Keeping it together, to dream happy

Good feelings drift out there, under the waves, along those long country roads, in the soothing tones of friends voices. Harvesting growth and simple joys I listen to the spin of tires, songs of birds and crickets, sounds of the woods at night. The pains of mind and body make their endless circuit around me, coming and going, and looming large then small in comparison. Sleep blesses me with happy dreams sometimes, challenges me with stressful nightmares others. I just went from The Grapes of Wrath into Tobacco Road. The book's not as funny as the movie, but it helps the time pass in an oddly uplifting way.

Been seeing my kids three times/week for awhile now. I would like to spend vastly more time than that ~10-hours or less with them, but it appears that for awhile I will see them even less. Life passes both quickly and slowly, but our visits end too soon. I see that they will join me ever again as long as I maintain my health and wits and life energy. That means working, excercising, sleeping, meditating, and eating with as much vim as I can muster. All those things are precious, and help me remain present for the next time with my darlings, not just my kids but all the wonderful people in my circle of love.

Joy May Come, In Time

peaceful vibrations. listening to the birds chirp, digesting breakfast, working. curled leaf tea tasty. leap to meditation whenever fear grows, even before(difficult). Spirit glows inside us, and through our friends & nature. let bitter feelings free up, they upset our balance. joy may come in time

Feel better all ready

Summer breezes sometimes blow cold
Across the bay with pastimes grown joyless
But whip them in the eyes I must
To feel them surge warm and thrill once more

The rising sun and Jimi Hendrix
Losing traction on the curves
Forgetting self on carnival rides
Hypnotized by the abyss

The subtle joy of pain every true skateboarder bemuses
Has taken flight across unskateble cobbles, to werewolf moors
Self absorption steals the joy, lends power to death, fear to life
But the moving love that keeps me free is on the move again

To spin, to dance, to fly & sing
Meditation, music making, progressing across watery bodies
Sensing seasons, ignoring reasons, howling at the moon
Crying with the stars, trees grow with me, coat my car in sap

Dharma Bummin' Hard

The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
I thought that I read this whole book long ago, but it turned out that I had read all but the last 20-pages or so, which were stunning and grand. The whole book seemed to be about me and a certain set of my friends at a certain time in our lives, which I think is part of it's genius. It helped that I knew most of the places he wrote about, made me have goosebumps more than once.



"During the night I had a vivid dream, one of the most distinct dreams I ever had, I clearly saw a crowded dirty smoky..."



From the mountain climbing to the hitchhiking to the suicides & orgies, Kerouac paints complex pictures of their idyllic lives that cyclically became painful. I like the way he tries to extricate himself from pursuing sex, and warmth, the whole time feeling a nagging desire for a little smooch in a heated bungalow, classic theme.



What I liked the most though, were the demonstrations of manifestation. Kerouac hears about stuff, gets excited, and is able to make or let the stuff happen, with a little help from his friends & family. Sometimes it's little stuff like food & booze & transportation, while other times it's life itself, fulfillment & bliss & loving friendship.



One night in a meditation vision Avalokitesvara the Hearer and Answerer of Prayer said to me "You are empowered to remind people that they are utterly free" so I laid my hand on myself to remind myself first and then felt gay, yelled "Ta," opened my eyes, and a shooting star shot.


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I Feel Numb

"The numbness started in her fingertips. She felt it flow up through her hands, into her wrists and on along her arms to her shoulders and through her shoulders to her heart and up her neck to her head. She was a numbness, a thing of nettles and ice and prickles and a hollow thundering nothingness. Her lips were dry petals, her eyelids were a thousand times heavier than iron, and each part of her body was now iron and lead and copper and platinum. Her body weighed ten tons, each part of it was so incredibly heavy, and, in that heaviness, crushed and beating to survive, was her crippled heart, throbbing and tearing about like a headless chicken. And buried in the limestone and steel of her robot body was her terror and crying out, walled in, with someone tapping the trowel on the exterior wall, the job finished, and, ironically, it was her own hand she saw before her that had wielded the trowel, set the final brick in place, frothed on the thick slush of mortar and pushed everything into a tightness and self-finished prison." --from Ray Bradbury's short story Interval in Sunlight, published in his Long After Midnight collection.

Almost out of the October Country, for better or for worse. It's been an amazing month. Hard to believe how much got packed into it, but now, like the girl in the story, I feel numb, and more than a little trapped. Just my subconcious telling me get more exercise and meditate deeper, because when push comes to shove, I am as free as the wind, and can send the numbness away at will.

Know Her Quiet Love

Racing round & round the hills & valleys of these beautiful Bay Area counties I have gradually come to realize that, deep within, my true search is always & only for the Goddess. She etches figure eights around Twin Peaks, ambles enlessly around the peaks of Mount Diablo, sits in silent meditation on lonely beaches from Alameda to Tennessee Valley, suns herself by the shores of Lake Merrit, whispers through my open windows, lays waste to ego & self-consciousness when the inevitable tears of joy storm from my eyes. When I find her I receive whatever gifts she bestows with loving reverence & grace, and request nothing more for all eternity except to know her quiet love.

"…I waited on a bench for my next bus trying to sleep on my arms on my rucksack but kept waking up to see the pale ghosts of American bus stations wandering around: in fact one woman streamed by like a wisp of smoke, I was definitely certain she didn't exist for sure. On her face the phantasmal belief in what she was doing...on my face, for that matter, too." --from Kerouac's The Dharma Bums

Downieville 2008, Brakes-Free

Downieville, and all the trails that lead to it, exert a force on me and all that know about the magic in the rocks & roots. So tall you can't ride over it, so wide you can't ride around it, it will eat your bicycle along with your body & soul; it ate mine. I write now as a shell of a human, the real me endlessly looping those trails, swimming those lakes & creeks, falling rain on mossy rocks, that's me, sunshine leaping across distant peaks.

I arrived in town late last Saturday, after the last shuttle for the day had left, so against the setting sun I raced for Packer Saddle along Fire Road 93 up from Union Flat campground on Highway 49. No matter how hard I raced though, the sun set too fast and I could not lose an ever-growing highly infuriating cloud of gnats. The daylight factor meant that, after climbing from 2,835' to 6,719' I had to ride down the dark fire road instead of bombing the blessed single-tracks. That route presented itself as the only non-suicidal option available given the lights I had with me. It was a long, cold, stressful descent marked by one true fall and one quick unintentional dismount. You see, I could only see the drop-off edge of the trail with my teeny-tiny light, and that only intermittently. The miles past slowly, and I cursed my over-eagerness to just ride rather than pay attention to small details like night and day, warm and cold. I wore only a short-sleeved jersey with no under-shirt, brought no jacket with me, and ran out of food. The running out of food part was particularly smart, since that left me to dine on a tin of mango-flavored Altoid sours and a sack of low-sodium sunflower seeds, in the shell after I rolled into town at 9:45PM, drove 5-miles to my campground, and set up my tent. I awoke to a sore stomach, but happy to know that I had a reservation on the 10:30 AM shuttle to Packer Saddle (7,200'). The thought that I should have my brakes checked/adjusted crossed my mind a couple of times, but 10:30 arrived in no time, so up I went. My rear brakes went out on Sunrise Trail, the first 1/2-mile stretch of single track. I spent awhile trying to fix them, but ended up stripping the little bolt/nut that holds the cable in place, so that was done. Did not take long to decide to limp down with only my lovely 8" front rotor helping me control my velocity on these near-vertical piles of loose baby-head sized cobbles that pass for trails here. The front brake did wonderfully for a few miles, and then I had wee crash that ended up hosing my front brakes completely. I worked on them for some time before sitting down to whimper and snivel, realizing that, with more than 3,000' of wickedly technical trail left to descend, my vehicle could only be ridden by a madman, so I laughed at the water in the corners of my eyes, said hello to the tree friends gathered all around, told my racing heart to calm down, and hopped on my fast fast bicycle. I had already navigated all of Big Boulder Trail at that point, which is the longest way down the mountain from Packer Saddle, and so was near the top of Third Divide. I had to call on my ancient experience as a pre-teen, riding BMX bikes with no brakes - you just stand on the rear wheel with your right foot. Three problems with that: 1) the rear suspension allowed my extremely sharp seat post to gouge my ankle if I bounced my ass on the seat at all, which happened a lot, 2) if you don't pay attention to your left foot, and just let it rest at the bottom of it's range it hits rocks & roots that cause your left ankle to bang your frame (ouch), so you must ride with your foot & pedal half-way up a good part of the time, 3) a rear brake alone is not sufficient to control your speed on the steep parts, so you must be ready to bail off at any time. The ride harrowed me, hurt me, taught me lessons about many things far beyond bicycle mechanics and innovative trail riding methods. It convinced me that these brakes are history; time to move on to hydraulic disc brakes from mechanical disc brakes, seriously. They're Laurent's anyway, long-term loaned to me when he & Quintan built this bike up for me a few year ago.

Pain and cold and hassles aside, Downieville still loves me. When I fall and those big fir roots and stout granite rocks reach up and pound the blood out me, it's with such deep love that I don't even mind it a bit. It's like the mountain she's massaging me, in a very rough way. I could be happy forever with her. The trails demand such utter and devoted attention to avoid death or dismemberment that riding them becomes a meditation, an inevitable concentration spurning speech without action in rocky red dust. Age, gender, & race lose meaning rapidly, along with all those other labels that once defined me, confining boxes that never met Saddleback Mountain, or felt the Milky Way grind their bones to gleaming white, the better to dance you with.

Iron Goddess

Claudia gave me the figurine on the left for my birthday, and a coworker gave me the box of tea on the right because she knows I'm a tea junkie, and it was just moldering away on her shelf anyway. Introduction to the Iron Goddess goes on, one leg tucked in to represent constant meditation, and the other ready to launch the body into action to help those in need. A female representation of Buddha. The tea (Ti Kwan Yin) drank down real delicious and invigorating too, superfine. These forms have drawn me to them, inspired heartfelt peace and aspirations of growth. I like the story of Buddha where she lets ants build a hill on her as she meditates. Life force control, it's the shiznits.

Another storm on the way. It kneads me and needs me. Just a few blue patches left in a darkening sky, no turning back, nothing to say or do (other than drag all my crap getting ruined in the rain into the garage).