August 9, 2025
Knock, Knock
I'm being lazy. I tell myself I'm going to meditate. And it's not lazy to meditate. But I know that what I really should be doing is moving. I already had a break and ... even if it is Saturday afternoon and ... even if I don't have any place I specifically need to be ... I really am due to get my butt on a walk or otherwise use my feet — not put them back up on the arm rest of the couch.
Which is what I'm doing. With my I eyes closed. When seconds later a sound comes from the outside wall next to the to living room window next to the bottom sides of my feet. My feet, in other words, are inches from the source of the sound.
Thumpth. Thumpth.
I ignore it. But then I think it isn't the sort of sound I recall hearing. Is there something wrong? Maybe it's a woodpecker.
Thumpth. Thumpth.
And again. Thumpth.
I sit up and raise the blind with the presumption that, if I'm about to learn the source of this racket, I will discover the culprit is, in fact, a woodpecker who doesn't know stucco isn't ideal for pecking.
Up — nothing. Left — nothing. Right — nothing.
I look down on the ground (my living room is on the ground floor, yet elevated) and there on the grass sits a robin. As soon as I spot her, she hops up on the baseboard of my fence. The bird equivalent of going up a hop-step.
Someone recently told me that all animal encounters are meaningful. Not every time you see a creature, mind you, but every time you have what we might call "a moment" with another species. Animals share souls more easily than do humans was the sentiment expressed. I don't know about soul-sharing but I do know from time to time I sense something more is happening when I cross paths with certain sentient beings with whom I do not share a verbal language.
I have zero evidence for the following claim and you are free to go read the rest of the Internet but here's how I process the robin's mien plus the sounds that aroused me to observe it: the way she simultaneously faces the platform feeder, perches where I can see her (robins just don't sit on the thin baseboard of my fence) and "poses," shiftily, like she might be hungry, tells me, in so many words that, "Hey, buddy, it rained all morning and now we're hungry out here. Besides, shouldn't you get out and get moving — maybe get yourself some sun now that it finally came out? These days won't go on forever."
Yes, the robin says all that. (Though I sanitized the language a little bit.)
The interpretation feels so clear in that direction that I cannot not put my shoes on and fill a bowl of seed, go outside, dump it on the feeder, fill the bath with fresh water and go for a walk. Any other life choice at that moment feels wrong. For the robin is right: I do need to move. I walk to a neighborhood school and do some stretches. At one point a dog on a leash makes its owner wait for minutes so he can say hello to me. It is warm. The sun feels needed. The beads of sweat that form do, too.
Before I open the fence to re-enter my backyard I sneak a peak into my own property. I jump up to look over the fence. Sure enough, a female cardinal feasts.
She isn't alone. I can hear other birds are near and after I go inside and take off my shoes I look out the back door to see a band of baby birds take turns. They bob their heads up and down as they nibble on the safflower and the sunflower seeds.
This makes me happy. The walk made me happy. And you can tell me the robin didn't have that sort of awareness in her little bird brain when she came a knocking. That would be a perfectly sensible position to take. That just doesn't happen to be my view.
July 27, 2025
All We Got
This life goes so fast.
Which you realize when you slow down.
The inclination is to think that the realization is enough. That because you're aware that the awareness itself is sufficient to do something about it.
Quick! While there's still time!
Let's bottle it up.
Board it up.
Wrap it up.
Let's take it with us.
Except ... wait, what is it? And what is it that you think you can do with it exactly? What are we talking about here? Putting time in storage? Bear-hugging a bundle of memory?
Like there's a safety deposit box for one's experience.
It's so easy to think: There will be time.
When? For what? (To say everything — do everything — whatever everything is.)
As contemplatives wiser you have deduced, all you have is This Moment. And this.
What are you to do with all that you have — your moment?
Shall you experience pleasure? Be good? Do good? Prepare for later — your later or the later that will come when you are no longer in this body? (This list of possible activities are not all mutually exclusive, of course.)
Here's your answer, at least right now: Show up — show up as you. As who you are. Where you are. Right now.
Be. Just be.
If you experience being — really be-ing — then you have a chance to expand your consciousness. You can, put another way, maybe more fully than you have before experience what it's like to be alive.
Energy enters through your eyes. Through your nose. Your ears. Your skin. Energy enters and without even trying you repurpose it. Energy enters your brain and shoots through your vast highway of nerves. And at some point in this process your fingers begin to move. You pick up the pen. You place the tip of the pen onto the surface of paper. You move the pend and the pen leaves marks. In an immediate exchange of outputs and inputs you put down and recycle what you leave. That is, you write words and you read those same words and the act — out and in, in and out — yes, just like the breath — sustains you, raises you, changes you.
What do you do with this moment?
You come to the page.
Since you have nowhere else to go that would allow you get as far.
July 26, 2025
Take Your Seat, Please
I went to the megaplex this afternoon to watch a summer blockbuster. It was reserved seating. The kid behind the glass with a microphone wrapped around his ear wearing a movie promotion T-shirt asked me which seat I wanted. I haven't been to a McTheater in years. I wasn't ready for this decision. I squinted at the screen to see which seats were open.
F1 was open.
F1 was the name of the movie I was there to see.
"You have to do it, don't you?" I asked the kid. Laughing at patron jokes might be in the manual. He humored me.
To summarize:
On the screen was F1.
On my seat was F1.
My ticket said F1 and F1.
I do not have much power in this world. I am not wealthy. But give me this: who else in this world can say they went to a theater today and sat in the title seat?
Many Returns – Happy Or Otherwise
I haven't come back to this space in, well, you can see how long.
That seems to be the place to start, then: the return.
Returning is an underrated skill. Starting is easy. Stopping is easier. Starting again ... that takes fortitude.
I recently read The Why Is Everything: A Story of Football, Rivalry, and Revolution by Michael Silver. This is in many ways a flawed book about a group of NFL coaches none of whom make for especially personally compelling narrative characters that really needed a copy editor (it's rare to see so many typos in a mainstream book — and, no, I was not reading a galley). It's a book that could have done with about fifty fewer pages of game blow-by-blows and needed to do a better job explaining the minutiae of the novel football schematics it aims to chronicle. Meanwhile, it's written by an author who strains to remind readers about his relationships with his subjects (text messages are not infrequently cited as source material). And yet, the whole time, for all 400 pages about men who examine gridiron formations for a living, this book had me totally engrossed.
I'm drawn to a type of person who is really not like me. These NFL coaches spend nearly every waking hour studying film, looking for any small hole in the strategies of their opponents. They live to think of new ways to force an oblong ball down a rectangular patch of grass — and to stop the same.
The singular focus they apply in an attempt to understand what is happening in four-second bursts of activity by twenty-two men in near constant collision with one another over the 150-160 plays of an average NFL game is either impressive or a grand waste of time — depending on one's point of view. (There's a saying about football coaches: You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it matters.) Even more challenging — to my way of thinking — are the naming conventions they draw up for plays that are intended to be part of entire systems, systems that can be adapted, often on the fly, during games against opponents who are similarly so engaged. To be so singular of purpose is rather shocking to a person (me) who finds interest in so many different ideas and possibilities in the different areas of life.
What's my point? My point is that I want to say something about comebacks. I'm leading — I think — to a remark about returns.
The book chronicles the efforts of about a half-dozen head coaches, shorter examinations of some of the assistants who support them, plus a profile of the "godfather" of all of them and the literal father of one of them (retired NFL head coach Mike Shanahan) over a period of several seasons. Almost every one of these seasons end in failure. The so-called "revolutionary" (can we please pass a law against the overuse of this word) that would have to be considered the book's main character, Kyle Shanahan, son of Mike and current coach of the San Francisco 49ers, has never won a championship. Meanwhile, he's had some whoppers in terms of failures. I mean some historically noteworthy missed opportunities in which his greatest attribute — his thinking function — failed him. He has overthought in some key moments and on some crucial decisions and this desire to think hard has led to his own misery and his team's defeats. (You wonder why people who are so smart they can create intricate systems that program the minds and bodies of 45 men of varied jobs and sizes and skills and then turn those same systems inside out don't ever wonder if the operator of a system himself needs an overhaul.)
But what do these guys do after they fail? They all do the same thing: They get up the next morning and they get after it again with renewed intensity. That is, they study more film. They think harder. If that is possible. The answer is there somewhere. We'll meet at 5 a.m. on Monday to break down all of the first-and-goal-from-the-nine-yard-line-plays executed on the west end of second halves in the last ten years by visiting teams. OK, so that's not a verbatim quote from the book.
In Kyle Shanahan's case, he's been a focal point of two separate historic Super Bowl fails. Once, as an offensive coordinator who just needed to call the obvious plays to run out the clock on a big lead but didn't and once as a head coach with a two-score lead with less than a quarter in the Super Bowl. He also failed in a second Super Bowl as a head coach when he had a lead in the first half and control of his own destiny. Yet he still returns. Every day. He still works. Every day. The answer is in there somewhere.
For all my negativity here, that is truly, well, something. It's not hard to see why I am compelled by such singularity of focus. I sometimes long to experience the clarity that must bring to life but I just do not possess that sort of drive in any single thing.
Even those of us who want more than two things in our lives — football and family in the coaches cases (and in that order) — I can identify with the sweetness I feel when I return to something necessary if not essential to my way of being in the world.
Sometimes I will be reading a book, get up to eat or go for a walk or whatever, and then come right back to the same book. I may not have been totally immersed in the book before I set it down but when I come back, I will notice in the return moment the benefits of reading have consolidated. I am suddenly in the flow state. This is all I want to do.
I experience this, too, with writing. Or any form of creation. Also with fitness. Run a bit — just until it gets hard. Then stop. Rest a minute. Then start again and tell me it isn't at least a little easier.
There's another saying, this one not about football coaches: "many happy returns." This doesn't mean — I looked it up — what I am talking about in this entry, per se. The word "returns" in this saying, which dates to at least the 18th century, refers to the return of one's birthday. To say "many happy returns" is to wish that someone will live many more years, that they will return to the date of their birth many more times.
I'm fascinated by those people who can live on the extreme even if I will not join them there anytime soon. Even so, many happy returns occur when one comes back to the site of "failure." I didn't write here for weeks. This realization is not a pleasant one. But then I return anyway and that act is worth something — if not to the person reading these words at least to the person who is writing them.
More than the starting, I think, it's the returning that matters.
June 7, 2025
Don't Talk To Me Like That
I received a compliment yesterday. Yeah, I know — it was the worst.
Of course, compliments are nice to receive. Like many people, I am naturally drawn to the affections of others, romantic and platonic, human and animal, real and in my imagination. Human beings want to belong. We might go so far as to say we need to belong. We’re not, after all, silos. The pandemic taught us this (among other things).
During the lockdown we were keenly reminded that human beings are social creatures who need emotional-intellectual-physical connection. One way we judge whether we have found connection is through remarks made by other people. Who doesn’t like to get an attaboy at work? A thank you from a friend? A love note from a partner? A warm smile from a stranger we chatted up in the produce aisle?
"You will be great at [it]," I was told.
I assented. That is, I didn't decline and I didn't attempt false modesty. If presented with nice words the polite thing to do, I was always taught, is to do what I did: say thank you and not much else.
So what's the problem here?
The problem is that I didn't only say thank you. Privately, I suddenly expected myself to prove this person right. Maybe even show them they were wrong — show them that I won't, in fact, be great; I'll be exceptional. That I'll be so good that people will be beside themselves in observance of my otherworldly skill.
That's the rub with compliments: it's easy to move from acceptance to an altered view of who I am and what I need to do. That is to say, rather than just accept the feather in my cap, I took those few words and adopted an altered sense of how I need to be. I fashioned a new standard. I needed to be That Guy.
The other day I had a dream about being under something heavy. This something heavy wasn't an object I could identify in waking life. What was just above my head while I was standing upright (I just fit my head under this dense stuff) was some combination of metal parts; almost as though eight or ten automobiles had been smashed to smithereens and fused together like a metal Big Mac. Only, there with no uniformity. If this chunk of cosmic refuse fell, it would bury me. And, as I stood there, I intuited that there was only so much time before the whole shebang was coming down. Then, as I straddled the line between sleep and awake ... with the image still lingering in my mind's eye … the thing sort of morphed … suddenly, this same object felt safe to be let down. It was safe to let this weight go and not hold it up any more. It would fall but I would not be crushed.
I am reminded of that dream because in the clarity of today I aim to set down the weight of the compliment I received yesterday. There was, of course, nothing at all wrong with the words I heard; the person was being kind; it was, in fact, a gift. My response to what I was told was what caused undue weight on my shoulders. Upon receiving the compliment I felt positive energy, sure, but that positive energy was buried by the weight of a new Self I thought I needed to hold up to the world. It became a burden. I don't need to carry that. Let's let it go.
During a late lunch today I pulled out my notebook. My hand scribbled these words: Don't uphold ideas of Self defined by the imagined perceptions of others.
I might need to remind myself. Many times over.
June 4, 2025
A Dream Come True
On the morning of May 27, 2025, my best friend appeared in my dreams. In waking life, my friend was a dog. In dream life, he appeared in the form of a cardinal. In the dream, I wanted to take my friend's picture but he did not want me to; he didn't want to be captured.
On the evening of June 3, 2025, one week later, during a moment in waking life, a male cardinal and a female cardinal appeared on the railing over the two steps outside my porch window that lead to the city sidewalk. The hour was past dusk; the sighting surprised me. I watched the companions as they sat side by side on the slight edge. After a moment, I reached for my phone but as I tried to capture them they flew off.
Evidence of the male cardinal can be seen in the resulting photograph. He looks like the memory of a dream.
June 2, 2025
The Best
Is there anything better than the moments before a summer storm?
The winds whip and the birds zip in and out of the lilac (one young cardinal grabs a quick nibble from the seed I use as feed). It's early evening. I had started on a walk and came back. But I didn't go in. Soon but not yet. It's OK that the drops have started to fall. I want to be here for this. I just want to be a witness.
No show that can be found through a screen can come close.
They're There For You
Generally, when I'm alone in bed I don't want to hear any noise. The sound of a car engine on the street, say, is an unwelcome disturbance during those hours.
Yet I never mind the birds. They must have started in at about 5 o'clock this morning. They may not intend this, I will grant you, but it's as if with their early morning chatter they are greeting me. They are greeters. They are greeting me, specifically.
It's as if they say: Welcome to the day.
June 1, 2025
Don't Mind If I Do
I look out the backdoor and see a squirrel friend with his head buried in blades of grass. Something tells me he's soon to go for a drink and, sure enough, I watch him cross the walkway, sit on his hind legs, and sip from the pint-sized pool I poured this morning. There's something moving about seeing small animals, domesticated or otherwise, perform the primal tasks: sleep, eat, drink. These are rare life moments: to see essential needs as they are met with suffering out of view.
May 29, 2025
Friends Who Don't Know It Yet
I see them at least once a week. Maggie and Mabel. We're on similar walking schedules, apparently. Usually, they are on the opposite side of the road. Or they are off ahead of me. This morning we happen to be on the same patch of sidewalk.
I squat. I hold my knuckles out. I want to see if Mabel, the canine end of this lovely lady-dog duo, will draw closer. She looks up from whatever she was sniffing and starts slowly toward me, then — like that — hops back, yanking her leash, causing Maggie to have to hold on tighter. Mabel's not sure about me. Either that or my knuckles need washing.
"She's a little skittish," Maggie says.
"That's OK," I say. "So am I."
As I continue on my loop during a mid-day stroll, I notice my mind's instinct to make something of moments like this one. Scan for meaning. Review for possible revision (as if that were possible). Consider what might be said or done next time. We live a half-dozen blocks away from each other and yet I see them more often than I do neighbors that live on my street. Is the universe showing me something I am too blind to see? If so, what would that be?
I do not indulge these thoughts long. I stop writing the script and instead, later, after I get home, scribble down what did occur. I do not know what will come, if anything does, and it's best to free myself, whenever I can, from the burden of rehearsing the future.
The gift was the moment. In its recollection I receive that gift again.
May 27, 2025
Lord of the Realm
Four stories up in a tree across the street sits a cardinal. A bundle of red life in a sea of yellow-green leaves. His head twists this way and that as he chirp-chirp-chirps royal dictums from the perch of a branch that might as well be a throne.
Is this cardinal the king of the world?
I do not think there is any other plausible conclusion.
May 26, 2025
Giants Among Us
I am so blessed to live near so many trees.
May 25, 2025
Turn That Dang Music Down
It's quite possibly a sign that I'm making the pivot to Geezer City but in this edition of "Smartphones Have Ruined the World: Part 1,222" let's talk about the people who walk (or ride) down the sidewalk with the speaker-phone function turned up full, as though there were no difference between the rest of the world and their living rooms. The latest example to disturb my peace: a sixty-something walked along my sidewalk on this, a Sunday morning, engaged in a conversation that I really didn't want to hear but was forced to despite my windows being closed because if we have a phone — and we have to have a phone — we need always to be using it.
May 24, 2025
Get On My Lawn
A squirrel sits on its hindquarters next to the city tree next to my street. White-breast out, he sits, sits, sits, parallel with the tree trunk, as though he just came on stage. Then he steps all-fours into the street. He scampers across. A foot from the curb, he turns right. He scampers until he reaches the walkway cut into the patch of grass between the street and the sidewalk. He hops over the curb onto the walkway. Here he had scampered in a straight line across the road but instead of continue on this path, onto the grass, he went down to the walkway. Why? My first thought is that we've had some early-spring rains so maybe this agile tree-dwelling, bushy-tailed rodent wished a break from wetness. Yet I was on this grass earlier; the lawn was not dewy. When I walk these same streets, I usually make a point, as I'm crossing from one sidewalk to the next, to step over and around grass so as to remain on the pavement. At some point we collectively decided it was neighborly to avoid other people's lawns. Was this squirrel at that meeting? Was this squirrel upholding this odd etiquette? Jaywalking violation not withstanding, this squirrel appears to be a good pedestrian.