didn't we just fall back last week?

[click image]

.
Yer telling me I gotta Spring Forward tonight or be all worse discombobulated tomorrow? Could we consider returning me to my home planet instead? Am I getting old? Whut?

I've got stuff going on here that, believe it or not, for once, I don't much feel like discussing, but in the midst of my thinkings and doings and explorations I find this Chinese lay Zen master, teacher, old dude, and notwithstanding his having been damned with faint praise by Thomas Cleary—There is no question that Master Nan’s work is a cut above anything else available from modern authors, either academic or sectarian, and I would like to see his work gain its rightful place in the English speaking world.—I'm not getting the right feeling from this encounter with evidence of his existence. I even think I've read one of his books and not been grabbed.... There could be a couple thousand reasons for this and I may see them or just forget any significance to coming across him again at this moment of vexation and deal with it some other how. I don't know.

I'm going to practice NOT getting into a sweat over it one way or another....

Have I mentioned lately that if you are interested in Zen and reading anything by anyone beside Thomas or J.C. Cleary, yer taking way too big a chance with your whole life? I know I must've before, but, well, it bears repeating ad infinitum....

There are others I could sort of recommend, would recommend if I had you right in front of me to insert the proper amount of qualifiers and list pitfalls for you, but I can't have you right in front of me, and, truly, there's enough stuff by and translated by the Cleary brothers to keep you busy for the rest of time anyway. In fact, I'd like to be powerful enough to call them both up out of the soup this very now to come smack me around a little, put me back into shape.... I know I oughta be grateful enough for their spectacular work that is piled up all around me, but, well, most of the time I am. Just this very now it seems not enough somehow.

I have been learning in my time on the tubes that HEARING is what gets it in here. This may be because I damn well need a guide dog to drive me to town, but I never noticed it before. I have noticed that I am STUPIDLY sensitive to annoying sounds, and have—DEAF—friends who think I'm a damn maniac for flipping so hard over stuff they don't even notice, but there you have it. It seems to work the best if I hear it while I'm doodling or mindlessly playing computer solitaire or darning or embroidering or SMOKING AND SIPPING DEPRESSO.* I'm thinking that it's about keeping the other senses and my yammering ideas at bay while soaking in the good stuff.

I have a PROBLEM. Something has popped up in the last day or two that has been trying to pop up for quite some time and it is egregiously not kosher.... I'm not flipping. But I am vexed by it big time and don't know which trick to use on it.... So I'm building psychic rooms in which to return to my hermitage, see if I can't be here and a hermit at the same time... or keep me busy until my hand falls on the right volume to help me with this. It's a BIG problem. It seems on its face like a monstrous regression, but it feels more like a new clarity... only not in any way as happy as I've ever found clarity to be, and I have always loved clarity to bits, even when I have to be clear on stuff I outright hate. This one may be big.

Oh, sorry to be thinking obliquely out loud on you here. I'll shut up now. Sorry.
.

* Long ago and far away I had a Venetian lover who cooked like God, did marvelous things for and to and with me, and made sure I never lacked for cups of "depresso". If his Martian roots had not finally started showing, I might have married him and never been swept off my feet by 86... and then... how very, very much else would be how many googolplexes of kalpas different around here? OMG
.