THE GHOST PARAGRAPH AND THE CIRCLE

sofia and cat toy

 

This the final day of Thanksgiving weekend, a thankful attitude has been with me for four days, looking at the world that is my life, noting gratitude unto overwhelmed. It is seeing in a new light, though not altogether new, in a light that has joy in it. I look out the window, see Jenny eating Jack's grain and laugh within. A few minutes ago Jack was standing at his grain pile eating, Jenny standing behind him after she'd finished her grain, like waiting in line. She eats faster than Jack. She will eat three carrots while he eats one. Jack was aware she was standing behind him and knew what came next. He could have easily popped her on the chin and chose not to. She was anxious, shifting her weight on her feet, watching Jack. After waiting long enough she walked around to Jack's right side, nonchalantly turned her rear end to him and stepped backwards, placing her back knees under his belly threatening. He stepped aside and let her have the last of his grain. She could not have taken his grain soon after I poured it without a fight.

 

 

 

The first day of thinking about thankfulness because we're s'posed-to was Thanksgiving day. Tapped into facebook, it's impossible not to think about it. First thing I came up with was just about everything. I woke from a nap a little bit ago, during which I composed in a dream the first paragraph for a subject I thought I'd write about today. It happened in half dream state and half slightly awake, though the awareness of being awake may have been part of the dream. I wrote it out, sentence by sentence, thinking I'll get up and write down this paragraph composed in sleep. Waking, I sat up on the side of the bed, slipped feet into shoes, Sophia jumped onto my lap. I looked at the dream for the paragraph and the first sentence was gone, then it was all gone, then I forgot what it was about. In subconscious mind, while writing the paragraph, it came to me I am grateful for each one, individually, of my readers. The reader completes the circle of the writing, like a band and the audience. One needs the other to complete the circle.

 

 

 

I'm especially grateful for the people I've met through the writing, the Daily Creative Practitioners among them. This is the best part of every day for me. I enjoy writing to you more than watching a good movie, even. Some years ago, I wrote a weekly column for the local paper. In conversation with the editor one day I mentioned that the time of writing was my favorite time of the week. He said, Really? I said, Yeah. He said, You need a life. I heard his remark as the stupidest assessment I'd ever been offered about myself. He had a passion for changing my punctuation. One day I told him I'd like him to stop messing up my punctuation. He said, What? I told him it changes the meaning and the rhythm when he changes a comma to a period. He said, The rhythm? You're strange. I couldn't hold back. I said, Remember this: I am the strangest individual you will ever meet in  your life. I felt it a safe prophecy as he had the most limited mind of anyone I know.

 

 

 

I especially like about writing in a blog the absence of an editor. Everyone I have talked with who wrote a newspaper column for a period of time said they left it over an impossible editor who could not refrain from making disruptive changes. I left after being censored the third time. I was told at the beginning my column is in my name, independent of the paper. That didn't last long. The final one was in the time of Abu Ghraib prison torture in the headlines and photographs of Geneva Convention atrocities. I was saying this is an embarrassment to all that America stands for around the globe. He said, We are not a political paper. I said, This is not politics; it's history. He said, We can't run it without changes. I said, Then you'll not run it. He said, What should I put in its place? I said, I don't care; you're the editor, figure it out. I wrote a farewell piece to my readers for the following week and was done with it. Five years was enough. Time to pass it on to somebody else. Writing daily is fulfilling. Not in a big external way like appearing on the Ellen DeGeneres show, but in a big way within. I use it as a psychoanalyst's couch, to see more clearly.

 

 

photos by tj worthington

 

 

 

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THE PROCESS

selfie of the artist hard at it

This week, Christine in the Daily Creative Practice put up a question of process, how the artist works. My art form in this time is writing daily. Art, for me, is not about money, so it doesn't matter what form I choose. I wanted to write every day, but knew if I started a journal it wouldn't last more than a few days; from there on it would be notes, then nothing. That's how I journal. I was talking with a friend about wanting to write every day, but had not found a way to make myself do it, especially against my will. She suggested a blog. I said, What's a blog? It was something her daughter told her about. She gave me the site, BlogSpot.com., I thought about it a day and night, set up a blog and started. The point of putting it online was to give self a guideline to follow. I was thinking if I make it public, I'll have to keep it up. It started with one to three viewers five years ago. Yesterday, Waterfall Road had 233 views. 102 of them were USA, 26 Russia, 18 Poland, 17 Germany, 14 France, 10 UK, 7 Netherlands, 4 Canada, 2 Pakistan, and a long string of twos and ones. Every day the numbers are different. In one day last year over 500 from Latvia. I have no idea who is reading them, except for comments on facebook, or even if anyone finishes a reading. I don't even know how accurate these numbers are. Russia has been the number two readership for over a year. One time, Russian viewers outnumbered American. American exchange students? English language students? I love it that my readers span the globe. I sometimes laugh from thinking that if I'd spent this writing time putting together a long novel, it would not have near the readers the blog has. And counting readers is not my purpose. My purpose is to write every day something perhaps worth reading. This is the only purpose. It is good geography for me too. I've learned of four countries I'd never heard of. I love writing to international readers, though in the writing the only thing it tells me is to write with clarity. I consider that possibly half the people reading my writings are practicing their second language. This present entry is number 1,511. If I'd set out with this number as a goal, I could not have made it for the weight of so many.

the cubicle

the picture beside laptop is ralph stanley

I need silence for writing. Cannot listen to any kind of music, certainly not Prince, who puts me on my feet and takes my mind over completely. Music has a way of pulling me into it, from Philip Glass to Doc Watson. Instrumental music demands my attention the same as words. The only kind of background music that does not take me over would be New Age. It does take me over in that it repulses me so much I have to turn it off. My friends Lucas and Judy listen to almost every kind of music there is. Like mine, their collection spans almost the entire spectrum. I wondered while their girl Meredith was growing up how she could rebel musically in her mid teens. She found the needle in the haystack, or the plane in the Indian Ocean, Enya. Lucas hated Enya. I thought that was genius of Meredith to find the one thing her dad could not handle, like my parents with Little Richard. They only liked big band music, so I had a world of music to rebel with. Anything, even polka. In short, I cannot listen to music while I write or paint. I have to sit and listen to music like I watch a movie. To listen to YoYo Ma's album, SILK ROAD, I need to be in place, cat on lap, and listen. There is really nothing I like for background music. In the silence now, I hear the battery-operated clock on the wall, toc, toc, toc. I stack rocks in different arrangements on a small pedestal while searching between sentences. Out one window I watch the donkeys graze in the meadow. Out two other windows I see  snowbirds, chickadees, towhees, cardinals, doves, chipmunks and squirrels picking up snacks in and around the birdfeeders. I throw seed on the ground too, to keep the squirrels from dominating the feeders. I don't mind squirrels eating here. I think it a communal feeding station for anybody who wants it, my neighbors. It's the same squirrels every day. Four gray squirrels from the woods across the road, and four red squirrels from the pines around the house. I stare at pictures on the walls between sentences, drink coffee or hot tea, and sometimes smoke cigarettes, maybe a fourth of the time. I already know it's not cool. Judge me uncool, but leave me alone about it. I don't aim to give up smoking, so I smoke every once in awhile instead of all the time. Same with liquor, I don't want to quit, so I drink in moderation.

the environment

I sometimes have a dram to sip on while writing, but mostly not. It costs too much to do it all the time. I saw a quotation attributed to Hemingway, Write drunk, edit sober. I don't write drunk, but the idea appeals to me. I have done it and found it doesn't do anything for the writing to the good or ill. I have no mojo I put myself through, no fetish, no special outfit, no rituals, not even meditation or prayer. Time of day does not matter. My preference is to write in the night between midnight and five. It is in the late-nite hours I dive deepest within. That's where I like best to go. This is journaling for me, so I want to go the deepest I can reach and still have air to return to the surface. These daily entries have become the only part of the day I really care about. It takes four to six hours to write one. It sometimes takes around an hour to assemble the pictures and place them. A lot of time is spent gazing out the windows. I leave mind blank looking out the windows, seldom thinking about what I'm looking at. It makes me smile to see the donkeys and the squirrels. Yesterday I wrote first half in the morning and second half in the evening. Preferring to write them straight through, I have no problem with writing a paragraph at a time. Writer's block has not been a problem, because I don't take the writing seriously. When my head is blank and I can't think of anything, I start here, now, most often the weather. Anything my attention settles on will be good enough to open with. I recall a time a couple years ago my mind was blank and could not find even a first sentence. All it takes is one. I told self, I don't care what it is, next thought in my head is the first sentence. Sarah Palin entered mind. I said, No. Said no again and it hit, I don't have to write the whole thing about her, just the first sentence. And did. Choked down writing her name (one more step in making stupid people famous) and steered away from her quick as if she'd stepped out in front of me on the highway, segued into a new subject and it flowed.

rock stack

As for time of day, sometimes I get up in the morning, feed the stock, pour the coffee and am ready to jump in and swim. It turns out to be evening I write the most, between 8 and 2. Middle of the night messes me up with the donkeys and birds for sleeping til 11 or 12. I have found that I write the best so tired I can't sit up straight, when forehead leans downward onto keyboard, makes a long line of k's and I don't even know it's happening. The sentences arrive with great distances between them in time. I feel like I'm walking through mud up to the knees. Every step is a major effort that takes all I've got, the mental place of the physical place where Himalayan climbers pace themselves, resting between each step, thin air, so tired it would be a blessing to die. They love that physical place and I love the mental place. I close my eyes and my head drifts downward. I search the void for the next sentence and wait. It arrives, I enter it on the keyboard and wait some more for the next sentence. I say to self, just fold up the computer and go to bed. No, not done yet. The times this has happened, I dive into the bed immediately after the last period. No proof-reading. Don't even turn the computer off. I wake in the morning, or afternoon, not even wanting to look at it. I wait a long time to take a look, distracting self with clips from Jon Stewart and Bill Maher shows, looking at cartoons on facebook, thinking I probably ought to delete every pixel of the writing without even looking at it. I'd be ashamed to see it. Eventually I get there and every time am awed by what I saw written, came out of reading each one, maybe twenty over five years, in a mild shock, saying, "Damn (2 syllables). That was pretty good," impressed I'd written so to my own satisfaction. Like, where'd that come from? Recalling lines from a poem by Kabir, or another of the Persian poets, "Dive deep, O mind, dive deep in the ocean of God's beauty. If you dive to the uttermost depths, there you will find the gem of love." I feel like my experience is a lesser version of same process. He's talking about enlightenment. I'm talking about finding the next sentence. The most important, in conclusion, is allowing self the freedom not to write when I really don't feel like it. I skip about one day a week, due largely to events taking up the day. I call it a day of rest, battery charging time.

 

how much is the donkey in the window

 

 

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MEMORY TREE: THE PAST IN NOW

cleve gray, zen gardens 20

 

I'm thinking this morning of my friend Jr Maxwell, one of the people I have known who kept his mind out of the past. He said the past is over and gone, nothing can be done to change it. The past is nothing. He did not learn this from reading philosophy. I believe he came to it because his past held several deep sorrows, each one the kind that would put a rhino on its knees. For five years he told me the story of his life, actually dwelling in the past remembering the experiences, the people he knew, relationships. In his mind he was a fool. He could make an impenetrable case for himself a fool. He said he looked up to everybody. He had a fast, retentive mind, and worked mostly alone during the days, driving a tractor or a bulldozer, working cattle, working a sawmill, working on tractor motors, welding. Often there was somebody with him, like sawmilling where he had an "off-bearer" working with him. Sawmill work requires concentration and makes noise, a straight-8 Buick motor without a muffler plus the scream of the big steel blade eating its course through the wood. Working with that much focus, you're working alone. Same in welding. Other people may be around, but welding is a solitary act. He was also gregarious; he needed people around him when he was not working in solitude. He genuinely liked other people, and had solitude in a good balance.

japanese screen

He had so much sorrow in his past, none of it self-made, I wondered if he had trained himself not to dwell on the past to keep a smile on his face. Patience, he said, was number one. Patience takes care of everything. It went against his belief about the past to tell me his life over his last years with mind intact, but I was so eager to hear his life that my undivided attention encouraged him. He never told me the same experience twice. My feeling about Jr is that he came into this lifetime an advanced soul already knowing these things, finding them again as experience activated them. I felt like he chose the fast track of spiritual development in this lifetime, the path of suffering. How he suffered! And kept his nose above water through it all. He was baptized at age 11 and eventually stopped going to church. For one thing, he came to a place where he knew not to take preachers seriously. He knew them too well as individual men and did not take to false piety. Calling piety false is actually redundant. Piety itself is a word for false, except for the people who believe nose-in-the-air a correct display for whatever the need to affect a superior pose. One of the best I've heard is, "I write for myself." I bend over laughing when I hear that one. Jr kept his mind out of the past while he was not remembering experiences to tell a drinking buddy over white liquor so good that no bonded liquor could match it. I think of him the wise fool. What else could a man of wisdom be in this world but a fool?

moonshine

 

I've come to a place with my own mind that the past has become like a gigantic vat of red jell-0 (zero nutritional value) with chunks of fruit cocktail floating in it like primitive wasps in amber, but thicker. I can find a kind of psychological order running through the past, how one experience leads to the next. I find when I think about the past or tell something from the past, it has to be apparently random, like a leaf falling from a tree, one at a time, no given order to predict which one will fall next, though it predictable that one will indeed fall next. This is how I write these daily musings. I follow a method learned from an old Regular Baptist preacher who told me how a preacher approached the pulpit in the old time way. He had no subject in mind, no purpose in mind. He starts talking and when the spirit hits, he lets go and allows the spirit to flow through, using his voice. The preachers in the old way called themselves "vessels" for the spirit to speak through. A vessel I think of something like a boat. An iced-tea pitcher is a vessel. Both are empty without cargo in one case, iced-tea in the other. A shipping vessel carries cargo from one shore to another. A pitcher vessel pours out what was poured into it. Either way, the preachers were vessels of the Holy Spirit, themselves empty in the mind to allow the flow. I don't claim access to the Holy Spirit and I'm not about sermons or missionarizing. Sometimes, in fact, I anti-sermonize to stop myself from going there. And maybe sometimes I do go there. So what. Though I see myself an anti-alarmist, I am quite susceptible to alarm, like when a bolt of lightning hits a tree next to the house it gives me shivers for a long time.

magritte, the return, 1940

I cannot claim legitimately that I am channeling, because I am not. I'm channeling my own thoughts and memories from my mind somehow, but I can't claim any galactic entity from outside myself. I can legitimately claim I'm inspired by the spirit of life. That spirit, to me, is God. I can claim channeling God only in that way, not like taking dictation. Writing anything amounts to activating the spirit of life. Maybe that's what I've come to like so much about it. Swimming slowly through the red jell-0 assessing all the chunks of fruit cocktail, deciding which one to pick to nibble on next. Only this fruit cocktail isn't all sugary. It has jalapeños in it too, pickled okra, Hershey's kisses, and surprises. A beautiful dove walking just outside the window in its spring plumage smooth as skin, the same color as the ground, head bobbing with each footstep. I feel like I can say rationally that I channel no more than my own mind. Maybe every once in awhile something drops in from my own higher self. Some people call that the Holy Spirit or God, but I don't. Maybe "God" speaks through some people, but I'm not one of them. My understanding of God is more as the spirit of life than any other way I could put it, consciousness. Consciousness without thought as we know thought. The act of fingers dancing on the keyboard is expression of the spirit of life, too, through physical form. Thought is a form too. God has no form.

japanese screen

At the same time, on the other hand, all forms are expressions of God, like the bluejay hopping from one rhododendron branch to another, flying to the birdfeeder and back to the rhododendron branch to hold the seed with a foot and peck the shell. For me, that image is essence of spirit of life. It's in the same manner I call my inspiration the spirit of life. The soul, a drop of the ocean that is God, is the spirit of life that animates the physical form I call me and mine. A leaf may fall from my higher self into my writing mind, but I can't say I recognize it if it does happen. I can't say that I have any original ideas. I've picked up a lot from reading and from knowing a wide variety of people. My time on earth is characterized by learning. I couldn't footnote most of what I've dumped into my experience facility, so I let it flow. It's like a blender where I take in bits of information by reading, by talking with people, first and second hand sources, experiences. It is a matter of  blending almost three quarters of a century of experience mixed with false memory I'm no more aware of than of input from higher self. I like to think of all of it as the spirit of life and not worry about guilt, oughta, duty, fear of hell, piety, learning Bible verses, none of it. If anything does come through from the higher self, it's in one of the yellow chunks of fruit cocktail floating in red jell-0, a portion of the whole.   

andy goldsworthy

 

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