Baby in Cradle of the Imagination
Indian summer ignites my passions. I don’t mind a hot summer
day, don’t care for a cold winter night, but those last gasps of balm that
slather my skin as the Northern hemisphere inevitably marches toward winter
stir some deeper part of my yearnings. Because fitting out a wooden sloop is so
time intense they become objects of contemplation. Some days a single task
takes the whole of the day. You get out of a thing what you put into it. Put
your whole back into a marriage and you might just get the life partner your
heart has always dreamed of. So, like the feel of sun on my skin in October the
mere sight of a wooden sloop displaying a refurbished and seaworthy appearance
stirs some illusions I carry in my soul as I quest toward perfections that I
know do not actually exist in reality. And so against the odds a beautiful day
appears between the last storm and before the next. One repaired and soon to be
launched wooden sloop pushes back against the tyranny of all those neglected
hulls dissolving back into the primordial soup from which they arose. My mothers
love for her son was unconditional, absolute, and foundational. As Shunryu
Suzuki would say, “we must find perfection in imperfection.” Work on a wood
sloop beneath the healing beams of an Indian summer day comes close to such a
notion.
Bankrupt Heart The Second Novel
“He had to start over and walk the length of the mast one more time. Seemed by the
time he got to the other end he’d forgot he was supposed to be doing a final
inspection instead of dwelling upon his new job. It was like that for Ry. He
looked up. He turned and looked one direction and then in another direction, he
looked up into the sky, it was blue the air clear the sun warm, he looked down
into the water it was calm, reflecting the sky it was darker but blue, the
siren like high pitched scream of a woodworker cutting an edge with a router in
the distance sounded right to his ear, Palo and Javier were moving boats with
the jitney, Max had just dashed by in his straw hat with his stoic manner, the
yard was alive with one man painting a
bottom, another man carving out a piece of rot from the hull of a wood boat in
the early stages of a major refit. The long rainy season was giving way to
warmer days. The light of the sun shined more often and longer. The late
afternoon was after a hot shower, if a man had worked to his limit became a time for
satisfaction, for a beer, with the acknowledgement that a hard day’s labor had
moved a project closer to its end.”
Bankrupt Heart Copyright © 2011 by Dana Smith
A Place Where Time Stands Still
My first drink in the Mauna Loawas much the same as my last drink. It was with much the same folks who were there the last time I was there. And while the people could not possibly have been the identical group of people there the first time they were linked by some mysterious attractant that somehow pulls these like minded souls to frequent the very same place. I was on tour in and passing through Parker, Arizona and pulled over to catch the Super Bowl. It was an out of Mauna Loa experience. It was as if the venerable institution had beamed its community from San Francisco south some 600 miles and they had gathered for a convention of the like minded. Of course they came with the same fire in their belly to drink, cuss, shout and cheer for a game that seemed to increase in consequence with the sacred consumption of the spirit laced beverages… Your faithful digitally published author is investigating in long form all evidence of impermanence (I use the word change in my blogs…) , its relevance to helping us understand the passage of our life while here, and nothing could be more of consequence in this journey through change than to have that quintessential close encounter of the neighborhood saloon kind and find that in some defiant,
against one of the fundamental truths of existence that at least in one small corner of the Universe…….some things never change. One more for the road barkeep….
For relaxation at night he went to a place called The Tavern, where he shot pool, drank beer, and idled his time away with the hired help. He could always count on a conversation with Leslie, the bartender, and she seemed to like him.
Tonight Noel was drinking Blitz, the local beer. He had been picking at the label with his fidgeting fingers, the metallic scraps
scattered in front of him. Leslie was a less than demure woman. She kept up a constant discussion with customers at one end of the bar and the other. She wore a long skirt that fell almost all the way to the floor. Tucked into the skirt was a tight turquoise blouse, unbuttoned just enough to allow the fullness of her breasts to fill the open neckline. Lovely and fetching, Noel thought.
Highway Home
San Francisco Bay Bridge at Dawn
“That everything changes is the basic truth of existence.”
Shunryu Suzuki
We do great harm to our lives when we surround it with worn out old stories. Nothing stays the same. Things are not fixed but rather in a state of flux. We have a lot of change going on in our world. In Japan there is change happening. In our own lives it is happening. It is wonderful in some circumstances to have fond memories of some special moment. Not so wonderful moments take advantage of our minds tendency to cling. We think that Japan is a fixed thing. I look at photographs of centuries old villages here Thursday and now vanished. Everything is gone. They can’t even find the bodies. It is difficult to accept. My mind doesn’t want to believe this can happen (to me). It happens out there somewhere, to somebody else. They were caught in a story. Someone didn’t look both ways before they crossed…. We have this mental trick in our head that tends to be dishonest about reality. We predict when something bad might happen. We avoid certain neighborhoods. We stay off the roads when weather is bad, we hope things will work out. Might be that we would be better served by taking a fresh look every next moment and forget about thinking we know how something might turn out. Might be better to not know how it is going to go. We don’t have to go around believing everything we tell ourselves. I got up Friday morning and it turned out I was wrong about what I believed about Japan. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. That is a fact.
