Tag Archives: meditation

In Search Of…

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In my pocket sits the letter, or book chapter, titled “Diary of a Lefthander.”

A tufted titmouse calls out from the branches of a bush whose common/Latin name I can no longer remember — evergreen with thorns and orange berries in late autumn — reminds me of the word pachysandra and looks like cotoneaster, but taller and spindlier. [Google search identified it as pyracantha, yea for search engine technology when my portable memory (a/k/a my wife) is not around.]

I sit in the garage, uncomfortably seated in a folding chair emblazoned with the orange and white colour scheme of the University of Tennessee, with requisite pocket for a drink in an arm of the chair.

A 16GB SD card is plugged into the notebook PC on which I write these notes, containing many snapshots of the plastic chair in the treehouse toward which the trailcam is pointed, capturing also images of squirrels.

I would include one of the images here but this free blog has reached its 3GB image storage capacity and I don’t want to pay for more.

None of the images are particularly viral but it is funny to see the squirrel on the chair.  There’s also a fuzzy furry image of something big in the treehouse, its body pressed up against the trailcam…could just be the squirrel, and probably is, considering we don’t have much more treeclimbers of the sort that look like squirrel fur/eyeball up close.

I’ve always worried that I am boring so I’ve created many ways to entertain people, getting bored myself when a particular character I’m portraying attracts too many of the same kind of people so lately I’ve tried to cultivate a character people dislike (modeling in part on a certain self-centered politician (isn’t that redundant?)) to see if it attracts any fans.

It has and not the kind I want, either.

Too bad for I was just getting to like the new character.

What is next for me, then?

I still believe in Earth-based life on Mars like so many other people, both interesting and boring.

We don’t know with complete certainty which of the 8+ billion humans on/around Earth will make the difference in  declaring the success of Mars colonisation by 6th May 2050 so I can’t write off any one person, subculture, population, planet.

Excuse me or am I the only one who thinks the millipedes around here keep getting bigger and bigger?

I walked through our wooded yard earlier today, noting the blooms of spring beauty, white star grass, scorpion weed, yellow trout lily, trillium; early sprouts of mayapple, deciduous holly, and unidentified trees.

A Carolina wren calls out from the branches of a burning bush, highlighted by the bright pink blooms of a Japanese redbud.  In the distance, another wren returns the call.

Strips of shagbark hickory hang down from a gray stalk growing upwards tens of feet to the forest canopy.

The twisted trunk of a decades-old wisteria holds a maple tree in suspended bent shape as if defying gravity.

Lacewings, crane flies, bumblebees and wasps occupy my gaze occasionally.

The beep of a computer reminder to install a new version of Java reminds me that it’s time to get ready to go to work to collect freshly donated whole blood for processing and delivery to patients in need of blood products at our local hospitals.

Perhaps I will type up “Diary of a Lefthander” later this week…

Talent

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What is talent?

It seems I wish everyday I haven’t woken up from the night before, that I don’t have to face the real me anymore. 

As a child, well-versed in protecting myself from my father’s angry blows and blessed with a natural smile on my face, I was able to fake happiness physically when I was instead crouching in fear mentally.

That fear has never left me.

In a false belief of sophistication, I have grown my vocabulary of words and phrases to protect myself from what I always perceive as two ways people treat me:

1. They want something from me, and/or

2. They intend to do me harm.

It is an odd way to see the world, not knowing what love is except through observation and analysis of others’ behaviour toward one another when they say it’s about love.

In the autumn of 1984, I took my parents’ station wagon and drove out West, able, through many hours of hearing country/rock songs on the radio, to discern much of what people call love in commercial music/adverts is really lust or temporary physical attraction.

But decades have past and I’m older, supposedly wiser.

A friend, Brenda Craig, once told me if I ever got outside my head, to look her up. I interpreted that to mean joining society more fully so I climbed the corporate ladder and looked her up. She congratulated me.

From that experience I learned it was no good trying to interpret what other people mean.  Did she love me, and if so, in what way?

I have been alone, mostly lonely, my whole life.

Despite the best efforts by friends to break through my mental fog of being isolated from the world, the fog thickens and I return to my self-hatred and fear of the world of humans at large.

I don’t give up hope that I might change and actually learn what true love and friendship is.

At the same time I’ve grown used to being alone in my thoughts, so much so that I’ve tried to warn friends old and new to leave me alone, I’m not who they think I am.

I’ve developed a strong defense system that appears to make people feel better about themselves which in turn makes them want to make me feel better by their reciprocal behaviour.

It is simply sets of states of energy reacting to one another.

Although Jenn has been a great friend to me I have done my best to stay away from her because I know who I am.  I love her too much to be a part of her life.

With that I return to my mental contemplation of wishing I don’t live another day and stop recording my mental musings in social media.

What is a god?

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One of the fortuitous moments in my life occurred when I realised I am my own source of self-fulfillment, that, as a set of states of energy in this spacetime continuum, I, although an artificial construct, or because of it, bounce within the local framework as I wish, knowing that others desire to direct my path to their energy-enhancing benefit.

All labels become moot points.

This set of states of energy will disperse soon enough.

Throbbing migraine headaches and sound blindness on my left side will end with my end — what I make of them in the meantime is my choice.

Depressive suicidal thoughts are mine to nurture or forget as soon as they’re thought. 

I am a quiet, private person who likes to write about what he observes within his tiny framework, his points of reference he uses to understand what/who he is.

I need not much more, plenty less than what I have, especially the comparison of others’ lives/thoughts to mine.

A day to drop Facebook off my daily to-do list and stay focused on happy ol’ me!

Absence or prescience? Presence or absinthe?

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Does one neglect one’s habit of meditation in words whilst deeply meditating on one’s aimless thoughts?

How?

In thought, these esoteric sets of states of energy in motion, one exists as an imaginary temporary confluence, a locus of waveparticles crisscrossing, one of infinite patterns.

Does a plecostomus attack weak fish?

Questions are the only way this one shows to itself that it exists, if not independently then at least with the ability to shape the future from previous experience.

From questions, stories form.

From stories, tales grow taller.

From tales, legends renew themselves.

Leading to more questions…

Have you overcome the concepts of conscious and subconcious conscientiously?

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A wren calls out in the backyard at 0630 this morning, making danger calls likes the ones it calls out when I open the garage door and walk out on the driveway.

Without my hearing aids, I would no longer hear the frequencies of its warbling.

I have learned from today’s experience of bird voices but I want to learn more.

And after learning, then what?

PLAN/DO/CHECK/ACT?

Do-be, do-be, do?

Those who can’t teach, act?

To know is to do/act?

To be is to do?

As a child, I learned to stop asking my parents “why?” all the time, because why I can’t remember.  I knew not to ask other adults because I often knew the answer before I asked and discovered that many adults feigned knowledge but basically lied or diverted attention from the facts to hide their ignorance rather than say “I don’t know” or “Good question!  Why don’t you look it up in a dictionary/encyclopedia and find out for yourself?”, although some adults, including my parents, pointed me to reference material, including nature itself, for answers.

A number/percentage of children don’t/didn’t have the luxury of helpful parents/adults or reference material and I will point them in the direction of my sister and her friends more suited to parenting/nurturing roles than I who provide such things as backpacks filled with food and other useful means to guide children without a [locally] socially-defined safety net for nurturing future adults/leaders/followers.

Today, my thoughts wander as I wake up in preparation for a workday of helping save lives.

I have on the periphery of my cloudy neurochemical neuronic firings the hint I will learn some thing/idea of relative importance, to/for whom/what, I cannot say.

I ask myself why and do not yet receive a reply.

I try to avoid platitudes and concepts upon which I could rely for quick answers to general questions at this time.

I could, for instance, turn to the comforting plateau of nothingness, a blank plain, devoid of sun, wind, and/or objects of any kind, neither dark nor light, in which I erase the advert-like memes that pop up from daily exposure to members of my set of states of energy (i.e., species) and relax uninterrupted for immeasurable units of time.

But that, too, is an artificial construct which does not exist.

Instead, I am surrounded by trees, bacteria, insects, fungus, algae, plastic, paper, cloth, furniture, electrical wiring and words printed on material that identify objects, advertising their purchasable purposes.

It is in reality that I live.  I desire to live in this moment, not ignore it as I ponder other moments that we identify as past and future for placement of the set of states of energy I hesitantly but happily will identify as my older self in another setting with other objects, perhaps on another planet.

From that last statement, I mentally prepare to save/post this blog entry, close down the laptop computer and finish getting ready to drive to my new workplace, interact with fellow employees and help to save lives.

Hand in hand

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A shriveled-up, rubber balloon, silvery-red, like the dead carcass of a strange alien creature, sits atop the moss growing on our roof shingles.

Where the balloon originated, I know not.

Or, rather, I do, if I think about it enough.

I see a parent shopping in a gift store, buying a bag of rubber sheaths ready to be filled with helium, bagged at a factory, made from a mix of petroleum products, as ancient a form as goat bladders used to hold water by prehistoric ancestors.

Who was the first person to realise bladders could also serve as air-filled flotation devices?

Who first put helium in a balloon for a party decoration?

Shall I risk my life to climb a ladder and retrieve the remnants of a child’s birthday bash, perhaps not even remembered by the child, who could have been one or two years old this time around the Sun?

Leaves swept off the roof a few weeks ago still pile across the glass tabletop of outdoor furniture on the back deck next to the lichen-covered gas grill cover, spilling over onto the moldy lumber of the deck itself.

Raindrops from a small summer storm form islets and peninsulas of wet refuges for airborne bacteria, evaporating too fast for tree frogs to alight on the skylights and lay love’s eggs in the dance of life.

Densely-packed water droplets reflect white light to my eyes, triggering my thoughts to distinguish the whiteness from the rest of the blue sky and think “clouds.”

If only my days of dancing were ahead of me, not behind me, but the sacrifice of gentle peace in my thoughts to rearrange my thought-body coordination to adjust from a nearly sedentary lifestyle to one of freestyle dancing and its associated whirlwind destruction of old habits with the only reward being the ending for my collected group of words called the next book…

Not to mention the difficulty I have dropping my guard in the presence of others.

I do not hate other people.

I am merely uncomfortable letting the real me out on the loose while feeding the people-pleasing personality in me at the same time, along with all the other personalities I feed who give me characters to write about.

I store my thoughts here, unhindered by personal security measures, no reason to hide them from others, because here is the only place I know how to be myself without having to react to others in realtime.

Here I can say phrases like I wish I was dead because I have nothing more to accomplish personally.

When I recently hung out with young people, I felt like maybe I did want to live longer because maybe I did have something more to accomplish personally, what with the sped-up treadmill effect of being in their high-energy presence.

But when I stepped off the treadmill, I returned to my base/real self.

Their joie de vivre about what they loved to do, especially making music and dancing, but also robots and other interests, infected me and made me want the same for myself.

Then I concluded I wanted the same for my self when I was 25 years old, half a lifetime ago, not 50+ years old today.

Sure, age is just a number.  Ninety-year olds are completing marathons and jumping out of aeroplanes but they were always energetic (or so I lead myself to believe).

I was never that much of an athletic type.  Sure, I sang in high school musicals, participated in high school/college marching bands and belonged to a church choir when I was 30 but only because I was pursuing a girl or bowing to peer pressure.

As I get older, I see that who I am is this person here, the way I’ve been for a long time, talking to myself in the form of diary entries, poems and short stories.

I may never finish another book.

In the past, my books, short stories and poems have been fancy, written forms of excuses for not seeking physical contact with the women I thought society had taught me to say I loved.

The more intense the understanding that I was in love, the more I dedicated thought cycles to formal groups of words like these.

I have grown older, if not wiser.

The return on my investment in writing book-length love letters…well, only once did I get anything for it — I have been married to my childhood penpal for over 27 years now.

Otherwise, the law of diminishing returns tells me that I probably don’t have another book to finish, even if that book was about the very fate/future of Earth-based lifeforms on extraterrestrial celestial bodies.

Why?

Because to complete the book, I’d need to be around people again.

To be around people again, I’d need something to calm my nerves.

To calm my nerves, I have, for the most part, consumed alcoholic beverages.

I no longer like the effect that alcoholic beverages have on my body, regardless of whether I’ll live another day or another century, effects like dizziness, depression and [imagined] swelling of the kidneys.

I generally withdrew from online social media sites because I was no longer interested in the like/plus/chat/comment format of social engagement.

To be honest, online social media was always only an ego-boosting game to me.

I have been ready to die for a long time now, going on almost 45 years, and, in preparation, I want to concentrate on what my last thought will be as I lose consciousness.

Here and now, I focus on what I want to think, not on what I am reacting to in polite conversations.

I have had enough social media validation to last a lifetime.

I am at peace with myself when I’m standing alone, looking up into the treetops, listening to the wind, birds and insects in a spontaneous, extemporaneous, symphony of sets of states of energy in the most natural form of dancing that exists.

As Earth turns away from the light of the Sun and darkness indicates less UV radiation and photons in the space around me, I pause to think of anything else to write today before I post this blog entry and go outside to turn off the water spigot which, through a rubber hose, hydrated the plants at the front of the yard because not enough rain fell to moisten the soil for our curbside flower garden.

If I had my druthers, I’d fall asleep tonight and never wake up again, today being a good day and no days in the future promising more than the peace and quiet I’ve enjoyed during the ten hours I’ve been up and about.

However, I’ll probably wake up tomorrow and have to figure out something to do because I posted my weekly meditation blog entry on a Saturday, not a Sunday.

Such is life.

HHGG on CD

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My life right now: feeding a microwaved mix of canned food and sliced “deli-style” turkey to a cat that cycles through days of sneezing blood and mucus interspersed with days of just-plain gargled breathing; I type with my left hand on the keyboard while in the right arm cradling my little velveteen feline buddy as he falls asleep into the cat dream world of his, sawing branches with his snoring.

Thus, I am not alone.

I eat leftover popcorn and watch “The Giant Mechanical Man.”

I ruminate on stories about PE ratios and declining middle class wealth.

I masticate.

I expectorate.

I do not like deciding the fate of others but I go ahead anyway, stirring the pond’s waters and redirecting the pebbled waves I quietly dropped in my monklike meditation.

It — the mysterious two-letter word that commands attention at the beginning of this sentence — is no easier now to order the elimination of labeled beings we train ourselves to see as the Others, “them,” as it was the first time I let peer pressure push me to end the life of a being that could not live in the hustle and bustle of so-called modern society.

I is one letter less than it.

I am this artificial label for a relatively dense set of states of energy we sometimes say is a human being.

A head concussion in high school split my brain apart.

Ever since then, I have reconstructed the universe in small quantities and big ideas.

Something about my corpus callosum bothers me.

Gray matter matters, too.

I have stopped drinking alcoholic liquids/beverages.

I have dedicated at least one book each to my parents, my wife, Monica, Ann P., Maggie and who else?  I have not finished the book I plan to dedicate to Jenn.

I can say what a book is not but can I truly, really say what a book is?

Twenty-one days since I last checked the Mars countdown calendar.

My next book to read: Sagittarius Rising.

A Writer’s Secret

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Thought to self: do not fixate on any one idea or image that bobs to the surface of one’s pool of consciousness before spinning out of the eddy and disappearing into the mainstream.

Which person will connect the dots between Chinese senior citizens collecting recyclable trash, Central American children escaping unstable societies, Carlos Slim suggesting part-time work is good for you, Bill Gates suggesting an old collection of New Yorker short stories to read, Elon Musk selling a “people’s car” version of the Tesla and Erin Kennedy organising a robot party?

What about the algae that gives the atmosphere the oxygen we need to breathe?  How much water and algae do we need off-planet to terraform our new digs?

I saw the first USPS vehicle making deliveries on Sunday driving down our street just now — what Amazon purchase was so important that it had to arrive before Monday morning?

I essentially quit hanging out in the virtual community known as Facebook, having checked in a couple of times since I quit because I didn’t have contact information for people outside of Facebook.  Once that was completed, my time spent on Facebook is over.  Although I enjoyed communicating with people in that social media space, I lost track of me, spending more time managing my Facebook personality than spending with the flesh-and-blood body that has to eat and breathe.

Primarily, since I was a young child, I have lived in and with my thoughts.  I learned to convert thinking into writing, and then examined the labels of “thinking” and “writing” to discover for myself why I am the center of my own universe.

I never stop eating and breathing but I sometimes stop being me in order to please the person in me who thinks he has to please other people enough so they don’t see the real me who’d rather sit in a nest of his thoughts than listen to others’ opinions that I have to pick through to find something in common that minimises controversy, lessening the chance that I have to stay connected to a person for longer than I have to.

I am not unique.  I compromise like many people.  Even these sentences are a form of compromise, walking the minefield of libel, slander and inflammatory comments I could make were I less civilised.

I write because it’s the quickest form of communication for me to scan when I want to return to previously-recorded thought trails of mine.

Time to close my eyes and remove myself from words, experiencing the living minideath of meditation that sometimes becomes sleep, the temporary suicide of self that rejuvenates me enough that I can stand to be around people again for a while.

Only as strong as our weakest link

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I am back alone in the sunroom, meditating upon the organisation of states of energy that surround this structure and expose solar energy-converting appendages we say are green leaves.

When I sat down on my grandfather’s chair to write, I moved an instruction manual for a GWFSM4GP FMS GP Simulator to keep it from sliding off the fake mahogany Chinese storage chest, which in turn pushed a solar panel-charged battery compartment attached to two LED lights (i.e., solar spotlight) into a spider’s web.

The spider, smaller in total size than my thumbnail, spindly little thing, sometimes called a cellar or attic spider, started a gyration that caused the spider to spin like an acrobat in a sky-high rope dance, my own personal Cirque du Soleil performance.

There’s not a lot in the way of ready prey for spiders here in the sunroom so I often find the dead corpses of tiny spiders in dust-covered webs.

How much energy did that spider expend while pretending to be larger than it is in its circus act?

Dozens of trees, some only a few feet from our house, are large enough to cause significant damage to our domicile should they fall.

As I slip into meditative silence, I look back at the last couple of years of my life and marvel at yet another “midlife crisis” I experienced as I felt young again amongst the company of people in their 20s.

The world was mine, the universe a mere blip on the radar of territory to explore.

I wanted to shout from the treetops and sing in the shower.

But the moment passed and now I return to the simplicity of domestic bliss.

I see the fast-approaching date of my impending death and smile.

All is well.

I have achieved my personal goals.

I have enjoyed activities out of reach of my imagination.

I have helped send people into orbit of our planet aboard spacecraft.

Now I can meditate once again upon the happiness of being, no longer feeling inspired to boldly go where no man has gone before, content to watch blue-striped skinks skitter and scatter across hot asphalt roofs and a variety of spiders spread webs, hanging out and waiting for their next morsels, like me waiting for a thought to meditate upon in the World Wide Web.