Letter to David - Running and Meditating in a Lockdown

Dear David,

So far the running is going as planned - .5, off day, then the consecutive streak is 1.25, 1.6, 2, 2, and today 2.25 in a spring chilled morning mist with gray and white skies. I have upped the meditation sessions to 30 minutes upon waking, 40 minutes upon returning from the running workout (after a shower), then an evening session of 30 minutes followed by listening to music while in meditation posture. This is a new routine for me, and I think it is a good one, one of the best I have followed in a long time, actually. I have managed to eradicate less meaningful habits and routines, and the progress with the meditation is producing favorable results. Mind is slowly becoming quiet, body is adjusting with sitting becoming ever more comfortable.  When sitting I try not to expect any kind of happening, just to see how it goes, some sessions are more peaceful than others. This morning was excellent and calm, the afternoon session just completed not so much due to the mind wondering about financial changes caused by the lockdown. If I can continue with 3 sessions per day until the lockdown ends peace and calm will possibly be lingering inside of me.

Letter to David - Bring the Mind Home

Dear David,

I am blessed to receive your music, once again filling in the hours and days with sweet and sad melodies. The first string notes have a John Fahey quality which brought me back into the past, 1990, spring, driving around the suburbs in an old silver car looking for a job and one class short of graduation. One morning I felt especially up against the impossible odds of trying to patch together a life in the universe, a beautiful day, sun out sky bright blue, no white skies then, I felt I should be out wandering in the woods, instead logic and practicality insisted that the best way to move forward was to sign away my time in exchange for money. Only job I had experience in was warehouse work, so I knew I was going to be shutting myself inside a damp dark building for the best days of the coming year. I think I realized even then that free will has its limitations, I knew I was free to drive my car down the road and in two days be in Yosemite or somewhere on the west coast, but that plan was not the right one because it would cause too much disturbance to the universe, the better way was to work with karma and later I discovered that through perseverance and concentration one gets everything desired through a slow process that somehow bends reality, just an inch or two left or right of center. The harder part of life is in the waiting for those few inches to move, it can take years depending on how stubborn and large the mountain is, and if one wavers before the movement then it never comes and one is left bewildered and wondering where all the time went. So I park the car in a grocery parking lot, walk into the store and buy a paper, and emerge into the bright squinty light with a heavy heart and back in the car I slip in a mix tape of Fahey songs and this one plays -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dZZVFUqA1I

I felt immediate fortification and pleasure, a real godsend. Strange, isn't it, what sustains us, for some it's the safety and security of family and career, or perhaps life is so terrifying that once any kind of shelter is found it is never abandoned, and this I believe is called a closed mind, and for myself stability lay in beauty, of the earth, people, animals, trees, clouds, blue sky and lake, forests and fields, and just as important, the beauty created by artists - paintings, music, photographs, poems, novels. I drove off in search of a warehouse in Bensenville, Fahey and his guitar filling my heart with strength and joy, and somehow that forlorn day turned out to be special because the universe it seems is compelled to keep unique and unusual combinations, in this case the mixture of despair, beauty, hopelessness, and faith. And isn't it also interesting how music is stored in the mind, it seems to not have its own place to stay, but instead is lumped in with whatever else is going on in one's life at the moment one listens, so now whenever I hear When The Springtime Comes Again I am transported back to the grocery store parking lot reading the want ads.

This morning looked to be promising with the white sky giving way and allowing blue and golden light to mix with the earth elements, and when I reached the lake I felt the exhilarating urge to run (!), and not having run in 4 months, I was reminded of my times in Chiang Mai in 2012 and 2018/19, when I began running in the hot weather after not having run for months. I ran 1/2 mile and walked the rest of the way, but just that little bit made me feel high and happy, which almost seems a crime with the current world circumstances. When I reached Lake Shore Park I decided to look into the little free library box and with 20 books to choose from my intuition told me to take Peace of Mind by Thich Nhat Hanh. Next to the library box is a unique hand carved tree bench and I lay on it with my feet up on the railing and read "As you breathe in, you can connect with your body. Bring your mind home to your body and remember that you have a body." I smiled, laughed out loud because the universe loves finding order in the chaos, for earlier in the day I sat meditating, gazing at the white stone elephant with a note taped to its trunk, three ideas written out by hand, which currently are the main focus of my existence :

- Bring the Mind Home

- and Release

- and Relax

You tell me, isn't the universe confirming the correctness of this particular life choice of mine, saying to me through the random finding of the book "Keep at it, Bring the Mind Home!" 

Letter to David - The Faraway Loneliness of God

Dear David,

Just now returning from an evening walk, the air not too cold and the colors of the blue white sky giving the lake a glowing calm. Stopping to skip stones at Oak St Beach and then striding the jetty until the chess pavilion reminds me of a hot summer morning in the 90's and we battled our guts out while slamming a green fuzz ball and then back at your home you treated me to a Knudson's spritzer, flavor red, and we sipped on your porch, and God bless youth, we found more energy to run and bike to the lake, I was loping down the street with you at my side both of us weaving in the traffic with the sun rising and getting hot and we didn't care we were flying!! And then we reached the lake and I thought why not let's keep going and we cruised south all the way to the chess pavilion and we stopped like it was nothing being young then I hope we had the sense to realize the greatness of the day and I think we/I do/did because 25 years later I am thinking about it and savoring it like a raga in nocturne mood. And then turning into the park and going back south along Rush St the faded lights of a downing sun mellowing the usual city glare and now everything is soft and this special light brings me back into my past and I watch my nine year old self wandering in a field with five friends and we are walking talking balls of energy and one of the boys gets a little too far ahead and one of the other boys turns to the four of us and motions to scatter and we all see and understand the beauty of the game, where the sorry boy who gets left behind has the exhilarating thrill of surprise to find a once bustling field of action has changed into a silent church of one and even the birds have fled and a pure thrilling abandonment descends upon everything and for one brief moment he feels in his bones the faraway loneliness of God. And now I'm walking beside the Museum of Modern Art, the streets abandoned, feeling a certain shame creeping in, as if the whole gang has fled and to my great surprise I look around and see nothing but deep feelings of a cold quiet. I slept long the night before, with dreams no more far fetched than the present real moment, where it seems to be folding in on itself like an out of tune accordion and all I know is fading fast the empty buildings pass like corpses stood on end all the spirit gone I'm the last man standing at Columbus and Wacker and that isn't saying much.

Letter to David - Lockdown

Dear David,

Hope all is well with you and your family. The virus lock down reminds me a bit of Camus' The Plague, with the exception that people are not dying in large numbers and not in such a gruesome way as plague death. As for myself, I mentioned I was "off-grid" in a recent letter, that refers to being psychologically off-grid, which I believe is positive in times of societal unrest and impending confusion and possible disaster. The first step in going off-grid was to stop watching television in 1987, followed soon after by not reading newspapers or magazines. When the internet came around I decided I could carefully pick and choose news stories to bypass obvious propaganda so I began to read news again via AP/Reuters. I also was able to view more films because when I have the option to choose what I want to watch (unlike television, which is  a handful of channels all based on the same propagandist themes) it becomes easier to pick the wheat from the chaff. Having a mind which has had low propaganda contact for the past 3 decades takes one off-grid culturally, and in a risky time such as this virus lock down it probably gives me a rather unusual perspective from which to watch it unfold. Even though a lock down is in place, I believe walking is still allowed, so my normal daily routine of meditation, walking, reading, art study, and eating, will not be affected other than having to search for toilet paper and soap on occasion.

Letter to David - Random Pleasure/Random Pain

Dear David,

A few days ago a new insight arrived during my zoo walk. I realized, based on another recent insight about my self being nothing but the accumulation of past moments and the storage of these moments for future reference, that if I experience a great amount of pleasure, more than is normal, the longer this pleasure experience lasts, the more it will be stored inside my past, and when the pleasure is finally reduced, or, worse, taken away completely without any way of recovery (such as death of a loved one), the severity and duration of pain which will arise due to the loss of this pleasure will be dependent upon the intensity and longevity of the pleasure. I then began to think of what the great pleasures are in life, according to my own experiences, and they are, in order - 1) sex/love with a female 2) physical movement (running/walking, etc)  3) food  4) reading philosophy/history/religion/psychology/literature 5) the creation and contemplation of beauty and art  6) the spiritual path/meditation.

Being nothing but a collection of past moments, I called upon as many as I could and saw that the more I loved a female, the more pain I was going to feel when the female was no longer a part of my life. The intensity of pleasure and pain was of such strength that while in the presence of the female I could lose job, be robbed of my savings, get randomly beaten during a walk, and still have enough pleasure in my heart that these things would do little to erode my confidence in myself and life. However, when the female becomes permanently absent the hole in the heart becomes so prominent that no other object of pleasure can assuage the feelings of deep loss and grief.

Calling upon another recent insight, that of the complete randomness of my thoughts, emotions, and choices, that even though I do have some degree of freedom with the body (e.g., I will decide tomorrow to arise at 5:00am, instead of noon), there are other parts of myself which I have little control over, such as what gives me pleasure and pain. While I can choose to ignore women, there will always be something in my emotions which signals that there is no greater pleasure than being in the presence of a loved female. All I can do is observe this quality of the body and deduce that the reason I love females has not so much to do with pleasure, but rather, it has to do with the universe knowing how to achieve its aim, which is to have a constant dance of objects and animals, and the only way to keep the dance from dying is to continually produce new animals through reproduction. My body serves the needs of the universe by reproducing, and the way to get me to reproduce is to make me feel immense pleasure when in close proximity to a female. The problem is not so much the lack of freedom in this process, but the subsequent pain and emptiness which arises after the aim is achieved, reproduction is successful, and the subsequent fleeing of the female (either physically or spiritually).

Through these insights I now have a better understanding of why the Buddha thought the middle way was best. To obliterate the senses with absolute denial of pleasure may cause some wonky spiritual progress, but it is more likely that a balanced approach to pleasure and pain will give the best results. Too much pleasure causes too much pain, too little pleasure causes too much pain, but just the right amount of pleasure can cause the least amount of pain.

When I returned from my evening walk tonight the above ideas were swirling around inside of me, random as usual, and then one of those special  moments of synchronicity occurred, which makes me think that pure randomness can sometimes nourish connections which are deep and beautiful.

Letter to David - Loss

Dear David,

Every day new lessons emerge, or, things which interest me, prick me into a searching gaze, and the gaze invariably ends up inward. The past, my past, it is all so random, 8 billion pair of conscious eyes pulling in colors and shapes in an infinite progression of order, each life its own unique game of hide and seek, who seeks and who hides? What led me to one book over another, one thought pattern over other patterns? I've walked 19,300 days though forests and cities, cutting a ridiculously illogical and instinctive path and when looking back at it I laugh and wonder how I made it this far, what need to worry, someone who survives a jungle trek by repeating a five word mantra is master of the imaginative universe, the lunging tiger, slayed by the fire of words.

I dreamt of my father a few weeks ago, even though I have not seen him in 30 years. He was not there when I needed him, and perhaps if he had been it would not have made much of a difference. I'd like to think I have forgiven him for breaking off a budding family just getting ready to bloom, it taught me about the pain of loss, the pain of a trust being broken, the pain of a love being severed. How plunging from affluence to want and need didn't mean much, the sun still shines down on my head and I recognize that in deepest loss a new life is planted.

Letter to David - Grief

Dear David,

This past week I have experienced a vast changing of my inner landscape. It began when I lay in bed and a great feeling of loss and grief came over me, out of an apparently happy time of my life, and yet, it felt as if I had lost someone close which left a hole in my heart. The following days the valley shadows of grief visited me, and listening to a Chalisa by Krishna Das would make me weep uncontrollably, something I have not done for 33 years. Day after day I wept a great sorrowing while listening to Krishna Das, and today I tried to walk but gave up and decided to sleep, read, meditate, and cry some more. It feels as if someone close has died, but even in death I am usually composed enough with positive energy to not be so overcome with grief. And yet there is no external death to latch my grief onto, it appears my grief is coming from a long forgotten dark corner of my psyche, and watching it emerge into light has cast my consciousness into a dark pit of despair and emptiness. I know I must let these feelings flow and not try to push them back into the corner, and I also feel in a certain sense that this can be yet another test of the meditation, when bringing the mind home means I will be pulling it through a wet and stormy night.

Traveler of the Century

I quit my job at the AIC back in sept 2018, and going 18 months on savings completes the plan/goal of having time to live life on my own terms and conditions. Now I must begin looking for another job and begin the process again. Now that I am past 50 I no longer am so confident in my luck, fate, destiny, etc, perhaps because I feel I have already approached it, tagged it in passing, and now am floating into the distant void of an uncertain future.

I am reading Traveler of the Century and on page 246 found this gem which points to my own personal facts of existence -

"I'm embarrassed to tell you this, Hans admitted, but the fact is I'm running out of money. Up until now I always did things in the same way - I worked, saved, and traveled until I ran out of funds, then I started all over again."

Compliment

March in 2020 is not like March in 1990, or even 2000. The sky is poisoned with white particles and the sun scorches from depleted Ozone. Still, if I am alive I still have the chance to use consciousness diligently, being as fully aware as possible from moment to moment.

Today on my walk the air was almost 60 and after turning around at the zoo I walked along the boardwalk and then when I crossed into the underpass a female runner passed by in the cool shadows, and when I emerged I saw her leaning against a boulder and facing me. She spoke, and after I took a few steps I realized she was directing her words at me. I stopped in front of her, calmly gazing at her sun glasses. She told me she wanted to give me a compliment, I did not say anything but held her gaze and the thought passed through my mind in less than 1 second that she must have seen me walking many times through the park, and she was going to perhaps say that she admired my dedication to walking every day, but after the second passed she did not say that, but instead said "your head of hair is beautiful, it is the best I have seen,  ever." I must have been a bit stunned because I just kept gazing at her because I could have been given a hundred guesses as to what she would have complimented me about, and none of the guesses would have had the word beautiful or hair mentioned. She may have repeated her compliment during the silence, I am not sure, but I eventually said thank you and asked how her run was going. We soon after parted ways but I have been wondering what her motivation was in deciding to give me such an unusual compliment. Being distinctly ugly, I don't expect to have any part of me described as beautiful, and maybe she knew this, and decided to do something memorable by telling an ugly person they have a beautiful quality. If this motive is true then I have no problem with it, even though the words themselves are untrue, the intent was to give a big dose of positive energy to me and I can feel the warm result from feeling such a good energy.