So it is in, and through, the Beatitudes that we find “the map,” the way to Jesus, the way to embrace fully that which is completely a story, completely a myth, also a history, also a penetrating psych-scientific study and teaching of how to attain intellectually and physically a spiritual life, the way, in other words.  (Credit to The Chosen Series for putting these phrase, a Map to find Me, into the Beatitudes episode culminating Season Two.)

The cat has gone outside again.  It’s four AM, and I watch him tread his paws over the lightly frozen ground, disappearing into the darkness of a cloud covered night.

We all make our pilgrimage as children, trying to be men, women.  Our own path of spiritual support, which comes to be the single most important and meaningful thing to us.  To the greater meaning, we can only be ignorant.

This is the pained thing, the path, its great length through time.  We cannot come to its conclusion, its greater meaning, before we are ready.

It is an incredible and unbelievably difficult and trying path to be on.  To listen to the order of heaven, god, truth, reality, ...  It might also smack of madness, for its risks, for its otherworldliness.

Joseph, a good father who must, as all good mortals, pass way.

And Jesus is the one who reveals the reality of existing in the universe.  Not to exclude any other path, the ancient wisdom of Eastern thought...

The myth shows us the way, a map, to whatever it is we chose to strive for.

As a writer, maybe it's harder to fake who you are.  If you end up doing yoga and reading Genesis and that's all you can do, that's how it goes.  

Mom comes down, after I write two sentences.  She sits down at the table, I get her her two morning pills. Did you sleep okay...  She examines an empty box of museum painting holiday cards.  She is concerned about the cat being out, reaches her hand, her right hand, to the top of her head to pick at around at it.  She makes little observations.  The refrigerator is very full, she says.  I'm making soup for her, the usual can of Progresso, tear up some chicken, from fried chicken breasts today, add stock, spices.  I need to get to the River's End Bookstore.  She wants to go for a ride too.  Mom, it's cold out.  The way she clears her throat irritates me, perpetually.  Do you want to take a shower, Mom?  It's too damn cold.  But you just said that it's too warm already when I asked you if I should turn the heat up.  She opens a can for the cat, he eats it.  You're scaring him, she tells me.  Soon he wants to go back out.  I feed him another spoonful from the open can, he mushes the bits up against the side of the dish, licking up the liquid gravy and some of the bits, abandoning the rest.  He's calling to be let out now, on top of mom going on.  She looks through her purse.  She brought it down last night, when she came down for a slice of pizza.  

I get through the dishes, sip on a chilled paper cup of Stewart Shop coffee from the fridge, take care of some emails, write out a card for Ben the maintenance guy, and low on money as we are $40 is generous, but I feel guilty about that, and then as winter night comes with cloud cover I go up to change out of my sweats and put my trusty pants on, with belt, wallet, mask, either to go for a walk in the light, or to get down to the grocery store, so I check in on mom who was lobbying for a ride earlier.  No, she's comfortable in bed.  I sit in her chair, text my friend Betsy to catch up, on yoga, on the Christmas holiday, and she's flying back to DC from Utah, and in the background mom's talking to herself, stirring, and down the stairs as I am in mid sentence composition.  And she's hungry.  Oh, but not that hungry.  Oh, I don't want to disturb you.  My voice rises, mom, what do you want?!  Okay, pizza, so I put my energy on hold and heat up the oven for 425, Paul Newman cauliflower crust pizza...  Okay, calm down, you can do this.  She's on the couch still.  The cat has observed me head into the kitchen, so he hops down from being next to her on the sofa and out he goes.  Where did the cat go?  Then she's singing Silent Night in her out of tune tone deaf way, so I vanish back into the kitchen's relative refuge.

She'll go around all day looking at random pieces of paper, packing slips, old mail from the Toyota Takata Airbag recall, oh uh, we're in trouble, Ted, Ted, are we in trouble... So I leave the kitchen, over to where she's sitting in her great chair...  I look at the two pieces of mail, one a promise of rates for an extended car warranty, and the recall note.  Mom, we already took care of this?  I'm not so sure.  Mom, remember driving down to the Toyota dealership in North Syracuse off of 481?  No, she doesn't remember...

No wonder I've become addicted to looking into my iPhone for the communal minds of distant cyber friends for some relative sanity, Instagram.  (If not worse.)

Is this my home?  This is a nice place.  But I left some things back at the other house.  Okay, mom.

It gets exasperating.   This spiritual journey to pained adulthood.

Okay, pizza's ready, mom.

She rises from her chair.  I'm coming.  I don't have an airplane, ha ha ha.  

She comes in.  Where are the people?  Mom, it's just us.

I ask if her if she wants some "roast beef," from the standing rib roast from Christmas dinner leftovers.  No, I'm fine.  How about a small piece.  Okay, she says, as if she doesn't remember saying no.  I've brought the horseradish sauce over, as an alternative to the hot gravy way I've served it with the last three nights.  She smacks her lips as she eats the cut of pizza picking it up with hand, her mouth looking like a monkey's as she chews with her broken teeth.  She spreads some horseradish sauce on the bit of crust she's picked on.

Well, I offer, I never thought we'd get through all that roast beef, I say.  (There's more in the freezer, plus the bones.).   

It ends with I won't come here again, after she says, no, my house is over that way.  This is the last time.

She observes her mother's mirror, there to my left on the wall before the old dining room table here in the kitchen, cluttered.  I should write a story about my mom's mirror, she says.  Well, why don't you.  You have to get in the...

I suggest, as I mention my going out to get groceries, that she rinse her mouth out, and she quickly gets angry with me.  I will not be bossed around.  She slams down her glass when I ask her to take her pill.  I call it pill for a her bones, though it's a mild tranquilizer.  I move her little wine glass closer to her, asking if she'd like more.  She immediately bangs the glass down where it was before.

Do you want a B-12?  I've had enough with your pills and being bossed around.  Well, I'm going to take one.  Good for you, she snoots.

So, what's up for the rest of the day...  Did you cut your hair last night?  It looks good.  So what are going to do...  Mom, I told you I'm going to the grocery store.  Oh, fun.  She compliments me on my shirt.  L.L. Beans, I tell her.  Mr. Beans has outfitted a lot of good men...  and women too.  What a nice bracelet that is.  Is it gold?  No, mom.  Copper.

She rises to clean off her plate, the pouring some water on it, then checking on the back door and here comes the cat.  Oh you’ve been out all this time…  poor kitty.

Okay mom.  I leave her picking at her scalp.  It’s damn cold out there.  Yup.

I find the card and envelope with 2 twenty dollar bills, and as I walk out and start the car to warm the engine.  My spine straightens.

And on my grocery list, wine, and maybe cider too...

I go the grocery store, after the wine store, where I leave embarrassed from having asked the stalwart woman if she's been boosted yet, and to hide my embarrassment I listen to her agreeably as she tells me she is a healthy person, and that everyone she knows who's had the shots has gotten sick, and she hasn't gotten sick yet.  At the grocery store I repeat my parking lot joke, looks like a good night to ge drinking down by the river.  And here to I embarrass myself, and no one really gets my "living in a van down by the river," because you shouldn't really joke about such things.

Then later, after four glasses with a nice young woman bartender at Bistro 197, I go out across to the east side, where there's a bar that serves food late.  I was just going to leave, but the woman bartending there was nice enough to come over and check on me, so I have a shitty California fruit bomb cab in a plastic cup full of ice, but the whole crowd is for Trump.  The night gets increasingly weird when an older guy asks if I want to smoke any weed with them, no thanks.  I avoid the weed, but strike up conversation with a large man who looks vaguely like Albert Finney, but Polish American.

As I drive away the kid in the hoody is up in a maple tree where the older guy, slender, who was also wasted, I should never have said hey to him as he got his jack and coke and passed by, he's talking to the kid up in the tree, whereas going to the car I was pretty sure he was talking to himself, in a drunken rant.

In the morning, I'm wakened by our meals on wheels friend's knock, and also Ben the maintenance guy's call at the same time, as he needs to come and measure for the new dishwasher, who comes and goes curtly, and the poor woman has to see me with my hair stuck out to the side looking like a crazy man, and I can't explain to any of these people about the Covid symptoms, for which I was careful about wearing a mask last night.

I take some cough medicine, but the sweetness of it quickly brings on a feeling of a hollow stomach.  I open a fresh seltzer water, regretting the plastic of it, and release a bit of the demon airs from last night being a fool.  I feel stupid again.  But I get in a few Nadi Kriya and attempts to roll my core stomach muscles back and forth, exhaling through opposite nostrils on the back steps of cold concrete, coughing, releasing mucus so I can breath again in the dry heated cluttered apartment air.

And down in the basement I continue with the kriya practice and the breathing pranayama variations and breath counts and holds, after the mantra as I sit crossed legged and I begin to feel decent again, and after the silent mantra Ham Sa I'm feeling on my way into Shavasana corpse pose, and I feel that Jesus is just one to call attention to how we can be, as the proverbial "Son of God/Man," to be as if at the center of the universe, the center point where the Big Bang came, but also stretched across the whole thing like a vast blue light energy field with cores of other light.  The chakra opening chant had set up a very pleasant vibration, almost like those Tibetan monks I saw once at Amherst, who can make one note, but let other notes drone from deeper within their vocal chambers sympathetically. 

And so it can seem to me, how my years were not completely wasted, as I did explore mediation throughout the years back in the old apartment in the house on the quiet street, as Jorge harassed me but was sweet and kind enough as well, as much as I wish those years back and consider them wasted ones now as I say.  

I was getting in touch, dialing in with the deep...  It's a nice long relaxing breathing lightness thing, letting the muscles sink away from the bones, as if something that needed to gradually sink down to the soft sea floor and find comfortable and safe bedding had drifted down just so, and the old bones could too.  And I had in my deeper heart center mind meditation reconciled Jesus and Buddha and the wisdom of the yoga traditions.  Proper action, as the Bhagavad Gita tells us.

The cat comes in, proudly, as chickadees swim just so through the honeysuckle bushes coming away from the brief visit to the neighbor Bonnie's lard bird feeder.

And when will mom come down...

It's not an easy assignment to write out the spiritual experiences of mediation, morning Sadhana inspiration...

It is a burden, to be responsible, dutiful to the journal, to its honesty, to its reflection of your human thoughts.