Random rivers of the heart.
Heart-mind, chitta.
Is the Pali.
I hug the Pali, huggable Pali.
Category Archives: mind
My disciplined classmates. My oversight. My limited perspective.
There is no exploration—
sad tolerance well sad.
Everything is perfectly orderly
there is no unknown
there is no pressure
there is no relationship
all words for work
all winds blow from there to there
june 30, 2007
Calendar check 6:30.
Time check 1:30.
Skin check: itchy.
Wrist check: stiff.
Mind check: jittery.
Stomach check: jittery.
Throat check: thirsty.
Mouth check: worried about someone else’s leukemia.
Soul check: distant.
Pulse check: alive.
Poetry check: parallel universe.
Sky check: blue delightful.
Bird check: twittering and cheeping.
Smell check: corpse flowers.
Sound check: birds, flies buzzing, metallic clink, a flagpole, distant pounding, distant humming.
Air check: slightly breezy, warm.
Clink, clink clink.
Cars passing. Thump.
Cedrus Libani, Cedar of Lebanon.
Stone cairns.
Cedar needles.
Adirondack chairs.
Conversations hanging in the air.
Buzzing plane. Gardens.
Labor hanging in the air, remnants of sweat.
Dry tongue. Clink, clink.
Air belly, squirrel throat.
Darkness behind the eyes.
Mouth film.
Uneasy belly. Toast and jelly.
Uneasy eyes, ants and flies.
Uneasy legs, beans and eggs.
Uneasy hands, toast and jam.
Ordered poetry for the millennium. I am not a MicMac, not a Passamaquoddy, not a Pequot. Hanging conversations. I have made up my mind. Corpse flower, cedar needles. Aboriginal gardens. Poisons. Fatalities. Eco echoes.
Afternoon check: summer.
I see a caret, arrow, circumflex.
I see accents aigu and grave.
I see tomorrow but only in my mind.
I see the table and the paper.
I see vigor. I see sunlight.
Winy. Surrounded. No uppekha.
Mudita, Karuna, Metta,
the Heavenly Abodes.
I am sucked in
I gotta do some laundry
I can’t get a grip
Lisbon, Lisbon, Lisbon, Lisbon, Lisbon, Lisbon.
Find that wishing-wanting. Find that rooster Greed a’crowing.
Find aversion, Blair at High School Graduation in a thunderstorm,
dressed like hell, and making his first adult deposit into an account.
Amorous appellant.
Rebellious repellent.
Pillow Book, I want it.
Secrets in the teeny tiny.
there is a layer of judgment in the clouds
it’s atmospheric pressure there
thin band of cloud that blesses you
this is the way of cloud
This is me relaxing
this is me not liking what I’m writing
this is me still looking for the answer
this is me with a vestigial sense of boredom
this is me with mountains petals mountains petals mountains
this is something like a bag of petals paper catching petals
this is vision you are bequeathed a vision and you grasp it whether it is sandwich bags or earth house hold
this is your gift your vision
this is how we do it
how and how and how
I can smell my armpits very faintly
hemorrhoid and I miss California
there is a sensation of letting judgments drop away and no big deals
not trying to achieve you see this backlog boatload
reminiscent wish for Gertrude mind you wonder
no ambition
no clarity
or lack of clarity
there is the sweetest delicate salve
like flower scented
and it flows
it’s over all that
and the meaning—
—okay—relax the mind
these are my instructions to myself
Pace accelerated or slowed down, watching mind, allow for the irrational, allow for traveling socks, allow for hairdos, allow for walkie-talkies, long bones, commutes, the military. Allow for focus allow for data entry. Allow for exercise, clichés, and chatter of all kinds.
Wandering. Needing an infusion. Noting—or—composing. Note-compose, note and compose.
I make afternoons. It was way past afternoon.
I make logic. I make alphalogic, betalogic, gammalogic, deltalogic.
I would like to. I would not like to.
swimming about without a project
there is nothing I can do
no means no ends no optimistic no despair
and here a series of no’s
that anyone would call bad poetry
and in my hand, the summa critical
of everyone who thinks
or writes or speaks
just wanting nurture
happiness
Averse to morning happenings and hoverings
I will let you know my niche and you will visit
impressed by all my lone wolf contemplation
june 1, 2007 Moments 7 am
Easily impressed by nothing
this is not much of a morning
broken morning by a change in plans
change in routine
I am seeking if there is seeking
I am watching if there is watching
oh am I still and forever hunting there is no whatsoever
Resting consciousness and sparrow comes to visit. Sparrows are efficient. No timetables, no project plans.
Not concerned with what I used to be concerned with.
What about a CSP reunion? I am undecided, in a murky turmoil.
Feeling oversized, overwrought, overcome. Feeling feet in shoes. Feeling a non-yogic sluggishness, untoned qualities creeping in and the mind is coalescing.
I’m not sure what time it is. The anxiety of the future has me in its grip.
I am out of synch, off kilter.
There is some compression of the spine.
Dreaming of comfort, dreaming of collapse.
No dreams, not at this time, no.
Desire composes. Composing, composing. Greed, hatred, and delusion. Putting away desire and grief for the world. Burdens. Putting away the burdens. Freedom is tranquility but composing is not. Composing is agitation, discharge of mental electricity. Composing, composing. She is a random fragment.
may 15, 2007
Lost luxuries, lost goodbyes. Lost opportunity villages, lost forever. Lost and found. Once was lost. Now am found. Find a lot, lose a lot. Remember. The memory of forever. The memory of Rembrandt. The awfulness. The offing. The offertory. The the the How repetitive. Mind is cramped, contracted. How to land. Wanting to land on an object. Wanting to observe theory. Observe theory. Observing theory. Notheory. Nothery. Nothing.
The Amazon River. The big river, the small people. Adaptation.
may 14, 2007
Lost luxuries—lost luxuries of isolation, roaming, leaving home. All the diligence, the discipline it takes, the spending and the strengthening. Part of that muscle just wants to collapse. Oh wait, that’s not the muscle, that’s the mind. What is the ethical muscle?
Let us diagnose it. But there is no diagnosis. Off my high horse.
Let the wind blow me off my high horse
let the derogatory blow me into yesterditch
let the white appalling bloom in my backyard
let the Geshe undertake me
let the mercury be done and married
let the soon be sooner and the heart be hearty
hartfelt heart fool fool hearty—
where did I see that?
Mental flexibility—my mind is rigid as a jungle gym—I don’t let go, my wrists are taut and strained and stretched
wishing isn’t easy
something that I can’t resolve with mind
she clings to analysis—my savior
she clings to—something? harmony
she’s wondering about her clothes
What Fran did not remark upon—the line breaks, the line breaks are wicked and insidious in that “poem” and point to fractures—consciousness not flexible but fractured cracking as I struggle to shift and separate, adapt
I’m ready to go home
brief thoughts of sex—need for writing about sex—some struggle in the bedroom and some insight—my mother unable to find comfort unable to take refuge—what is my refuge? yes the moment’s smell and that sensation walking on this trail this step-by-step, yes, your shoulder and pow—the odors of your hair sensation pressing mouth into your shoulder upper arm, sensation from other parts of body sensation pleasure from the use of muscles in my limbs with a calibrated abandon—leading okay—leading out of mind—it is a kind of practice—the flexibility to change your frame of reference—to let the body lead (no breath awareness) but—this is something I have learned
See the margin where the lawngrass turns to weeds.
Deer in the weeds, robin on the lawn. Jill Chan. The extravagance of the mentally ill. An email—write to Ann. Some stillness in my face, my weary eyes. Persistent nagging from my taxes. Still, a stomachache. Desire for tea and toast. Bird shadow. Ear flick. Plastic bag.
Dirty wall in the ladies’ bathroom near the light switch. Childrens’ hands. Wondering if I should call my brother. Wondering too long is never good. Stomachache. The regular diary. The jotting. The tendency. Dependent origination. The chain. The wrangling. The striving and the letting go. The seeking a rhythm. Child’s voice behind me. Heater ticking. Draft consistent. Periodically there is a sound of wind.
april 14, 2007
Just three pages, all boiled down to just three pages. My granola stomachache, the dryness in my nose and mouth. Heater ticking next to me, cold air drafting from behind my shoulder. Grayness out the window, brownness out the window, sign saying “wetland preserve” names that small anonymous swampy spot. My relationship with suffering is changing, trying to change. Or is this all in my head anyway?
Soft—softness of her terms. The soundness of her structure. Building system like a structure of spun sugar, stained with drops of food coloring. Where do you want to work? On the page, on the screen? at some point, I let go of all that effort. That did fall away like husks. I envy Mister You, at his desk just prior to dawn, staring out the window at the frozen lawn, no meadow. Cardinals and bluebirds. Resistant to maternal comments, on the —Robins or the —Peepers. Like a metronome each spring drawing your attention. And yet I have to trace my way through boredom, I have to throw my mind a bone to chew on and make Money. It’s awfully hard to retain my concentration on this thin high music as though here I was up in the mountains in my hut.
Chocolates for Sam on Valentine’s Day. Nantucket chocolates. Makes me very happy.
Going back to yoga.
Going home to order books.
Maybe exercise. Maybe write to CJ.
Asking, vague desire to ask for something.
Desire to buy books, Dogen & Desnos.
At the next table, the woman drones into her cell phone in a monotone. Sad face and sad words. Manicure. Hairstyle. Family. You know, what am I getting in return? Nothing, absolutely nothing. And maybe expecting something is my problem. I just thought things were going to be a lot different. … skiing with Megan…
Vague wish to go skiing.
Dogen and Desnos are in my sights right now. Even so, not so hard to find.
Rusty rusty mind.
My arm’s whine affecting my mind, a slight nausea of thinking—or maybe that’s the holiday?
november 11
Jumpy. Jumpy. Leaf blowers until I can’t hear myself think. Renegotiating everything. What about a month of fragments? What about a month of Sundays? What about doing some hard laundry? What about turn off the critical frame of mind?
Not necessary.