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.

Finally, after five night shifts closing the restaurant, the day off.  Awaking at two PM has seemed the way to handle the shifts, the most rest possible, and that's when I get up.  I need daylight, vitamin D.  I go for a walk in a warm humid November rain, a magnificent double rainbow spanning Rock Creek just as I cross the Massachusetts Avenue bridge.  I walk very slowly down the grassy slope, back on the road as it hairpins, finding the path down to the creek, which is running best I've seen it in a while.

I read sketches from the barman's album, snippets of thoughts, written in haste, impressions, complaints, attempts at understanding, full of exaggerations, moody explorations that seem out of place in this time of corporate employment, akin to Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground.  Just thoughts that come and go:


The bar can be the opposite of calm.  Sometimes it is calm.  Those are the times you do it for.  The busy times are good, too.  The times when you don't have to think, just do, keep moving, no need to be involved in different modes of conversations.  Facilitate.  


When I went out into the city I became a professional.  And for that there is a show, faces, happy, grinning, getting a buzz on, raised voices, laughter, pats on the back, display, confusion, loudness, stories you'd heard a hundred times, but welcomed each time in nuances.  It was enough to make you anxious.

Much of it is friendly and benevolent, a good vibe.  It puts you in the present moment, interacting with people so intensely and steadily that it brings you out of your head.

It was next to impossible to get done with a shift and not want a glass of wine.  If you felt bad about that basic fact, didn't treat the commune right, the next day, you sometimes weren't feeling so hot, sleepy, tired from physical exertion.  And on top of all that, working at night in order to do that which  was basically natural, to write, as a skill to develop for whatever reason, as a therapy, as a way of sorting things out in the mind on a daily basis...


But that was also a kind of learning path, a modest highly fallible attempt at one.  The approach, in life's waves, of one's own tiny little dark night of the soul, of the that which can allow a burning away of vanities and the personality of the ego attached to the past.  Maybe cities are heavy with just that which one would preach to people to get rid of.  And for me, the ego of being a writer didn't turn out to be much, unless it had a spiritual side.



Writing, somehow it always worked for you, helped you put things in piles, so that you could think about them, let out inner thoughts, and all I could think about was the spirit which would endure and offer great kindness to people because love is our nature.


Jesus or Buddha, what difference does it make how you come about it?  They're both going the same place.  Sick of that which is making you sick?  Let it go, bring peace to you.  There is nothing wrong, only the perception.   As if we are programmed, in our nervous system, to replicate the voyage of the spiritual master, just by allowing it to happen, in our own little ways.

And enough bitching.  I've truly enjoyed tending bar, and all the customers.  A privilege it is to be amongst great people, real people.

It is towards the end of the night and the singer brings the oversized martini glass Mr. Koko the little white dog has drank water of in the course of the evening as he lies on his couch as the jazz trio plays through their sets up to the bar.  There is some water left in the glass, and I take it by the stem and toss the remainder into the sink, and as I do I say toward the sink or an imaginary person in its locale, "I thought I told you to shut up."  (As if someone was throwing a drink at someone else.)  Caught unexpectedly, the lady with the silky voice and excellent pitch, laughs aloud.  As do several seated at the small bar.  I've never thrown a drink at anyone, nor has anyone ever thrown one at me, but there is theater in small things.

But the old barman knows.  Woe unto the world because of offenses, if that even applies.  But there it is, the love, the respect, the friendliness, desire for happiness and agreement, people feel for each other.  And yet, even as the two parties might offer each other several, even many olive branches, but in the dance, and in the high stakes of the mating ritual, unfortunately, things can go very wrong, even against the will.   Why?  Mainly because of insecurities, perhaps, or there be moods, or psychological tendencies, or other events in a life that bleed over to the personal aspect.  Or there is just juvenile dumbness, the unmet need for a more aggressive approach to not leave things up to the divine but to bite the apple and make things happen, as the clocks in games are ticking anyway.

Yes, the old barman knows.  He's talked to people about it in searching through the meaningful events of other people's happenings and doings and personal lives.  The very same thing happening to one of my favorite co-workers.  He's been through months of it, and I tell him, over a text, mainly to be sympathetic, 'yeah, I've had years like that.'  And indeed, I wish old events would not have taken hold over the circuitry of my mind, to the extent that I wonder, in a domino theory kind of way, why I do my work in night shifts, even into versions of that old spiritual wilderness of the night of the soul.  Which is I suppose a good part of why I am a writer, in order to deal with such a Satan of every day, which I will explain.

From reading too much Alan Watts, it goes something like this.  The Cross symbolizes the accomplishment of putting Lucifer, the ego, all that which we keep with us as a past and memories which hold us in such a way as to determine our future, away from us, so that we rise, spiritually healthy and capable of life, by living in the present.  The theme, of the Perennial Philosophy, captured beautifully throughout the details of the Christian story, is compelling presented in his Myth and Ritual in Christianity.

Okay, that's all nice, that's all well and good and worth thinking about, but...

And then you look at the world today, and you wonder.  Produced, built, formed in the divine image, we are the love of the creator, personified, exemplified, brought to life.  And yet, look at the world;  look at the absence of that in different acts of aggression and retaliation, all of which seem inevitable and unending to us, unless, like the Cross symbolizes, we were to take the act of stepping outside of history, outside the past that wears us down into warriors, to become, in essence, ourselves again.

I suppose you can hear it in Lincoln, of course in the Gospels, or in the preacher's words about a happy marriage, do not let disagreements and charges and the like simmer and develop, lest all the wealth piled up is torn away and one is cast into prison to pay for the rest of a life.

Perhaps that is the love of the divine, anyway, speaking to us, exemplifying, the need to speak that message.  Do not be stupid.  Apologize, show the other person that, no matter what act might come out, you care.  And if you can deliver that message, in whatever small way, perhaps that redeems you.   You've learned the lesson, and it's time to remember the higher things.

unpublished wine column 11/13

When things are clear as mud, I find a book off my father's shelf.  Alan Watts' "Myth and Ritual in Christianity” fits the bill as the Earth turns toward bare-treed November, the time to 'hold fast to the center.'  Watts describes a Christian mythos keeping with a Perennial Philosophy that people all around the world throughout history come up with.  

The emphasis, for Watts, is on the poetry of a good myth, on understandings that live in a mind attuned to the present, free from the ego and historical time and the science and metaphysics of the Western system of thought.

Myths don't make it onto the daily news, but one has stuck with me since childhood.

The basics of it are this:  Dionysos appears on some cliffs above the sea, a ship of pirates going by;  'Must be some rich prince, let's take him hostage,’ they say; they seize him and bind their young nobleman to the mast, but fetters will not hold; strange things begin to happen on the ship; grape vines grow, vessels overflow with sweet wine; and then Dionysos turns into a lion and pounces.  The pirates, terrified, jump into the sea; hardness and extremism in the flesh, they are turned into dolphins, put to good purpose, in tune with nature; and the god Dionysos, having understood the moderate old helmsman's wise heart, commands him to stay.  And as the sailing day reached the dusk, I imagine they had some wine together.

I wonder if there's a better myth suited to the world right now.

Eric Asimov, of the New York Times, reminds me of the value of keeping a good Chianti around, a true middle of the road graciously palatable red.  At a very reasonable price, the fruit is balanced with the tactile experience of that source of all things, as if one could taste the acorn, the pinecone, the rocks and places where the Earth has received enough of its own history to tell a story.

In what terms can we express the reality of life?  Sometimes, like wine, we need the leap of faith that is truth wrapped in myth, perceived and understood, accepted, at deeper levels of the mind.

Exposure to myth allows us to comprehend the truth of other persons.  With a head full of Cuchulains and Quixotes, of goddesses who mingle with shepherds, we get the human psyche, the person standing there before you, unbound, unpacked from the imposed.

Like wine, myth allows us back to that archaic time when people talked to each other, really talked, about nature and reality.

And sometimes, there is a reward, a good simple pleasure, to counter the tyranny of the majority, the glass of Jean-Luc Columbo 2010 Cornas the wine rep poured; it sat out on the shelf by the bourbons, untouched, me feeling unworthy of a big complex Syrah, and five hours later, at the end of the shift, it tasted great and I kept coming back to its exotic refined depths.

Ow, ow, ow, Mr. Daffy is saying aloud as he leans back in his chair, his chin up, holding his martini glass Last Word gin cocktail up to his nose to savor it, as he listens to the music of the jazz trio.  He had dinner downstairs.  I don't know exactly how much he's had to drink, but in checking in on him he doesn't seem too badly off.   His fancy leather motorcycle jacket is propped up on the chair next to him, and he has on his shiny red Prada slipper sneakers.  He wants another one, and I go downstairs to check with my buddy coworker, who says, 'he can have half a one.'  Okay.  "Thank you, thank you," he is saying loudly as the trio finishes a song, as if he were the house emcee when I come back to the bar.  But he is an uninhibited fellow, wealthy.  Friendly, outrageous, likable, he says what's on his mind, not quite typical of Washington.

Back joining the bar with two lady friends after dining downstairs is an interesting Welsh woman, a round of Sambucca on the rocks.   Her mum a Brit, her father came from Yemen, talking, telling stories, about how as a girl she'd go have dinner with the Fearnley's, Mrs. Fearnley putting supper together for 8 children, peas, eggs, beans, chips, how her own mother would tell her not to impose upon her Irish neighbor who had enough on her plate trying to feed everyone already, and a dinner of Bolognese at home was better anyway.  She emphasizes, at her neighbor's, with her friend, she always got the same plate as everyone else.  Good stories.  Which, I, of Irish extraction, enjoy humoring.  We all have a fun chat with her.  She sounds like I'd imagine Amy Winehouse might have in conversation, a little bit.  We'd been talking about diet, what her tastes for certain kinds of food, her no longer craving meat, getting her protein from fava and other beans, and guess what, she's Type A blood.

After she leaves, as the place clears out, the musicians somehow understanding, quietly waving as they leave down the stairs into the night with their cases and equipment, the wise mild Englishman with glasses, whose been there at the end of the bar the whole night, sort of chuckles how I engage with the crazies more than I might.  If I had more reserve.. but believe me, I try.  Hospitality is a hard thing to turn off.  "Yes, I remember the  bartender at Harry's Bar in Paris..."  Monsieur Jacques did not talk much, a white jacketed professional betraying little emotion, simply duty, nodding when taking an order.  Indeed, it can seem like the only sane people in the room are the ones who are waiting on people, encountering all the shows, the struts, the self-importance that breeds worldly wealth and importance.

The crazies, do I attract them?  It is the jazz, is it a full moon tonight?  Am I one of them?

I talk to mom at the end of the night after eating my grilled salmon dinner.  I listen to Morrissey, Every Day is Like Sunday, as I clean up the bar, alone now, after a long shift.  I hit the Safeway a long block up and across the street before Ubering it back to where I live.  Getting the groceries in, it took effort.

The day off I get up late.  I rise and take a hot shower after doing the dishes from yesterday and the night's gluten-free pizza.  I have my hot water with lemon, take a little tea, and limber by the hot water I perform my basic yoga poses and postures.  Sun salutation.  Shoulder stand.  Plow, first time in a while, feet touching the floor above my head.  Mountain, triangle, warrior poses.  Headstand.  Pigeon.

I need to see a little light before it gets dark, so I go for a walk.  Down on the avenue it's rush hour, a trail of slow moving red tail lights.  Walking slowly the back streets of Kalorama, finding a good interesting garden has been put to bed, everything cut low but for a little stand of kales, I call mom.  The purple flowers like Black-Eyed Susans a company of bees hovered about busy collecting pollen when I was recovering like St. Francis from the operation has been cut down too.  There are all kinds of crazies in education too, she tells me.  I have a good job as far as the imagination goes, stimulating, more social than if I'd just stuck back home with a  pickup truck and a dog.  I walk slowly under the clear warm jewel-like sky.  Cabdrivers have gathered on the back streets by the mosque, talking amiably with each other in their native tongues.

I cross the bridge, getting to the other side where the tall pines rise up to the bronze patina railings.  Further up the VP's big green with white helicopter comes in over the woods beyond the bridge for a landing, descending.

I walk down the little pasture, the grass damp, the sparse trees at the edge of the park's wooded bank lit by embassy mansion's exterior lights and the passing car.  I get the smell of the woods, the leaves building up now upon the lawn.  It's dark now, too dark to go down to the stream.

I walk back, and there's a turkey on ezekial sandwich I made for myself a day ago for work waiting for me.

But it's no wonder to me that after the week I return to my quiet and my yoga and my books touching upon aspects of religion.  Alan Watts lectures that when all humanity lived as a hunter, Type O, in the woods, able to do everything, hunt, cook, make weapons, mend, make shelter, on his own his spirituality was of the shaman type.  (Perhaps this is the basis of the human wish for privacy, that it is left to him to figure things out on his own, to practice, to woodshed, to master whatever he does, as he must do it alone as far as mastering the skill.  Thus the shyness, because of the nakedness of creativity, not wanting company when you're learning to sing a song.   The more intense the shyness, the wish for privacy, the better the craft might be.  Genius is, comes from, the solitary study and act.)  Watts points out the progress of an individual's life in Indian society of old, that after being a homeowner householder, there comes the final phase of being a forest dweller, eventually thinking, after months of silence, without words.  Do we return to from whence we came?

It seems a part of the job, to tolerate all the different forms of individual crazy that come out, ion beams, radiations, vocalizations, the individuality, the claims of each person as they live their lives and have dinner and wine at the bar.  I'm a patient listener, friendly, simpatico.

It seems sometimes like it was that second jazz night shift that was a bit much to put up with, a bit too many personalities, a bit too much, like I say, crazy.  It would then leave me not wanting to go out of the house, because if I did there would just be more of what I had so ably tolerated.  Bistro Du Coin?  No thanks.  The forest had its appeal, even if you felt lonesome.  It seemed as if the person with type O needed the quiet to recalibrate himself after his encounters with the modern world and the city his blood has difficulty comprehending, a survivor without urban credential.   A caveman with verbal skills, a good glad-hander.  The city makes little sense to him.  Television, unless he's making it, makes little sense to him.  The cell phone makes little sense to him.

And the people of other blood types, physiologically use to the agrarian and the city and conquering, have a huge leg up on the O.  The male of the species, perhaps in particular, will feel the tension and the pressures upon him.



A glass of wine, the biblical soother.


It almost began to seem like one of life's bad choices, going to work.  And yet it was, is, my job.  On a night off I listen to soothing music meant for yoga and meditation, do some yoga, after a walk down to the stream in the twilight.  I ease into exploring the mind away from dualities, away from outer labels, you are who you are, so why be pushed, why hurry about?  Do your yoga and your headstand, and meditate.  Relax into your true self;  work has too many labels if you let it be so.  Find that quiet person, thoughtful, redemptive, kind, not the animal who puts on a show, but the person who doesn't mind the downtime, the night alone reading.  Accept.  Be the sorrowful, the misunderstood, the un-listened to, meek, mild, mourning, poor.  And in that way, unburden one's self from burdens, from illusions.

As the psychologist might point out in her theories, The Happiness Trap, just that, that trying to be happy is great burden.  Just let that go.  That's not what life's about.  Life's lesson it to look beyond dualistic understandings and the appearance of multiplicity of that which is, undivided, whole, complete.

And religious literature, literature of the spiritual, talks about 'the dark night of the soul,' the obliteration of ego, that identity conditioned by the past to create the future.  And I suppose such a thing could happen to a barman, who's worked that room of people clinging to pleasure, not that that is all that it is, as sometimes it can be that real confiding place, an exchange.  Perhaps the dark night is a thing kept for people serious, focussed, about such things, students of that which is a deeper attempt to understand reality.

The only way for an artist to work, really, is to let go.  Release from effort, let it happen.  Occupy the present, free from ego, free from the past, free from the future.  Look at the bigger picture beyond the details.  He realizes it is not his by own effort.  He knows that it comes through doing nothing, like taking a nap, or meditating, stretching in a yoga pose, walking through the woods, unaware of how the mind is working until it speaks its formulation.

And in this seemingly 'idiotic' mode, it becomes obvious to him what everyone else is ignoring as they go about their business.  The process is magnified.  The more he stops to see, the more obvious it is the modes human thought falls into.  What the crowd ignores, passing by focussed on a duty, becomes what he sees, as if by physical law.  It's left up to him to see beyond the mind that puts what it sees in terms of dualities, good, bad, hot, cold, me, not me.  Maybe this is all he gets.  Maybe it seems of no practical use whatsoever.  Maybe he only can understand it to degrees.

Perhaps all he learns is that he must move away from all the distinctions and assumptions of the previously 'normal mode,' the constant mental activity of judgment.  This brings him, interestingly, the underpinnings of good mental health and decent realistic self-esteem.

Whereas before he worked at an art form searching through the past for meaning, noble as the effort might have been, nothing new came of it, nothing of any particular value other than 'a first novel,' an early work.

The ultimate point of his work taken as a whole went far beyond that as far as grappling with the reality of a human mind, the intake of sensory details, the attempt to make sense of input.  The early work was small detail work, the filagree for an apprentice to see if he had the patience.  Hopefully it would allow him the self-confidence to let the mature work happen, the saying of what one really had to say, that which he seemed to notice working in life.  The results of it fell within the natural parameter of a perennial philosophy, just as his father had wisely and presciently predicted.   The studied ironies of the past fell in to a studious effort that had worked itself through.

Trust the archaic mode of thought.  Trust the mind's inner workings.  Trust the meditation's wordless forays into the unconscious mind.  Trust the intuitions, and do a bit of recording them.

Recognize that having blood type O leads you to think in particular modes.

Compare that lone thinker to the power of mass media, the web, the widespread instantaneous exchange of whatever focus driven by itself and its own mindset.


Contrary to the thought that he was doing everything wrong, in great need of putting in more effort, more salesmanship, more industry, more PR, the better thought to follow was to follow instincts, to relax, to find natural footing.

To think that your life is nothing but bad choices is negative.  Put those choices in the context of blood type, type O, makes things a bit more comprehended, understandable.