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I am pretty seriously cosmic in my sleep. You sometimes should be wanting to be me. I'm not kidding. There is transcendental stuff going on really close to unconscious, but not unconscious. Sometimes I think I sleep so much, not because I need twice as much to get the same amount of rest as you, but because there is twice as much life while I'm sleeping. The weather has been mostly darn cold, raining down here, but snow just a couple hundred feet up, and I somehow am never as bed-happy as when it's like this out there.
For days I have been prowling around inside the heads of people I don't even know... just doing what I can only think to describe as consciousness hopping... and was doing the same this morning when suddenly some bit about Brad intruded. When I quit I told him I would be available to him for emergencies, stuff he couldn't get handled due to an outage or something like that, but otherwise 99 was pau on his blog. I don't even think it is nice to participate in that... even if he might not be able to fathom my point. So, in my sleep life, I was in some sort of encampment, something like you might picture FARC rebels inhabiting, charged with guarding Brad's master transmitter, and doing it, armed with this lethal weapon that was a knife that shot bullets. Sure enough an intruder had gotten in and I'd drawn my weapon, but Brad arrived to deal with him and all surprised as heck that I'd been on it ahead of him.
So I guess we needn't fear I wouldn't keep my word.
Then the hail became so loud that it woke me up.
I can't even hark back up accurately where in the multifarious comings up into awakeness or goings from it this occurred, but I was at one point finding myself thinking hard back to the moment in my most intense engagement with my teacher when a temptation so overwhelming I could barely breathe had struck. Any of you who know anything about Zen practice, even the shit dealt by charlatans, know that one is to refrain from romantic or sexual entanglement while working on this—not because sex is dirty or unworthy of enlightening being, but because it distracts lethally from achieving the insight at which the entire Zen canon is aimed—and, well, the buddhas tap danced on my forehead one day, making sure I wasn't kidding.
I was in Black Oak Books in Berkeley, in the Buddhist books section, and there was a man browsing around in those books whose presence had my body desperate to hit the floor for him. I was a fifty alarm fire. I was insentient with desire. I was toast. He was a complete stranger, and I'm pretty sure there was nothing objectively sexy about him, but you could not have told that by any cell in my body.
I RAN FROM THE BUILDING.
I was panting with the effort of removing myself from his proximity. I was STILL just reeling from the vertiginous desire. I ran across the street to one of my favorite stores to buy something sexy instead of running back into the bookstore to claim that man for the rest of time.
What I got was more important.
But I still miss him.
Obviously. :-P
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