(After Seuss)

Fat

Mat

Fat Mat.

Mat is fat.

After Waking to Loons (On Not Missing the Computer and/or Cell, But...)

The world we've made scares the hell outta me,
There's still a little bit of heaven in there
And I want to show it due respect.

This looks like a good spot, up here.
You can try me on the cell
But most places I want to be it doesn't work.

Sometimes you gotta listen hard to the sounds
Ol' Mother Earth still makes
All on her own.

- Greg Brown, Eugene

Those sounds include, I think, the kinds a 3 month-old Matvei makes as he sleeps, and Sam's seemingly endless barrage of wit and enlightening inquiry.

Well. Just back from the airport, from dropping off dear friend, brother, and insanely gifted musician, Shawn. We go back as far as college and I'm grateful to know him, as well as sad to see him leave.

Been a busy few weeks here. Shawn was here for ten of these days, and I'll add that it feels good and cleansing not to have gone near email, blogging, news, or internet anything for nearly as long. Felt good as well to have dropped the cell and its ailing battery on concrete during this trip somewhere between Cooper's Landing and Homer and so, as a result, to be mostly free, as well as out of range of any calls.

Here are some recent pics of the clan for long neglected fam and friends to ogle. Maybe some more soon. Still too, too hung over and blissed out on Sandhill Cranes, mountains wrapped in rain clouds in Homer and Seward, Humpbacks and Dall's Porpoises in Resurrection Bay, the Griz we spotted moseying along the Russian River to want to type much, to want to meander or tarry a moment longer than I need to in cyberspace.

Shawn and I spent a long time gabbing about Greg Brown and reading Jim Harrison poems aloud between sips of good whiskey or green tea, around camp fires and on hillsides, and in the dark tent by flashlight.

In the time since I last wrote I also acquired a dharma name, took the precepts, sewed my first anything ever (google "rakasu"), and watched the entire Planet Earth series (as I stitched). Also, Anya became a U.S. citizen, an event we found cause to celebrate over sushi with Chris and Gabe, and then last Friday with a big front yard bbq bash. And it looks more and more like we'll find ourselves in Japan very soon.

We've been very busy and it's a big world out there and I'm one of the luckiest guys in it. And it looks like summer's finally hit Alaska...

Stop reading this stuff. Instead go read something about sea turtles, whales, or cranes. Better yet, go find them.

Or Stephen Berg's Cuckoo's Blood poems. Potent stuff; a practical nuclear reactor of dharma wisdom colliding with poetry. I've been picking it up these mornings with shaking hands, all unnerved and flummoxed before I even dig in. But also very grateful.

Budding birch, long sun, full moon.

Ciao.

Zen teacher Mama Sea Turtle

I've always told myself that I don't and won't buy into the standard, cliche American male mid-life crisis "template" and all its surrounding, Hollywood-induced themes and myths. And so far - for the most part - I haven't. My son, for example, is insanely crazy about sports cars in a way I only had eyes, heart, and mind for Star Wars, and 99.9% of the time I couldn't give a hoot. (I'm good at feigning surprise and seeing it from his p.o.v. though. Honest.)

However, if I ever need to associate or pinpoint any one single thing that contributed to mine, perhaps became its "onset" or point of reference, it was a recent documentary I watched while rocking Matvei to sleep in our dark living room, after Sam was in bed and as Anya showered. Sea turtles, man. I won't go into all the details here, but the tears caught me entirely off guard and unprepared.

Maybe it had something to do with holding the baby there, too. I don't know.

It's perhaps the emo-equivalent of Tony Soprano's damn ducks (Episode one).

Sea turtles, man. Damn sea turtles.

...My smooth desk, my notebook,
my special pen with particular ink, my Bach playing
through the wall of another room - not the location
of the prepared field, but what the light says, when
the light says now.

- Elizabeth Bradfield, "Creation Myth: Periosteum and Self"

Note from a Detox/April 26

Dear __________,

There's so much to tell you. If only we had time.

89 degrees in NYC? Today I'm mostly sitting on our landing, sunk down in the wooden desk chair Anya salvaged from the dumpster last year, and I'm sipping on tea while looking out at the front yard and lot and contemplating the nearly two feet of fresh snow out there.

This, while also reveling in Stephen Berg's new book of poems, Cuckoo's Blood: Versions of Zen Masters. And Beethoven. Oh, Beethoven...stay put. Here.

Please ignore the recent post lamenting this kind of weather in this time of year, and my wedding it somehow to coffee and tea - as well as those posts taking aim, with a quivering, twitching hand, at politics. Finally changed the internet home-page to a site without news, one where we'll be welcomed instead by Poetry. Hope that helps work the mental toxins out of my system - I've got herbal remedies working on the others. A rumble in my belly, but today I'm finally ok with that...

Ah, hell, never mind also the raves about music, movies, etc, etc...

For today (at least), finally again, it's just this.
Just this.

Take care there,

J.

Happy Earth Day...Chapters 2-7 available at You Tube. 20 minutes total, if that - should be required viewing...You go, Annie - go girl!

Hank.

Discovered and then downloaded a few songs by a band of fine young folks from the Bay area a few nights ago. They call themselves Birds and Batteries. Hard to place them: Kind of Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi-ish Flaming Lips meets post-YHF-but-pre-SBS Wilco meets a dab of PA's own Frogholler...Good kids. I'm delighted by their sound and talent and can't but wish 'em well.

However...

It frequently happens - since my discovery and then obsession in the winter of 1998 - that I semi-frequently convince myself all songwriting begins and ends with Hank Williams. Rock might owe its musical chops to the Beatles (some Led Zep, others, sure...) - I offer nothing the way of proof - and have little to argue. By songwriting, I'm only talking vox+lyrics +pathos. The whole wedded matrimony of them. And if you've ever heard any of the demos for Dylan's Freewheelin', you might be inclined to agree...

I'm deep in one of those spells now. Hank, baby...

(Hank drawing done by illustrator Michael Cho. I copied it from his blog. Gorgeous.)

The Sound of a Ragtagger Yapping

Some months and months ago, Anchorage Zen Community's resident priest, Koun, planted a bird in my ear (or is it bug?) and suggested I put my writing skills to work and do something related to the AZC when I had a chance.

So, many moons later, I found a window and pitched this idea for a story on the AZC for the coming weekend's episode of AK, the theme of which is "Faith." Not sure myself what to expect - wasn't feeling too hot during the taping - but the feed goes up in these parts tomorrow evening sometime, and the episode will be available on their homepage for the entire week afterwards. It airs on local radio this weekend.

On the one hand, I learned/realized this week a big reason that I've hesitated to write about Buddhism for as long as I have. As I told Koun a couple nights back, writing about my take on Buddhism and meditation feels a lot like me trying to tell you what Anya's feeling when she gives birth. Too many late nights writing this one, too much fell to neglect to find a draft I could live with. Even then...Leonard Cohen says everything I wish I could wrap in prose when he sings, "And sometimes when/the night is slow/the wretched and the meek/we gather up our hearts and go/a thousand kisses deep." That's it, for me. Plain and simple. Play that song at my funeral, by the way. In fact, play that whole damn album.

Lesson learned: Talk radio just can't do what those lines do.

Finally, oddly enough, this story may have been the first time that I have ever erred on the side of too much exposition. In other words, the producer kept insisting I bring "me" into it more, that I was pulling too far back. Hm. This is the type of detail that probably only interests me as I type it.

Of course, the Buddha would probably prefer a big empty "nobody" in the piece, but that's an entire other matter...

Link to AK:

http://akradio.org/

The Morning's Koan, by Sam-Chan, from The Messy Apartment Record:

Not long after waking, he goes,
"Papa, is it tomorrow now?"

Tea Season?

My process of putting down a blog post often feels like I'm chewing the flavor out of gum. I chew and chew on a couple ideas, usually over days, filter and obsess over a few select details from my/our life/lives here in AK (and beyond), and by the time I put it down here and spit it out, I'm "this close" to grabbing the next piece.

Anyway - somewhere around last Thursday or Friday I thought I had cooked up a little something in my head about how I've noticed in the past couple years that the increased sunlight, lengthening days, and warmer mornings and afternoons do something to my taste for coffee. Zap it, essentially, and effectively turn me into a bona fide tea hound. Not sure exactly why it is; though, for starters, I'm pretty sure I just stop needing the infinitely more thick, soupy embrace of my own brand of brown sludge coercing me from my snug place locked in the fetal position under a few tons of blankets and comforters. "Wake up juice," my uncle used to say, which - don't get me wrong - truly is the perfect elixir for warming me up, as well as boosting my vitamin-D deficient affect in the AK dark, not to mention also aiding in dispelling the psychic fog with which I've periodically, seasonally done time and struggled.

First off, don't think I fail to see the irony of hearing a guy gripe about a late season snow here in snowboarder and skiier's Mecca. (I taught 3 classes yesterday, and in each at least a third of my students were unaccounted for. Rather, I accounted that they'd all bolted to Girdwood in unabashed giddiness and glee.) Still, for what it's worth from my end of narcissism and self-pity, the presence of the oversized, welcome patches of brown ground and concrete, and the hastening exit of the lingering snow and ice had recently sent this now-familiar, weird synaptic appeal to my inner-tea-merchant. The subsequent cravings prove welcome, for after imbibing more toxins than I effectively seem to expel in winter, it's nice to go a little ape shit for daily consuming a few cups of a warm beverage so chock full of things increasingly synonymous with health and longevity.

But scratch all that. Unfortunately, this past Saturday I woke and could think of nothing but to shoot that chewed-on post straight into the can. What first resembled flurries fast became a blustery mess of snow and ice, and by Sunday we would wake to see at least 8-10 inches of landscape (18 inches in Hillside) we'd foolishly convinced ourselves we left behind by boarding a plane to Miami a few weeks earlier. I won't speak for everyone - Sam's ecstatic about the new powder. It's great for pushing trucks around, and he evidently needed this one last hurrah for showing and explaining to all our neighbors the significance of his tire tracks on the white ground, and to describe how it all applies and ties to the big picture.

But me? I'm back on the Joe. So brown it's black.