A sketch for Julie (the loss of her Werner)

A therapist will tell us to avoid letting your own life be narrowed;  broaden out, volunteer, find fresh new activities, gardening, hiking, write for an ecological outfit for free, make new connections.

And then there's life.  Particular phases of life.  I find myself inhabiting my mother's basement, as a peaceful place to go where it is quiet and spacious, not cluttered with academia detritus and books and papers.  

And one can look back at life, and test the past, and find unexpected disappointments therein.  Things didn't work out in the happy golden autumn freshman bright way.  The relationship bonding with a mate didn't happen.  One can even torture himself.  The recording Walkman a friend hall mate borrowed for basketball practice and broke, didn't even bring the broken thing back to you, shrugged it off, sorry, without replacement.  I played in bands back then.  One cassette tape recording from the summer before, taped to a wall in a kind of fraternity house.  A gift from my mom, proceeds from the house.  All the voices one could have recorded, a career in oral history that never was, voices and ancestral stories lost to the mists.  Keep the batteries fresh in your answering machine, so the recording of your dad's voice will last beyond him.  What do you do?  The shrew you ran into, couldn't read so well, bright, but... etc, a real piece of work, toxic, dismissive, angry.   Just as I was a disappointment to her, apparently.  What's supposed to be good for you, advancing your life, turns out the other way, it doubly hurts and causes pain of a lasting sort in a world of comparisons in every venue.  The things you learn the hard way, feeling shame upon yourself.

But then you look back, as I do.  I remember my father speaking of his mother's tuberculosis.  "Life can be pretty grim," he once said, when we drove into town to pick up the New York Times, relating a story of a schoolteacher back then checking on him.  With TB one coughs her lungs up as they deteriorate, the digestive system is eaten up too.

And if not that, something eats the brain, if the cancer hasn't gotten through you already, shutting off life's flow within in particular spots spreading throughout.  A blackness coming to the mind, or the spirit, so that you can no longer lift life and limb.  

While Kerouac writes beautifully of Fall in New England alleyways, and sets a trail we follow of his own spirituality, there is behind it all, unseen, an awful subtext of life being rather saddening and unsatisfactory.  He took refuge in the common man, people of Lowell and Lynn, the alley bums of San Francisco, the Bohemians of New York.

It that enough, to make a life?

Even one's own vices don't work past a certain age.  The heart-rate soars when trying to sleep it off.  And all the things your therapist warned you about sort of come upon arrival.  

I think of Larkin sometimes.  Many of lines might occur, but "fools in old-style hats," comes to me, from This Be the Verse.  "They fuck you up, your mum and dad." "But they were fucked up in their turn," by the ones who came before them, everything in turn.

With no way forward and no way back, it's like the world, in at the broadest most universal sense, is asking of you to turn inward, to find the glories in the meditations that bring your spine back up straight, your chin parallel, your shoulder blades back and hugging your ribcage as you take the deepest of breaths from bottom to top and out again then inflate.  Exhale. The inner light of the chakra system.  

Not much to go on, huh.  Or is it enough.  A quiet changing of the equation, the sense of it building over time, yes.  Over the subtext we all share, successful or not.  

It's a rainy day here.  I make mom a BLT on Ezekiel bread, the cat's in, and as I do my sadhana, down in the basement, I hear the steps up to her room creak from her weight just so.  Not like yesterday where she berated me every time I passed through the living room, and I don't remember starting it that day.  I'll go down and finish up with twenty minutes of silent mantra, if I still can, and then a quick shavasana, and there's a beauty in all that.  She took two of her pills, the main ones for her condition, though not the calming one.  I'm trying melatonin gummies on her, and last night I stayed up too late with cans of cider, beer too much for my pipes.  

We're all waiting around, not ready for the tragedy to happen, but it will, and when it does, maybe it's a good thing, in some small way.  

Maybe in that way, acceptance, you learn to love again, the meek, the frail, the broken people dragging on you, a broken heart mends, feeling better the next day.  A half an hour, not chewing your guts out.