Anyone still read this?

TESTING

 3/21

The monk, HH Romapada Swami, is speaking over at 2 in the afternoon over at Rice Creek Field Station.  I get there and Dolly as prepared chick pea stew and a salad of ice berg lettuce.  She has a vegetarian's body, and is the mother of a three year old.  She hands me a plate with some cake, very graciously, and I see my friend over there who is an MBA student visiting with the Syracuse Mantra Central house contingent.  Real sweeties, as people from India quite often are, maybe as a rule.

I've never had any goals, or ones so vague that there is no clear road map, but to, what?, write every day.  The writing is market is such, it's not a job, it's a side duty, at the cost of other things.

I'm upstairs dreaming of being a bad misguided college student again, thinking it's all about me, and that I'm so cool.  Hunter S. Thompson.  Acting like I don't give a fuck.  My brother comes up to me and says he saw me passed out drunk under a tree.  There's a sequence where I arrive too late to the dining hall, not even capable and responsible enough to 

Honor and dishonor.  Cycles.  Like the weather.  Like women.

I fed mom baked gluten-free chicken tenders.  With hummus and pesto dipping sauces in small amounts on the plate I bring upstairs for her.  

It's my birthday, where is everybody, where are my mother and father?  When are we going home?  That's what I get when I get home from the grocery trip after my initial foray into the world for the Hindu Krishna meditation lecture.  

I interrupt the flow by asking an off topic question, which he is kind enough to field.  I thought it interesting, but now I see, to my embarrassment and mild horror, how foolish it was to ask, bringing in a topic I heard him speak over in a recent YouTube lecture.

On Nirvana, and the materialism of the moment.  On how to deal with negative emotions.  And mom's birthday is coming up.  I haven't gotten her a card yet.  I think I need another doo-dad for her.  Will this be her last here?

I heard her go downstairs in the middle of the night, around two in the morning.  Calling for the cat, who heard me go downstairs after my first round of sleep, so to put the pot of beef ragout in spaghetti sauce out own the back stoop to cool off, and fortunately it didn't burn on the bottom there on the electric range of unpredictable burners.  Maybe I'm bad at pleasing girlfriends with birthday gifts because my own mother female constant presence is so anxious and hard to satisfy, unpredictable in other words.  

I think of my embarrassment at my own voice and question before the monk I feel like Kerouac's red face in front of D.T. Suzuki.  

So I come down about 8:30 in the morning for a start on the day amidst all my bad habits and patterns and laziness and misguided misdirection, to sort out the dirty dishes from yesterday.  

Quietly I start with the dishes, after finding the two jars of green tea second steeping in the fridge, and carefully sorting out  back from the right sink to the left to be scraped of detritus, before going back to the right with the silverware on the bottom to fill with soapy water now that most of the grease has been removed, the little bits of dried cat food, the muck from cooking on the wooden spoon and the spatula I used to flip the chicken tenders and the Oreida crinkle cut French fries mom didn't even want.

After an argument rising over her concern for the children, getting her some water, and then asking about her hearing aids after she asks me, What?, three times... I get her to go upstairs, go check on her, bring her a cheddar cheese and almond butter sandwich and a piece of dark chocolate...

And I haven't even done my sadhana, though at least the dishes are clean and drying.  Oh, mental pain and minor lasting anguish constantly begging at you...  

How can I ever go free from such shame of being too kind and open and agreeable to people, to let them lead me around in my life, a weak person.

But at least I've found some new fresh impetus and direction, even if I was forced to go back to eating meats and drinking wine and being worn out too much to be mindful, just plod forward.  

I can only think of the madness and the brokenheartedness within the writer.  That's why the meditation and the sadhana and the spiritual practice and study and imaginative thought are so important in this loneliness we experience.  

By 12:20 I rise from my shavasana to cool down.

We too have our eyes looking down at the ground like the horse.

We feel the ground below us, and our limbs and muscles immediately respond.  

Beneath our eyes the worlds of the past fade away, sinking slowly, smaller and smaller, gradually. 

Our eyes feel, feel the light, feeling the distance, let things pass.

We are running now, after the past has faded sufficiently to not hold us back

so that by running and reconnecting with our motions of inward spins

we heal ourselves, mend the broken heart and the troubled mind, and our throats ruffle a neigh from deep within the chest.  An exhale, to comfort, a self-hugging, support.  We shake the back of our long neck, toward the height of the base of the skull to shake it all free, what's in our head, so we can see.

Ahead, in the distance, growing larger and moving slowly, like colored clouds coming toward us, spreading out to welcome us, to sooth with the quiet of the cooler woods' protections ahead, our home.  No need to crouch, we leap forward.

Then we turn, after we are comfortable and calm, confident with our motion, and our eyes are raised, as they were by the spreading clouds that came and were the leaves of the trees and the cool and warm fluttering comfort alive with life.  We leave the woods, to our right, running left, back in the open space's edge.

In shavasana, new sensations open, the fascia, I relax it all over, down the back from the top of the head, down the spine's run, down through the legs and up the feet and then back up the front, up the throat, to the head again.  The shoulders open to comfort.

By the end of the day, with far too much to think about, the left bands on the back of my neck are sore and tight, pulling my body to the side to hold the pain and the head up from it, until I can no longer bear writing at the kitchen table, nor the chair, and must go lie down.  The pain is frantic, and I must rest.  

Like Kundera's father, depicted as laboring on a horse in his travels toward the birth of his end, no longer able to speak, I watch my mom going through the rainbow lights, and she sleeps, because it must be exhausting, and I'm so rattled by her I shout at her about her hearing aids, and this isn't good.  

I could cry, to tell you the truth, and there's the to-do list, on top of pleasing her in the few little ways I can, straining over each.

The sun is half out maybe.  I stand at the door and feel the wind, before checking the mail, my hiking shoes on, and I need the three layers still and the heavy black knit hat for a walk, needed to quell the anxiety of mom's birthday in two days, am I prepared, what will we do, what will happen?

I think of the hill up to the water tower, still a receding bank of snow covering the side of the road, so I opt for no traffic, the two beaver lodges on either side of the access road to the power substation and the railroad tracks and the wetlands under the high tension power lines.  The road ends and I'll walk along the tracks, avoiding the puddle and the mud dug up by tire track wheels, and I listen to Jonathan Roumie recite the Sorrowful Tuesday Mysteries of the Holy Rosary with its five mysteries and it's run of ten recitations of the Hail Mary, with one Our Father for each mystery and a Glory Be to the Father prayer, and then a Fatima Oh my Jesus.  My sorrow in the garden is on a hill overlooking the mechanical electricity of the chain link fenced-in substation itself, standing looking back on it before dropping down the bank to the road cul de sac.  Mom was fast asleep on her bed with the plate on her lap still.  The cat is probably under the desk in mom's old office.

Walking back on Ellen Street finally, after reading the top of the hill and the water tower, May the Lord's peace be with you, and at least I've gotten a walk in with Christianity after my sadhana this morning.  What to do now, in the hours before tentatively heading to the library for the second of Dolly's public invite events featuring the Swami HH Romapada, disciple of Prabhupada, the man, the great sage, who brought Hare Krishna to the United States of America with humble beginnings.  The latter so tuned to Krishna, God, that he, I find on YouTube, spits at sexuality.  

From the road, passing the last houses, the one where the guy died, then the big white one set off the road, then the small weather beaten one, I come to the filled in railroad track ditch where as Charlie tells me there used to be an iron bridge, the slope muddy and deep tire tracks, coming down the slope carefully in the middle where the field grass still hangs on.  The back way to the townhouses.  

My mood is not much better, but I'm trying, and mom, when I go check on her, says oh, some sunshine, and then she falls back into the breath of sleep, not feeling my presence in the room and I go back to the kitchen, in bare feet again, the heat on, turning on the Bose to RVO, then taking out the celery stalks from the fridge, to assemble a tuna salad, mainly to soothe myself, as cooking does.  I pull the stalks of a bunch of parsley from the water, shake, pull the leaves off the stalks, pad them dry with a napkin before cutting.  Neither Krishna nor Prabhupada would approve of the violence that goes into the can of tuna fish and the habit, but I'm not feeling so good about myself anyway, and even the sense of going off to the library to attend a lecture feels like neglect.  The phone's weather app blips silently, light rain in twenty minutes.  

And Sharon coming at ten tomorrow morning wishing to help me box up and throw out and sort and all that is weighing on me unhappily, as is the 3 pm with Sally my counselor.  Is that the toilet flushing upstairs now I hear?

The knife makes chop noises on the sturdy plastic yellow cutting board and I remember Oscar and German, the working line cooks from Salvador back in the kitchen of the original Austin Grill.  Years ago.  Guys with children.  

I look in the refrigerator after finding mom in a good mood upstairs.  After several efforts and cord plugging, I get the television to work, and she requests a turkey club.  There is violence written all over the refrigerator, and after bringing mom her sandwich, the bacon cooked, toasted on top of the Ezekiel bread, and asking her if she wants to go the Hare Krishna talk with the monk at the library, nah, I find myself very hungry and make myself a turkey romaine and tomato slices sandwich, having the cutting board right there, and with mayonnaise, with olive oil, not just soybean oil, it tastes too good.

I'd gone in yesterday to the talk with too much ego, too much pride, too much thinking I'd figured it out and would become a devotee, looked after, sheltered by Krishna himself.

Face it, I'll never figure it out.  I get too nervous, anxious, too much a realist with his habits that walk the line.