It's his kindness.  That's what stands out.  He was kind.  That's a large part of it.  He expressed kindness and empathy to...  well, the kind of people no one else really wanted to touch or do much about.  Not extreme people, just the sort of people that a society might shrug about, 'Oh, well, what can you do..."  The kind of people the busy life of a city and directed aims and targeted tasks has to ignore.  By which I mean, the sufferers in our own midst.  Ourselves even.

Us.  The salt of the earth.  Not the particular, not the specially set apart as those in need of particular charity to be tended to in some professional way, but people, people with all the illnesses and things that flesh is heir to...

Jesus brought kindness to them.  He listened.  And kind of like dried out house plants, his kindness was water, and sticking with them the kindness had its effect in the way that it truly does.  Demons departed.  Of course they did.  A person suddenly found a kind therapeutic ear, a voice, an eye that understood everything.

Something which really should be present in all our lives.  But which isn't, because of professional titles and all that career stuff.  Professional realms which are good, which do work, but in turn cannot offer that ultimate simple kindness of which the need is so plainly evident in everything humanity touches.

"An onion."  Somewhere in The Brothers Karamazov, giving an onion to a hungry peasant woman... Dostoevsky, his eye focusses on the simple thing, like bread.  An onion.  A symbol, an act of grace.

"Wow,, this guy is kind to me, after everyone else just shrugged, too bad, and went on their way.  And I don't blame them, because, you know, it's not like they can heal you or give you immediately a new life, shelter, care, that sort of a thing."  Jesus stopped, and listened, was thoughtful and kind, and wasn't stuck too much on tradition.  New wine, old wine, new garments, old ones...  You have to listen to the story, see it reenacted, get the oral tradition to feel it.  Just reading it, not bringing it to life and to a sort of vision, you miss something.  Because it's music, spiritual music, music which you can play in your own head, to your own benefit, good for the brain.  It's not so much logical, but, from the heart, therefore satisfying.

Really, what did he do?  He was nice to people.  He listened, he saw.  He fed people.  He let it be okay that they drank wine, were fishermen, were not infallible.  Incredibly kind.  Even sacrificing himself, of course.  No wonder he liked his time up in the hills by himself, detoxing, cleansing his mind from the tacit unkindness that he saw, the making of deviants out of people stricken with problems not so much of their own making, health stuff, crazy minds...

He was a good person to go to a baseball game with, a good forgiver, a good acknowledger of people, individuals, the soul of individuals...  And yes, the opposite kind of a thing to that of, say, the old Soviet system of everyone being soulless comrade worker advancing the purposes chosen by the state.

It falls upon the writer, the awkwardness of truth, the claims of the word upon the flesh.

The writer finds, through examination of his own life, the things covered by Jesuit Priest James Martin, S.J., in The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, to be of a truth.  Here, a good treatment of the religious life, a covering of topics as poverty of spirit, or humility, the appropriateness of chastity, thereby to better love one's neighbor.   Odd things to consider, but then one did not invent them.  At a more mature age, one's own experience really does seem to lead him so.  Then one might be able to see, not the 'all the things I'm doing wrong with my life,' but rather, the gentle appropriateness, and thereby a grounded stance to make the corrections one can, confident again, less troubled, and more the feeling of being loved, somehow.

Why do I act with humility?  Why am I chaste?  Why am I more an embracer of poverty rather than the riches that would seemingly bring me comfort?  To all the pains of life, all the disappointments, faults and 'sins,' one can honestly say, 'well, that's just how it is, I didn't invent it, nor the pattern, it's just the path, to life, to what may be called, the Christian life.'  The vain mis-steps one is prone to in life, in social media, the selfishness that clouds the vision, such things seemed eased away from, and a reality emerges of not so much being at fault, but being basically right and true, even if it brings its own aches.

A good neighbor calls such things The Rock, that ability to see...



The evening of a Friday night shift, someone away for a weekend trip, ends, the barman eating a piece of salmon, alone, a glass of wine.  The energy level quickly sinks, and there are things left to do, the lugging up of bottles to restock, Sancerre, and Bordeaux, the last few dirty plates to take down to an empty kitchen.  A swipe of the bar surfaces, Windex, the bar towel.  The sound system, emptiness.  Is this the fundamental condition of humanity, choose we do to not admit it?   Is this some form of the sorrowful passion from the prayer on EWTN from 3 to 3:20 every afternoon.  The last late customers he entertained, did a good job of it, and now, what's there to do but walk home, also lonely, but healthy.  He stops in the park, sits down at a park bench, and the deer are the only ones for company.    Is this where one comes to find God's love?  Or just a lousy job...

They were great people to work with.  That always lifted my spirits.  Great crowd.  A real mixing with real people.

As you get older, you know better what's good for you, what's healthy.

The barroom, the drinkers, the patterns of freed tongues and conversations of the happy hour...  Conversation is conversation, often very interesting...  Rejoice in that.   But sometimes, the evening, because of the nature of work and lifting and dirty plates and orders and busboys that go home before you, gets a little too long.  Loud voices, boisterous and happy with completing their own work day...

Ach.  When you're young you don't have so clear a notion.  You over-react, you mis-react.  Or you just go along with things, not thinking of what there should be as far as following through with good productive intent.



The Rejection at Nazareth... What's He saying?  Being expansive about prophets, He reads from Isaiah.  "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me..."   He mentions the powers of a prophet...  And then He sits to add a commentary, as was customary in Jewish tradition.  "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing," He says.  (From the Gospel of Luke, 4:16 - 30.)

What does He mean by this?  As He is one discussing the divine reality of human nature, how expansive can we make this;  how broadly might it apply?   He could just be speaking about Himself, but isn't His habit generally that of the parable, of one thing and how it can be applied to many a situation.   His own things He applies to humanity, in its true essence as He teaches us to see it.

And then He adds, of course, he engages, for which there will be reaction of the gathered, "No prophet is accepted in the prophet's hometown."  And this too is a statement, broadly applicable.   As  if to say, that there is within us that which hears the divine spirit and understands, in some way, its nature, that ability to be, as they called it then, prophetic, or insightful.  That, He is telling us, is within the legacy of our birth, our birthright.

But because we attach ourselves and our neighbors to common every day less than remarkable things, like work, in order to understand them, we are not so much generally inclined to see in a conscious socially patterned way, the divine in the other.  (Even as we do see it, as we are meant to, because its a plain true part of ourselves and others.)  And because of this, we lean toward rejecting the divinity in the other, leaning toward understanding them by the usual social clues, this person is such n such, so n so, look at the clothes they are wearing, what they do for work, the color of their skin, their age, health, wealth, other practical things, like 'would I buy a loaf of bread from this guy...'

And so there is the great rejection.  The taking of a person who has a right to be where he is, who he is, and not listening.  The great dismissal.  The Rejection at Nazareth.

Rejection hurts, it has consequences.  And perhaps to someone who has some sense, conscious or not, subliminal, what-have-you, of the divine spark of spirit, who brings love to what he does, perhaps there is a particular sting, one that a more aggressive and practical person might be far better at shrugging off.

The consequences of the rejection might lead a man to be ever more entrenched, more steadfast, more a man on a mission.  We could say this about Jesus.  From the rejection in His hometown, He may be ever more set on exploring the nature of the prophetic teacher of parables going out into the world and its people just as they are.  Walking through the midst of His rejectors, Jesus is on His path.

As a regular normal mortal human being, as a youth, I'm afraid we're less circumspect when we get one of those little garden variety rejections, such as those in a young woman's fair arsenal of self-protection and carefulness to which we owe the survival of our species.  One never means to take rejections so heavily, but sometimes we do.  We seem to react with our own rejection, even without ever meaning it, as we must simply to on our way trying to be who we are in essence, trying to find ourselves, or in that great period of listening.

That's why young people, in this period of time, need a spiritual element to their educations.  To get a broader perspective, I suppose.  Or rather, we all do.  We all do.


But that little divine spirit spark within us, it's not the easiest more readily available thing to accept.  Or know what to do with.  Try to be good, sure.  But there is also sin, inherent to our nature.  That is our mix.   That is why forgiveness is so crucial.  Even Jesus brings the ire of at least some of the people of his own hometown upon Himself.  Maybe because they saw the forgiveness in Him, they did not bring harm to him, much as they intended to throw him down from the high place of the town.   A lesson amplified by the story of the woman caught in adultery...  Forgiveness around the world, emanating from this spirit brought forth in the old book of Isaiah, brought to life by Him.

Who knows, maybe He almost felt like rejecting Himself, sometimes...  As all theorists and scientist and artists might want to do sometimes, but for the beauty of the thing, the self-evident truth somewhere within, to be teased out, even if by some lone voice.

Or maybe he would have heard the voices rife with sarcasm, after he'd spoken his piece to the townspeople of his own hometown.  "Spiritual master (yeah, right...)  Asshole!"



Reconstructing it ourselves, we see our own vanity, the vanity of the everyday.  Vanity even as we see ourselves putting into play our talents.

Is it the realization of one's own vanity that leads Him to His work as we know it.

I don't know, I said, a quick explanation of the holidays and family, when one of the great musicians sat down to eat before playing.

Did you have a Christmas tree?

Oh, yes.  He nodded. I had his soda water for him.  Asked, his daughter in Germany, with her boyfriend, Vietnamese.  At Christmas, a preference for particular bourbon emerges.  Makers Mark, sound, but I don't drink when I play.  Bartender reacts.  Daughter's boyfriend likes... Basil Hayden.

I say, Knob Creek, best we have.  Famous American almost drowned in Knob Creek, Kentucky, at the age of nine.  Makers Mark.  Does what it should.  But who is that?

(Actually, the Irish are smarter, distilling three times, not just once, as in bourbon, though you have to give them credit for being the Armangac of whiskey, not just twice, like the Scots, who know they are going to drink a lot of it...  Makes a difference.)

A musician, a bass player, lets say, has an understanding of Abraham Lincoln.

I was watching a piece about the Naval Observatory...  (Here in Washington, DC, not far away, through the woods, off of Massachusetts Avenue.)   The big telescope had finally arrived.  All set up. And, you know, it's pretty quiet, up on a nice hill, surrounded by woods, and yes, if you had to pick a place in old DC, that's it, makes sense.

 But one night, not long after the big telescope is in place, somewhere in the night, maybe something like 2:30 AM, something like that, a knock at the door.  Boom boom.  Boom.  Boom.  Who the hell is it.  Go and answer the door.  And you're looking uphill if you are in front of the Naval Observatory.  Open the door.

It's him.  Abraham Lincoln.

Can I look through your telescope?  I thought I might like to.  You know, I have an interest in science and such things.  My patent never got very far, but, without science, where would we be?

Smiles.  Nods.  The self-confidence of a big man, like a man who can play the bass.  The keeper of the observatory, and he, look through the telescope, big for its day, up at the heavens.

Thank you very much.  That really was nice.  I much appreciate your letting me come and look, and think of all we saw.

And then, the keeper of the Observatory, well, sees him out.  The man did what he wanted, looked up, saw the stars of the deep heavens...  The door is opened to let him out, Lincoln...

And then, what does he see?  Lincoln nods, probably, and then he turns away, his hat on, and he walks away.  He steps down the hill, to the sloping little road that leads now down to Massachusetts Avenue which was basically the same route then as it is now...  It's the middle of the night, and the man is all alone.  No horse.  No guard.  No phalanx.  Just a lone tall man, at the odd hour, who probably said, what we all would have said, if we ourselves had the opportunity to be him, such a man, 'thank you very much.'  The words haven't changed that much since 1854, or 1855, or 1856.

Just a lone man, tall, shrouded in his dark suit, an overcoat, maybe, walking slowly and steadfastly out into the silent dark night.

The keeper of the Observatory watches the man walk away off into the night.

I look at my guest.  famous in his own right.

What was he, fifty seven?  (56, at death, some literature says.)  His weight was down to 180, thin for a man 6' 4", but sinewy, all muscle.  Out wrestled anyone he ever wrested with.

I've looked at his life masks, at the Portrait Gallery.  The one from 1860, then the one from 1865.  Something was getting him...  The cracked negative is not a big picture, just more than postcard size, unbelievably.  Or rather, appropriate.  Something comes out of it.  Him.

Something was getting him, yes.

Could hold an axe out, I add, holding my thin arm out straight.  I've split wood before as a kid, in my life.  But at shoulder height, he could do it.

A little Derringer pistol one shot thing, they weren't very reliable. Half the time they wouldn't go off, backfired, something like that.

And if it hadn't gone off, Lincoln would have turned around...

Yes, I said...

Lincoln would have turned around, picked the little bastard up, broke him in half and thrown him over the railing.

Which, unfortunately, for the world, did not happen.

The man finished his salmon, and I was his friend, and I watched him play the bass, while I tended to my duties there at the wine bar, with all its comings and goings.


But how can one not tear up, after hearing a story, and realizing that at night, all alone, Lincoln got up on his own two booted feat, and walked, alone, all the way from 16th Street Northwest (where The White House is), up the five or so blocks up to Massachusetts Avenue, and then all the way up west, a good fifty minutes, I might imagine, and then, satisfied, walked back, had to walk back, which some of us, as drinkers sometimes, know is not so perfectly pleasant, but sometimes weary, but then, sometimes allowing for a joy of the elements, the peaceful happy open night sky with all its little events of meaning and possibility and proposed geometry.

That is where the words came from, from such slow walks, as that old man, walking up, and then back down, old spooky Massachusetts Avenue not far away from where I sit, and many the time I have made the walk, the very same footsteps, in cold weather, and in fair, and in the same, one imagines, the same creative oblivion, honest, hurting, a practical thing to do as far as sanity.  A thing that made him who he was, always doing things like that, that odd wayfarer sort of thing, as if he was interested more in petals of clover in the grass than all the great matters of state.

Pigs stuck in mud.  Fallen birds.  Somber rhymes.  A man balanced, somehow, encompassing.  And on top of that, all the legal talent you'd want, unlike some of us, who aren't so industrious and responsible.

After the workweek, sore, the maestro lay on his side in bed with the shades drawn, in a meditation pose, allowing the thoughts to form, like watching loose translucent blob-like strings of DNA form and pass in his mind, vertically, like thematic streams of Beethoven's music.  Notes by themselves at first.  Then, discerning, coalescing, here a part, here a voice, here an instrument stating something, then picked up in another way, changed slightly, then many of those gathering, changing, reforming on their own as greater groups.  The actual music was hard to hear at this point, coming out like little blips, smaller sawings on a stringed instrument, much like the beginning of the Ninth.  One had no way to know if he was talking in nonsense or in scientific or psychological postulations of any accuracy or not.  A certain peace can be found in such writing attempts if not in the world in the same fashion.  One must rest in peace of some form to be able to see and hear.

Peace.  Yes, there are the diplomatic arenas of the courtship ritual.  So the notes in his mind were telling him, and he judged them not.  But there seemed some vague fact, hard to attain and develop, that certain people might act as, to use a loose term, depressives, and that to treat them with the usual roughness to be expected in such matters as courtship and friendship has a deeper effect, a magnifying effect.  Really they are just sensitive people, natural people.

But who knows if this is true, or reasonable to say, or even worth mentioning?  Barely a lump, a roughly formed thought, sitting just so in the mind of a person who'd gotten through the physicality of a work week of night shifts, who was awake but craved more rest.   A personal thought, coming from some personal experience long turned over in the mind, a delineation point between the world as it is and the questions of how to attain peace in the mind, through understanding.  Maybe if peace was found in one mind it could be passed to another, and so on.

The over-reaction, yes.  His own.  His own tendency to not react in the appropriate calm self-confident way, but to allow in the more negative narrative of a scene.  "Well, after all that I call her up and she practically hangs up on me, so therefore she doesn't like me..."   Carrying that in to the next day, when she appears before you, but you cannot break out in time of the bad thoughts, the sense of hurt, what-have-you, not worth going into.  Then distraction, then loss of opportunity, quickly and as easily as that, and your own sins coming into play.

The stress, that's what it is, you allow in the stress.  And the stress controls the thoughts and the way the adrenaline fires.  Be positive, easier said than done.   And stress is bad for the brain.  It leads to coping mechanisms that cause damage.  Ultimately, depressions of the sort that lead to things like dementia.  An overworked mind.

Which is again why people write, or, like Beethoven, craft strains of music into symphonies, as a way with coping with the depressions, the depressions that grow upon depressions.  Because you hear things, basic things, like somewhere, in the midst of cacophony, an Ode to Joy.

Or maybe quite well not even depressions.  Just an innate need, the organic need to take all those rushing loose strains of thought's pieces that run through the mind as we each must know it on our own, and put them down.  Ed Sheeran said as much on Charlie Rose last year.  It builds up.  When the chance comes out the songs come.

Somewhere a thought in the midst of the week.  Hamlet.  He slips so easily and fully into the antic disposition.  We want to tell him, stop, my friend, stop; it's Ophelia you're speaking to, forget the dramatic intent beyond that...  Shakespeare's observation is of people slipping into their modes, choosing them, how complete, overrunning they become, even when one is aware of what he's doing.

But it is hard enough to get through a workweek.  The new busboy.  The co-worker who shows up just before the door opens, not a single effort to help set-up, arrange the furniture for jazz night full to the brim.  One wishes to come from another culture, less Germanic about time.  Calm, easy-going, diplomatic, friendly, not so worried about how things might actually come together, eh, shrug, they will happen.  Not part of that tribe who has to go home, sleep, then upon waking try to spin the yarn of thought out of the coarse wool of the week.

Kindness, the depressive thinks, doesn't it finally come down to the kindness with which one treats, regardless of external fact, another human being, a kindness that is ultimately good for the health of that person, the deprivations of which of said kindness are not good for the health of that person.

And who would ever know where the less than full implementation of kindness came in to the dialog?  Can you blame anyone in particular?  Can you point to any thing that was just a little bit too harsh?   Diplomatic histories are made of such errors, like Obama and Netanyahu, one saw in PBS winding down, maybe that's why he is thinking of such things, diplomacy.

He wrote, he had his green tea, he had a cup of hot water with lemon, a dash of cayenne, a drop of pure maple syrup, and his glasses, oversized, progressive bifocals were awkward to look through as he leaned over the coffee table.

Okay, and what were other thoughts from the week that I have not been able to get to?

Depart from me;  for I am a sinful man, O Lord.  From the Gospel of Luke.  5:8

Peter's talent.  His sensitivity.  Self-understanding.  His great human humanity.  His shyness.  The great admission, the greatest of all admission, simple, stinging, full, a sense of the lack of self-control, scary.  Yet, we sense in him, he wants to do something creative, something good, something to wipe the pessimism and the negativity away, to be clean again.  Not caught in reaction.

The bar gets overrun.  No one from downstairs comes up to help, and so I hustle.

Master, we have toiled all night, and have taken nothing.  The futility of a job.  He's tired.

Then what does the Master say?  And then, somehow, it's easy to come along.

Peter will have his own moments of creativity.  He is the flashpoint for all the Gospel writers.  "Who do they say I am," and Peter answers.

A faith in kindness, some form of kindness, chaste as it may be, kindness given by and to a fisherman who's toiled all night and taken nothing, just trying to do his work.

And for him, there is better work.  A fisher of 'men.'  Temperate, Peter will have a better chance at working for the good, less allowing of evil...

There is barely any meaning left in words.  How they are delivered, yes.  But the words themselves, some are just foolish enough in a youthful time to believe in them, take them as fixed.  That's the beauty of poetry, the attempt to make words fixed points of a truth about something.

Really they are far more like music than we might think.  Musical notes, phrases, signifiers for things there are no rational terms for, emotional truths of how people feel.  Meditations, little more.  If you can pluck something out of them, it is a thought out of a field, one in keeping with the whole field, a whole spectrum, into which one supposes a particular instance of life might be dropped into to see it in greater context, for all outcomes.


Thereby, the maestro felt a certain comfort.  There was never any intention to write a novel, like, say, For Whom The Bell Tolls, something to be made into a movie with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman.  There were just mysterious connections to be mulled over in the words one was able to write down, something that went along with but perhaps beyond thought.  Thinking of a sort that could be placed in the context of a whole lifetime of a thinking creature, from wordless babe, through childhood and youth, through those years that are supposed to be somehow adult, and on into those of old age.  Thinking that is simply there, somehow, constant, a thing itself worth pondering about, conscious, present, aware somehow, as if from a higher perspective of our own thoughts, tolerant of them as we are tolerant of weather conditions, there being some spiritual point, some understanding to be gained, lest we get lost and think of ourselves only as the hapless fisherman of one night's fruitless toil.

Employ the wordy part of the mind, and let it go its own way, reaching down to thoughts of a deeper consciousness, for which one has, of course, no control over, but to sit down and listen.  An idiot full of sound and fury but signifying nothing?  One hopes not.

Somehow the blank thoughts, the exercise of words, soothed the maestro's mind after all the talk of the week and the people in different states coming through the bar and the tables.  Quiet enough now to let them come out, and then, maybe weeks or months later, find record of them, to then see if they might yield any jewel of meaning...

"Eat your dinner," they had told him, the kind people at the end of the night.  "He's too shy," a woman said.

Might some form of a parable emerge, just born, nascent, more human than divine.

It was the last diners that had pushed him over the edge, fellow staff disappearing as they conceived of their own real duties, abandoning him, wiping the glassware clean, the last cheese plates to be wrangled out of the kitchen at the end of a long one, a requested alteration of the night's fish special, the complication of being turned into a live music venue.   But he had recovered.  Just the next day, tired, rather tired.

What did it all mean?  It must have some Christian form of meaning, somehow.

Now when he had left speaking, he said unto Simon, Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught.

A literary operation, the room where people meet.  Salt of the earth.

Post number one thousand.  The last few, the hardest.  Adrift.  I had to consult my interviews, wondering if it was all worth it, the attempt to explain, if that's what it was, to catch how people talk, how they think.


When you do a tree pose...

That's the figure of the Christ brought to three dimensional reality I like to think of.  The tree pose is balance, in yoga, alignment, standing on one foot, and when you part your arms out straight, like the cross, there's an additional shift of the things of the body into place.

The tree pose of yoga comes close to the mythical meaning of the Cross, the wood that was the Tree of Knowledge back in the Garden, the true cross which shows to ourselves the reality of living in three dimensional space, and here, on the cross itself, being in the present moment.  The strength and power of the yoga pose leads to subtle changes in the mind, an alignment with that which could be represented in now ancient fresco art as the drawn mandala of the halo gold around the aligned head. The spine is straight, the energy centers of the chakras aligned.  And yes, through this pose, we achieve being ourselves, and to be ourselves is to be, yes, in a certain way, kind, unselfish, concerned with the poor and the ill, or, as you might say, with the real issues of humanity and the human psyche.  All the age old problems which will not go away, which will find their manifestation in history until history is bent by a higher of course non-violent mind.

Crucified, yes, but aren't we all crucified, in the sense of being incarnated as mortal beings bound in time and physicality and all its desires, needs, etc., creatures of flesh and blood and bone, which we, spiritual, must carry and care for, and arrange suitable lives for in society, even as far as careers and such.  Not just a smile, a pretty face...   The Stations of the Cross have their meaning, sure, not to offend the tradition, but does the image of so much gore bring across a power we might have within ourselves as well as, say, the tree, either pose, or tree appreciation while walking in the woods, deeply pondering the illusion of the boundary of self to the rest of the world...

(But even the old school masters who brought forth the image of tortured flesh, even those somehow explained themselves within the context of 'here was a happy man... even with such suffering,' because of fulfillment of beatitudes and the like...)

And oddly, it is the alignment, the proper straightening of the back, the movement back of the head upon the higher vertebrae so that the candle of the mind, the higher chakra of the third eye is lit, so that the energy from below might better flow upward...  It is those things which, as far we can only know, our only sense of them, bring forth, which present, the possibility of the miracle.   Remember, to Jesus Christ,  the miracle was, how should I say, almost nonchalant, almost a matter of fact of ease to do.  All one needed was faith, then one could, figuratively, make miracles of wine and walk on water, which is to say that there are already miracles within the nature of wine and within the nature of water, so why protest?

So how do people help you out?  How do they help effect you in good ways?  It's probably through some form of them finding their own cross to bear, a sort of sharing...  hey, I've been through this...

The yoga pose must be some kind of universal awakening bestowed upon the individual.  Maybe in the same way that porpoises and dolphins and manta rays and whales jump out of the water, a universal activity shared across each species, and they are no more automatons than we are;  they are just freer to express their personality from being all that closer and involved, highly more so than we are, with nature, with nature's very fabric.

So the tree pose, the Cross of Christ, is like that,  a kind of joyful entering into the calm of yoga, into the joyful leap, into that truer form of reality that we must psychologically encounter to feel we are in touch with everything.

You tell me.  Go do Tai Chi, go do yoga.  Can you not feel the awakening or the calm or the halo shining like light immediately, as light does, around you?

There are tales of Jesus' lost years of youth....  Did he follow the trade routes to India and Nepal and Tibet?  It makes a certain amount of sense, from his calm, that he would have learned from the yogis....


How could He have been anything but a man of sorrows...  For that, there is yoga.

Within the evanescent ethereal swirling tremulous-particle core of yoga practice there is the need for words, just as there is the need for the physical poses of muscle and limb and things within.  And there is within the core of writing the true need to do yoga and read about it, in order to grasp things which are barely comprehensible at first try.  How could one possibly make the leaps of faith and its poses that is raja yoga without the engagement and consideration?


"Sorry, I've been tending bar the last five nights," I explain to the woman at Glen's Market who's offering sample tastes of power bars.  I stopped to look, shyly, at the offerings of such on the shelf next to her, hoping she wouldn't notice me, but she asks me if I'd like a taste.  You don't want to talk to anyone very much after doing that, and 'ugh,' she understands completely.  One of the guys I work with gets through the night with protein shakes and a steady stream of nibbles, sometimes onion tarts and escargot, eating them unhurriedly back by the bread cutting board in the middle of service.  I've never given myself much a permission to do that, but there has to be a better way to do it, and the kid, who's studied kinesiology seems to have a scientifically based approach.


After tending bar five straight nights, I suppose the effects would be like that of hearing so many bird calls and sounds.  There'd been a lot of cawing, a lot of chirps and songs.  And my response was to get out the guitar and play some of the songs I knew.  That somehow seemed like the right way to absorb all I'd heard, all the different personalities, shapes, faces, voices, walks of life, social and dining habits.  I'd absorbed a certain amount, and it needed to come out.

I found the music I liked to have a shaman power to it, having its appeal to the raw blood coursing through the body like adrenaline, much like the effect The Beatles had when they came to America.  And music with an ancient quality to it, rhythms one could sink his teeth into.

Some of us think like shaman, myself, a type O, for instance, and some people, type B, look upon what I'd naturally as an embarrassment.    How does the O fit in comfortably with society that doesn't agree with his system very well?  Self-embarrasssment?  Isn't that what writers do?  Think of Vonnegut, his breath smelling like mustard gas after boozing a bit calling his old war buddies late at night in Slaughtehouse Five.


In a way, I liked the job.  I was well-suited for it, hospitality.  And where I'd never fit in, for not being, oh, a decisive forceful type with a goal to impose, but rather instead a passive type, there it was, my job, of all things.  I was a bartender.  I liked talking to people, I liked helping them out.  I was good at it, a performer, conversational, outdoing myself in ways that felt easy, providing good friendly service to random visitors.  In that context, I liked wine, to an extent;  like Jefferson, it seemed a necessity.  I like people who also like wine.  I like the conversations that come with wine, with the need for an exercise of humor.  I liked hanging out.  I liked restaurant people, I liked, at least almost liked, having my own rhythm, not that of the typical commute.  I liked being a professional of the night, and took pride in it.  Things can stressful, besides, and you need wine, and it is there for a good Godly reason.

The job was a good fit for the Celt, for the Type O in need of adrenaline's fire and the busy night.  Often hard to accept, on a mental level, what I did for work, the hours, the pay, the oddness of it, for one who was once a college boy with ambitious of writing and teaching, but it was a good forum, for me, for lots of people.  A shared venue.  I wasn't selfish about it.  One's own little version of Charlie Rose.  The subject, life in general.  Mortality.  Talk itself.


And on the other hand, recovering from the week, I thought how it was all an incredible show, a shy interior person putting on a pose.  Such by the end of the week, I kept to myself, the shyness back in large amount, the mind not sure what to think of anything, the mood depressed.  I had a real palpable need to get back to yoga to straighten out the pains mental and physical, for the quiet of recovery.  It was as if here was something I wanted to be doing, and I couldn't put my finger on it.  And it seemed like I had piled so much crap on top of that which I wanted to be doing, and for so many years.  But for such feelings, there was yoga and meditation.



Thanksgiving Day I woke up early after my shift, to drive up to see Mom.  There are several points on Route 81 in the Pennsylvania land of ridges, curves and climbs where NPR is lost, where religious programming is the offering of the lower end of the FM dial.  Where once a young man might have sort of sneered at is kitsch, or even dangerous to the mind, now I found it helpful.  The reasons of why to have faith, how to have it, the importance of keeping it, have grown clearer over the years.  Things to be grateful for, a good lesson.

Finding happiness with the simple things in life became clearer.  It was good to have a job, health insurance, a place to live, good friends.  The beauty in plain simple things suddenly seemed to offer itself up, even if I still was feeling stressed a bit, unclear as to the future.

And feeling grateful for what you have, just so as it is, that is something enormous.


But then, there's also that feeling of greatly missing something, of being on a completely different planet than that occupied by professional and practical people.  Shane MacGowan is to me, sometimes, a sane man, because he went crazy.  He created a persona as a way of hiding his sensitivity but also giving it a vehicle.  For some of us, yes, to be whatever kind of an artist you can be as you go about functioning in the world, that's one way to do it.


I see life more and more determined by blood chemistry.  The underlying difficulty of the excitable fight or flight response Type O human being, a shaman hunter, self-reliant, put into a world where one gets titles through a system of authority.  Thus did Hemingway write, acknowledging a direct need for words, to be directly engaged in them.  Which is different from the scholarly mode.

In the course of my life as an idiot, it seems I was too passive.  Too thoughtful.  Prone to confusion.  I did not take what was offered, rightfully mine, out of a moral sense of proper conduct and my love for an awesome girl.  I was too shy.  I did not step up at the right time.  I was too much a seeker of the order and meaning of the universe when it was right there before me.  I failed to act at crucial moments, over and over again.  Or was it that I had something ingrained within, physically, that was dictating things a bit.  Did it have something to do with the real but unmet unaddressed need for the spirituality of yoga, which in turn would be a better gateway toward beliefs, just as one might suspect that Jesus was a yogi in practice, thus his ability to put things into words.

There are the rough drafts, left lingering, to be recorded, I suppose, but then transcended, moved on from, to be understood by a place beyond normal understandings.


There I am sitting on the carpeted floor of the music auditorium during the last class of the anthropology class Deviancy, and she is seated up the same row, mid way up, conspicuous.  And what did I do?   How easy it would have been to go sit next to her.  What a nice way it would have been to smooth over the little differences that had grown up large in the back and forth of courting.  And how much it would cost me, that passivity...  And it was Christmastime.  I was a senior, she was a sophomore.   One more golden opportunity, missed.

From there things seemed to fall apart somewhat.  I kept losing units of self-confidence and assuredness.  I kept losing the push to follow through with that bright friendly kid who came to college and how he could be a teacher.  And instead of that path, it seemed like I just got crazier, fancying myself as the writer, coming to town, temping, busing tables...

And every morning, I'd wake up to the thoughts of how I messed it up with her, replaying in them in my mind, and each time the same frustrated end.  Sort of like feeling gaslighted, as in the old movie with Ingrid Bergman.  O adrenal system.

When I slept enough that I fell into dream, then I could deal with it.  Then I wasn't so much haunted by all my foolishness, the countless social errors I made with regard to college in general.

I returned to yoga.