The Birthday Post

Today I am turning 66 years old. It’s not a big deal except I never thought I’d live this long! I must say, I’ve always loved my birthday.

One of the stories my mother told me frequently, one of the rare stories she told me where I somehow made her laugh, was once when I was playing alone in the basement (as per usual) she came downstairs and said, “I have a surprise for you! Today your father is staying home from work!” and apparently, I said, obviously disappointed, “I thought you were going to tell me it was my birthday.”

I don’t know quite what to make of that story except that it proves that from an early age (post talking and pre memory) I loved my birthday.

But not parties. I hate parties. Even now I hate all birthday parties.

It’s like inviting strangers over to trample all over your flower beds, or in my case one year, draw pubic hair and nipples on all your Barbies. I didn’t have a lot of friends but I usually had one friend and they hated birthday parties as much as I did (hence the friendship).

So now I have grandkids who have parents who throw MASSIVE PARTIES for them sometimes in LOUD ARCADES. Honestly, at times CHEMO THERAPY felt like a more bearable assault on my senses. But I learned early that face painting at these events helped me focus and could allow me to be “at the party” without dealing with the chaos all around.

It’s partly how I became “Rio The Clown”.

My daughter texts me, “You don’t have to come if you don’t want,” meaning to my Granddaughter’s party.

For my birthday we are going to a nice restaurant for lunch, on the lakefront, a part of my new city that I haven’t been able to get to on my own as there is no bus. I am excited.

This morning I am doing one of the things I love to do, write, and better yet, I’m not alone as I am running the clock for a Breakfast Sprint with the SFF group of Toronto with one of its members (and my friend)! Yay!

One of my other favourite things to do is a day long zen practice and for many years I had the pleasure and joy of having a practice interview with my then teacher, Shikai Zuiko Sensei. She died during the pandemic. We were no longer teacher and student but the last time I saw her, after the first few moments of sitting across from her, it was as it always was, sitting on the zafu across from her, a remarkable gift.

I remember every birthday she’d remind me, “Thank your mother because she did all the work on the day you were born”.

And it will be something I do today. I will thank my mother.

I know all these things I write here may seem to be more permanent and real because they are written down. I am not talking about the “truth” though I have tried to be clear and honest always, maybe writing a memoir can’t help but be a bit of conceit, after all, I am still barely an adult. But none of what I write can compare to how real this moment is. Always renewing itself, always reborn as this moment.

I have my hands on the keyboard. Wrists rest on the ergonomic supports. Index fingers reassuringly register the bumps on the F key and the J keys. All the other fingers fall on their “home keys”. A map of the keyboard arises in my mind, but it isn’t a visual map, it is a spatial map, a proximity and associative map.

If my hands believed they held a world, who would be the letter Q?

And did you get that? I managed to fit in a Star Trek the Next Generation reference!

Happy Birthday Me!

(Thanks mom for birthing me.)

Original Face

“Show me your original face, the face you had before your mother and father were born.”

It is a Zen koan.

The circumstances of our lives lead to this and that, and on, and on, in all directions. And when we hear of the direction some people’s lives take, we have to wonder. For example, how could an old man go into a dance hall and kill a bunch of old people, his peers, while they were doing nothing other than just learning to ballroom dance? What brought him to such a state of congealed anger that he could do something so terrible?

When I am looking forward to my children’s future and the lives of their children and then looking back to when they were new babies, and then thinking of all the life that was before, all the family stories, all of that, and trouble and struggle and sorrow well I know anything can happen.

And yet here I am. Here you are.

My house of cards will be swept away. It has been swept away before, more than once. And it will go along with the last breath of air from my lungs, just as it should. Trying to try to carve any history in stone or lock into a belief for the future, horrible or wonderous, these things are all delusions and all evaporate in the brilliance of this moment.

“Original Face” is not your face or my face. It’s not even what we think of as Buddha, or Jesus or God. It is when this house of cards falls away and we wake up as a human being here, before all our thinking about it.

I woke up this morning early, thinking I would try to sleep longer because I have a busy day ahead. I’d not been sleeping and was just mulling over things, lying in bed. In the dim light of my room, through the bedroom door I saw, in the dim light of the living room, the framed photo that hangs on the wall in the dining area.

Suddenly I saw my life, viewed from one room looking at another room and through that room to another, on and on and ending with a photograph hanging on a wall that I couldn’t even see. It might as well have been a portrait of an artist, or a pipe, or temple.
But I understood.

So, I got up and did what needed to be done. And then I wrote this.

Celebrity

There is a lens to our awareness of others that we constantly have to adjust for context and proximity. For example, the personality of a comedian is one that often explodes the personal to mythic proportions for laughs, and as the audience grows, the message changes because the audience and impact also changes and the comic must take responsibility or create derision. But, as ego also inflates with the kind of surreal success of celebrity (often) it tends to shut off empathy. The very thing that gave them insight when they started, becomes their blind spot. And those they love, loved and lost, suffer in that darkness too. It is a trajectory we see often in those we once considered “great”.

The Stone in My Shoe

We forget that often the history we remember is the one that we are told, and that it ignores a lot of divergence, a lot of diversity. And yet, we celebrate the “genius, the artist and the philosopher/poet” who rises above the common story repeated to us about identity. Because they are special? No. I think it’s because they’re who we really are, each of us, when we are not afraid to live the lives this marvelous earth has given us.

Not everything is possible, but awareness of our potential is.

Every moment is revolutionary.

Yesterday, after a whole year, the shadow of my potted plants was cast upon the wall.

I thought I was going through stuff, and here an entire planet was tilting towards the sun.

Michael Gregory: This is your mind as green slime mold — Vox Populi

mingling molecules and attitudes sinews and desires platitudes and functions nervous circuits and circadian rhythms pure crap and masterful conceptions

Michael Gregory: This is your mind as green slime mold — Vox Populi

Doug Anderson: Negative Capability — Vox Populi

…art that honors the art and artist as well as its content, and apprehends it as more than its socio-political reality. Art is hard to do and not everybody can do it. It is not merely a pretext for theory.

Doug Anderson: Negative Capability — Vox Populi

clearly

when what needs to be

said

can’t be

one needs to

say

nothing

clearly

The Moon

I find writing excruciatingly difficult but it feels so good when I stop. And just having someone take the time to read something I’ve written thoughtfully is huge for me.

The idea of making enough money to live on from my writing is like comparing me, stumbling along with my bundle buggy to the grocery store, to an astronaut in a rocket shooting for the moon.

HOWEVER, I don’t think there is an astronaut who doesn’t see the same moon as I see when I am happy to sit by my window and stare at it.

It’s Going to be Uncomfortable Not Impossible.

And is that going to be what decides how we respond to the challenges we face? I worry that we are getting tired and want comfort above all.

I’m tired.  But I am also clear eyed. Some where recently I read, when we are uncertain of the future, take smaller steps. The truth is we are always uncertain of the future. If someone tells you they know what it holds be clear enough to see their self-delusion before you make it your own.

I take smaller steps because I am older, my knees are bad and I am not as fast as I was in catching myself from a fall, but I am clear eyed and I am accustomed to what is uncomfortable. I also have a history of what seemed impossible becoming possible.

I have an idea of what the world can be because I have known love, I have witnessed courage.  So my small steps remain on a path towards a world we can live in because it’s possible.