Correspondence with a friend on the path

Excerpted from correspondence with a friend on the path -DW

11/16/2003

Hi A,

How was your isolation?  How was coming back home?  Hopefully okay.

In describing things, you said, “While in the middle of it, I spent hours or days thinking/analyzing what was happening and what I should do and what might happen.”

That’s the value, I think.  Seeing one’s own reactions/processes like looking at someone else.

My take on the word fascination is: what captivates my curiosity and, therefore, my attention.

As far as lucid dreaming.  You said, “both types of consciousness,” when describing your definition of lucid dreaming.

I only am conscious of one type of consciousness!  Where it happens is not important, as far as it is concerned.  Where you turn on a light bulb—in a cave or on a space station or in a bathroom at McDonalds—it’s light.  Air is air no matter where…

Group work

I wait to meet myself.  Sometimes I see him come into our meeting room, but he’s not willing to hear me.  I can recognize myself sitting over there, but I can’t strike up a conversation.  Sometimes I see him walk in, look around, and walk out.  Sometimes he walks by in the hallway without coming in.  Sometimes he stays and I give him a book to read and he or she leaves, takes the book and brings it back unread.  I’m the tree in a time-lapse film, a flickering lantern on my motionless branch.

A Story With No People (told by God), by David W. Weimer

Some cultures chant in groups, “OM.”  (It rhymes with ‘home.’)

Jeeze... 

Act I. 

Luring me backward, The Andy Griffith Show theme song echoes in black and white whistling inside of my head, accompanying a kid walking down a summer lane with a fishing pole over his shoulder. 

Act Am.

All the description in the world can’t convey this.  When the period stops the flow of words it can’t hold in everything filling the box overflowing forever with sound.  How do you write sound on a page?  Each sentence is a box of words; the words stay in the box, or are changed and replaced, but the things the words try to describe—that’s the water flowing from eternal fountains with periods holding them apart from one another.

Act What.

I can sit here and swivel my head.  Just here in this chair, sitting.  What I hear.  What I can see…  I check smell.  I breathe deeply and can smell the air.  I taste the last of this tea which I don’t like.  What do I feel?  Belly pressure, a twitch in my neck, dry skin and an itching leg.  Just sitting here, it’s amazing.  It’s a whole world.  And then there’s that place over there, just ten feet away from me, on the couch.  And in the living room, the kitchen, the studio, the upstairs, the downstairs.  Man, it keeps going.  The rest of our property, the lawn, the front yard, the back deck.  I could sit right here, in every square foot of space, and swivel my head around, and pay attention to all this stuff and be blown away by all there is.  One time I rode a Greyhound Bus in Florida and was amazed by the endless reality flowing by my window in the five hours between Lake City and Kissimmee.

Act Now.

Effortlessnes...  What is effortless?  Anger.  Love.  Pity.  Nostalgia.  Regret.  Contentment.  Hunger.  Thirst.  Fatigue.  Joy.  Curiosity.  Sudden comprehension.  This. 

Act When.

The best gift life can give me, in my opinion, is a pure quest—something to go after.  Something self-evident and worth it.  I’d prefer a quest, instead of having to react automatically to the bead-like chain of crises and challenges delivered regularly like the mail, dropped right at my feet.  The gift I’m talking about is one that at first seems as far off as that barely-starting breeze over there.  Not felt yet, but somehow noticed.  The far away trees sway a little.  Then it comes in close, like a gradual thaw.  The feeling of coolness on my heated cheeks and forehead in the summer, sweating or working in the sun.  Or a heat-sucking frigid wind blowing snow over a frozen pond.  Here, it tells me.  It’s always something I hadn’t considered before, that seems like it’s worth going after.  It’s a quest for understanding.  A goal.  I climbed that mountain.  I did it.  All the while, I’m imagining.  Yes.  That’s what I want.

Act Nine.

Well.  Pray.  And thank you.  When I don’t know what to say, I do it.  Thanks for the time I get each day, most days, to spend ten minutes staring into the air in front of me, letting go of control.  Depth, profoundness, wonder.  Thank you for that: the wonder.

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