Leo made himself a Buddha for his backyard, out of pink and blue insulation, covered with something called Insucrete, which I’m pretty sure is the best art supply I’ve ever heard of.   It is nice to know that even pink styrofoam can be useful in attaining enlightenment.

When the sky is coming undone at 8:48 a.m. on January 5th and spilling itself all over the wall with no regard to whether anyone can see it or not, the simple thing to do is take a picture so you know you were paying attention to the right thing for at least 1/30th of a second or so.  And then go back to work, even though the whole world has changed, and there is nothing to be done about it.

The place I was writing from is under new management, and there have been a few changes which I am still getting used to.  And by “place”  I mean my inner perspective, and by “new management” I mean the growing peace that a daily meditation practice has been nourishing ever so subtly, since I began in July.  For all the incalculable good sitting in awareness of my breath has been doing me, it has also, like any anti-depressant, smoothed out some of the edges which lent urgency to my voice.  I hope, over time, to find a way to express what is here now, but it doesn’t seem to fit into words very well, and I am still not sure how to see it.

But I am, as ever, obsessed with my hair issues.  So there you go…don’t touch that dial!

This is absolutely the best treasure I found that day.   See the antenna?  Alex can not be improved on in anyway; he is clearly on track to be himself, the absolutely only task there is that I know of.

I took this photo for you, Deb Opyd.  Don’t say I never gave you nothing.

Hoping your 2012 will be sprinkled with lots and lots of good fortune!

He found you after all!   Merry Christmas!

From Dulce Domum, in The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham.

Goodman Joseph toiled through the snow — 
Saw the star o’er a stable low;
Mary she might not further go — 
Welcome thatch, and litter below!
Joy was hers in the morning!
And then they heard the angels tell
`Who were the first to cry Nowell?
Animals all, as it befell,
In the stable where they did dwell!
Joy shall be theirs in the morning!

The weary Mole also was glad to turn in without delay, and soon had his head on his pillow, in great joy and contentment. But ere he closed his eyes he let them wander round his old room, mellow in the glow of the firelight that played or rested on familiar and friendly things which had long been unconsciously a part of him, and now smilingly received him back, without rancour. He was now in just the frame of mind that the tactful Rat had quietly worked to bring about in him. He saw clearly how plain and simple — how narrow, even — it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one’s existence. He did not at all want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces, to turn his back on sun and air and all they offered him and creep home and stay there; the upper world was all too strong, it called to him still, even down there, and he knew he must return to the larger stage. But it was good to think he had this to come back to; this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.

I once asked you why you moved to Colorado, and you said, “I always wanted to be a cowboy.  Didn’t you?”

We all seem to want so many things, from each other and for each other.  I don’t know what all the time you weren’t in my life means, or what it means that I wasn’t in yours until the night our father was dying.  I only know that it was as if you had always been there, you and Felice, belonging with us.  And that discomforting joy amidst catastrophe rent a light leak in my heart that I have determined to make worse, until it has completely healed.

We are together in the Colorado sunshine
which came today, scouring away the grey coating of internal rhymes and reasons
that tend to accumulate with cloudy days on this side of the divide.
Corn stalks petrified in the prevailing winds,
Trees brushing a few remaining grains of gold from the sky,
The sky itself so unkind in its remorseless radiance, revealing
your whole selves, who are now no more or less than spaciousness.