Buddhist Confirmation

It’s a little after ten a.m., and I’ve been awake a mere hour. It rained all night, and with Jade’s window open at the end of the hall and the small side window open in here, my bedroom door thumped and bumped with each gust of wind. If there had been some underlying rhythm, I may have been able to fall asleep, but it seemed totally random, as though it were backing up a half step here and three there, deciding which way to blow.

So I got out of bed and sat down at the computer to find a response to a message I’d sent earlier. A young man on a message board who had something, not sure what yet, but something I recognized and it was familiar to me. I think most people have those things, or enough people have them with each other that eventually, we all hook up like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Or a lace doily table cloth, all our edges overlapping. Sounds good and fits with my unity in the universe, all of us flowing into each other, no real boundaries between human souls idea. Very Buddhist.

So the kid (and I hope that he would not be offended by me calling him a kid…he’s not much older than my own boys and it’s a hazard of age that everyone under a certain age becomes a kid. Like Amy, who’s twenty-nine now, but whom I still call a kid because she was…twenty-six when we met? So I guess thirty is my reference threshold for adulthood)........oh, yes, the kid. He sends me a link to a blog where he’s posted some stories and story fragments. And the first, it’s very vogue and vague. Much like I read in the current literary journals. Unnamed main character, a melting shift in action, a blend which doesn’t lend itself easily to understanding and definitely isn’t straight line narrative. Which is great, if it works, but what makes it work is a reader who wants to work. I haven’t reread it yet, though if I’m going to offer advice to him (I’m nearly twice his age and feel compelled to give advice…why is that?) is either define her (he’s brave enough to make his main character female—I’m impressed) or be damned sure that if I work hard enough to come away with a real understanding beyond the ephemeral first impression, make damned sure there’s no holes in it, because if I have to work that hard and I find flaws, I’m going to be pissed. The reader doesn’t want to be cheated. So art for arts sake is great. Just don’t make bad art. Probably why Tony urges me to aim for clarity.

So anyway, I first read a bit of this blog and make note to self to re-read them this morning when I’m not thinking about the ache in my knees (morning has come with achy knees still tagging along) and I surf around a bit more, playing a little online mah jong, checking the ten-day weather forecast, then back to the message board to see if the kid’s been around. Turns out, he has been. I have another message. And with this one, he sends me some more work, but not his own. He sends me a poem from The New Yorker which just came in the mail yesterday, though I was too busy with gardening chores to pick it up even to look at the table of contents. That’s my routine: flip through till I find the masthead, look down at the bottom of the page, and read the names of the poets and the page numbers where I might find them. Read the titles, look at the form. Read the poems if they look interesting. Sit them aside if the italicized translated from appears at the bottom (poems written in a language other than English need to be heard with a different kind of ear, I think). But always the poems first. I didn’t do that today. The kid did, and he’s sending me one. One about an alcoholic, dead father. Oh, it’s about more than that, I’m sure, and I only read it once at two a.m. Did he read my blog? Did he know? And what is a twenty-year-old doing reading The New Yorker? That is was the kicker. So, I found my overlap.

Outside my bedroom window is a rolling field, maybe harvested for hay to feed Bari’s horses and cows, maybe left to grow and give nesting ground to the red-winged blackbirds. Visible at the horizon, beyond the field is the tree line of the next mountain. And beyond that? More mountains. If it weren’t so foggy this morning after all the rain of last night, I’d surely see another tree line. I know it’s there. And beyond that? Somewhere, in that direction (east) or from my computer desk (west) or downstairs from my writing desk (north east) or from my side window that let the wind bang on my door last night (south)…somewhere is this young man half my age who holds inside him some tiny essence of what I see, what I feel and what I think. When I was younger, I mistook those things for signals that I’d found my soul mate, and in that way, I fucked a lot of guys and found lots of other things inside them that weren’t so harmonious. Now, I know…we’re all soul mates. Sometimes, we’re soul mates twice or thrice removed, but the connection is there. It has to be. Because we’re all connected. It’s not fate or chemistry. It’s compassion.

The ache seems to have settled in my toes, and getting rid of it isn’t as easy as it used to be. Alcoholic neuropathy or arthritis or my RSD or my FMS. I don’t even want to think about it. So I’ll enjoy my morning surf around my usual haunts, reread the kid's blog, reread the New Yorker poem, respond if I can. The rain today, or the remnants of the rain, are useful now. It’s totally appropriate that I sit in bed, laptop open and fingers limbered over the keys. No one expects much from achy old me on a day like today.

Till later….

** It has come to my attention that the "kid" discussed above in masculine terms may in fact be female. Very interesting. I'll have to tuck that one away for my next feminist theory rant......