  Mom had a toothache last night, concerning.  She is resting now on the bed, on a cool rainy day with the cat sacked out at the foot of her bed on a fuzzy fleece blanket with the television on low volume.  

How beautiful it is to be able to pour clean filtered water from the tap.  I think I'll have a cup of coffee this morning, so I find the Bialeti, water in the base, coffee grounds in the chamber and on to the stove burner. 

What a beautiful family I am connected to, even if I have no wife, no partner, no children around me.  Beautiful like shelter and water and sustenance, a roof over one's head.  The little metal coffee pot is soon gurgling, and I've looked out back already and it's damp out.  Maybe today is the day to go to T.J. Maxx and find a yoga mat.

The hero is not an actor.  He or she must go through real life.  The hero must go out way far, and come back having been both defeated but also somehow with some understanding.  Mistakes of an ultimately beneficial sort, to see the good in life, the interconnectedness, the fleeting nature of successes and failures. Not to be too hard on the self.  The self has to be so very brave anyway, in this beautiful mortal human gentle form.  

I have lived unwholesomely, under illusion, whatever it might be termed or called.  I have lived in fear, fear being ignorance in Buddha's great knowledge of all things.

The long years wandering are predestined, so you shouldn't be ashamed of yourself, I say, to myself first of all and foremost.   That's just a good person, I suppose, that such things happen.

Up here I am not on my own turf, not in my own abode, with my stuff, organized as I have allowed it to be.  I wake up surrounded, piles, binder notebooks, stacks of papers, my mother's scholarly life that she has fallen into, becoming a natural creature of all her books, like a log fallen, turning into a habitat as it slowly decays to the elements.

Naturally I wake up feeling timid.  Her stuff.  And then I have to think, but what about my own stuff, which is in a similar state.  For months I have indeed been living like a monk, clothes on a my back, a guitar, a fresh change of clothing, my tablet for scribing, my mattress with a provided blanket and pillow. I lie there for awhile, running through the chakra energy centers one at a time, connecting them, whether or nor this does any good, a kind of breathing meditation without words, with thoughts like "what is mom doing now, where is she, what will I do with her this rainy cool day so that she won't get any with me..."

It is hard to think of any plan.  Last night after the falling to bed after dinner and dish doing and mom settling, I woke at midnight again, or later, and so I go downstairs and fix a few things like the refrigerator, which has become crowded again, what to toss, what still might be of some use, and I open up the laptop and find a Robert Thurman lecture on Tibet Buddhism, crack open a cider, pour it over the rocks.

Too too much of my life has revolved around wine, and also dining, too.  Professionally.  You make many people happy for a time, relaxed, get them out of their own heads and into conversation and new friendships.  But you can't escape the product you are selling, and the wine can take you to places that leave you in a bad place.

Wine.  Mom gets angry, starts up on me.  The wine affects me too, and I rail back against her, it's hard not to, and then I have to get out for a walk to clear my head.  Out to the road, along the side to the National Grid station, for beaver and wildlife observation.  I seem to feel my habits are unwholesome, and this is how I've ended up so, in this situation I'm in.  The way I don't sip wine, but tend to take in more than that rather than savoring it, which is part of the point of good wine, in that it's good enough you just want to sip it.

It's harder to be wholesome when you are surrounded by unwholesome behavior.  Mom breathes in an awkward stressful way, exhaling in sighs.  Mom, breath in, breath out, energy in, energy out.  But she can only take so many of my recommendations before turning angry and indignant on me, as if there were indeed a devil of several names within her.  "I will not go off to bed!" that sort of a thing.  By the time I remind her to brush her teeth after a cold cut breakfast, after her toothache last night, "I've been taking care of myself since I was six years old," she pronounces.  Okay, Mom.  The Lee Holden Qui Gong I showed her just now on the laptop didn't get very far.  I used to do things like that.  Well, mom, you could start over again.  It'd be good for you.  "People make their own decisions about such things," she snoots at me.  Okay...  Wholesome, stay wholesome.  

I rinse my face and my arm pit joints over the upstairs tub.  She's growing impatient and started in with the "kill myself" thing from her chair as I brushed my teeth with the homemade whitening powder I've concocted out of baking soda, activated charcoal tabs emptied out and turmeric.  "Whose pills are these," she demands, but my mouth is full with a rinse as I climb the stairs. 

And as I get ready, with notes of anger at me, she says I'm going upstairs.  Okay...

And then I put a load of light colored towels into the washing machine down in the cluttered basement, with the dehumidifier going, a quick Moldex spray along the cinder blocks there in the corner, and when I go back up to check on her, she is peaceful and just wants to relax for a while.  Okay, mom, I'll go for a walk and we'll go out later.