I wish I was a cat.

I wish I was my cat.

Any one of them; I’ve got two. 

I walk by and one is lying on the couch, curled up next to a small pillow.  Wall clocks are ticking, making it sound quiet.  The cat’s eyes are closed in dedicated rest.

Another one just batted at the end of a yo-yo string (my six-year-old is ‘into’ yo-yo’s now) over there on the hardwood floor at the edge of an area rug where my wife and sons have a piece of plywood holding a mostly-completed puzzle of New Harbor in Copenhagen, Denmark that they picked up yesterday at the dollar store.

Just Waving

A guy recently told me he liked my writing.  It was unexpected.  Maybe he talked to someone who said I didn’t think anyone listened or read what I put ‘out there.’  Maybe he did like what he read.  I do this blog occasionally.  Very occasionally, lately.  His comments came unexpectedly during lunch and I was surprised to hear that someone, anyone, was out there.  “Keep it up,” he said.  “You’ve got readers.”  Well.

I took a walk with another guy during this same recent weekend retreat.  The organization that hosted the metaphysically-focused event is soon going to hold its quarterly meetings further away and I said I wasn’t sure I’d be attending them.  “I talk and people just think I’m crazy,” I said.  Or irrevelant.  I say stuff about this search-for-truth-thing that people say they’re on, and I don’t get any feedback.  They stare at me blankly.  That’s my perception.  Me, I’m talking on the one subject I feel qualified to talk about—the search for ultimate meaning, ultimate reality, God.  It seems I’m talking gibberish.  Maybe I’m talking in the wrong setting, to the wrong people.  Are there any right people out there?

This friend told me that the group needed people like me and another ‘crazy’ member, an older guy I keep meaning to visit in the care facility.  “You guys say stuff that no one else says.  You shake things up a bit.  Your irrelevant comments add spice.”  I explained that my comments were utterly relevant to me, that I only paid attention to things that interested me, and that I only followed the threads which I felt intuitively were the most interesting and that rang closest to the profound.  I don’t remember if he answered me.  We had a nice walk.

I’m writing a book, Born to Wonder.  This January and February I took a break from contracting to work on it.  I’ve got a last few chapters, the other ‘bookend’ for this memoir of a curious soul’s adventures.  It bothers me that I haven’t finished it.  I’m busy now painting houses, building decks, installing toilets, putting up drywall.  It’s what I do.  I have the best family on the planet.  My wife and sons are magical.  This is my life, this thing that I am living and moving inside.  But I am bothered by not working on my book.  Maybe I need to say something.

This entry is my first step up this hill, against the biting wind in the blizzard, in the jungles of Panama through heat so oppressive and bush so heavy that I can’t see further than my machete through the stinging sweat in my eyes (places I’ve been).  I have this hill that I am dying to climb.  Maybe literally.  Fair readers, wish me luck—or just wave.

Excerpt from upcoming book "Born to Wonder"

Here's what I wrote on the S-Bahn on the way to work in 2001.  I worked at a German warehouse, shipping and receiving for a designer office furniture firm, Lampert & Sudrow. 

From the Hauptbahnhof underground station beneath the Königstraße in Stuttgart, I'd board the S-4 and ride forty minutes to Benningen, one stop before Marbach.  This town was fascinating to me, in particular, for one reason.  If I went down a set of stairs and walked through a tunnel under the tracks and then, after passing through a park, walked a few minutes, I'd find myself at an oddly cobbled patch of ground about fifteen feet wide and roughly seventy feet long.  It was the understructure of a section of Roman highway.  While renovating an adjacent office building, the Germans found these odd stones and someone was eventually called in who recognized their significance.  So they made it into a little outdoor museum park-like place, with an information plaque.  Putting myself on that road, two millennia ago, always struck me.  The juxtaposition with the setting I saw around me, which, to me, was a foreign, aged, historied place. 

On the way to the warehouse, the countryside would flow by and I'd find myself on a train that grew less and less peopled.  I liked the journey to my job there.  I worked for Lampert until Andrée and I left for France in October of that year.  I never thought of writing a book of this sort, but I did think it was valuable, to me, to write down what had happened to me—now that there were a few years between then and now.