Gathering Up the Sun

Not including April when I closed my cases at Alpine Clinic, I have now been on sabbatical eight months, two-thirds of a year. It's time for a review.

I went over iCal on my desktop to see what I have been doing with the time. It appears I have done very little of what I thought I wanted to use the time for. Three consistent daily activities are meditating as soon as I get dressed, writing while I am having my first cup of coffee, and going to the gym in the evening. 

I did want to go back to meditating on a regular basis. I can't say that regular meditation has affected my lifestyle much. I do the minimum, sometimes as little as five minutes a day, but I do feel my morning incomplete if I don't sit on the cushion for at least that much time.

There have been days when I am inspired again by Buddhism. My dharma talks on Sunday mornings have been superb, often a surprise to me as well. But when I try to sit down and write down what came out of my mouth the inspired thoughts melt into inaccessibility.

Working out at the gym has been my greatest achievement. I lost 10 pounds early on then didn't lose any more. I did progress to walking up to seven miles a day. I rediscovered the pleasure of walking outdoors around the landscaped lake at the Crossing. A month ago I started using weights again, something I had not done in years. The muscles of my upper body are starting to bulk up again but overall my muscle mass has gotten flabby.

For a couple of months I had left-sided chest pain that frightened me. They are gone now. I don't think they were cardiac in origin since they would come at night when I lay down in bed. I would prop myself sideways to view the TV monitor on one side of the room. The experience did bring about a change in my routines. In years past I thought I would prefer to die of cardiac ischemia but I've changed my mind. This has added impetus to my working out, cooking and modifying my eating habits again. Now my worry centers around the floaters in both eyes that appeared after cataract surgery four years ago now.

Going on a springtime walking tour to the Amalfi Coast of Italy last May was a chapter opener. Walking at the gym enabled me to tackle the walking. I didn't do as well as I could have but this does not belittle the accomplishment that trip was for me. It was my first trip to Europe without Merma. It was my first trip on a time of the year I've always wanted to visit Europe, in the spring when spring flowers abound. 

A walking tour affords views of Europe that melted my heart. That is like the intimacy one gets a glimpse of when going to bed with a bar pickup. Tourist haunts are great but seeing a foreign country in those places where only locals live grants pleasure beyond the tourist high. Somewhere in the back of my mind, probably influenced by my readings about ancient Buddhist and Taoist adepts, is the lure of passing my days "like the clouds in the sky."

Writing has been confined to journal, blog entries and email. Since starting the sabbatical I have written blogs, first on the iWeb site I created, now on several blogger sites. I have not written anything close to something I'd want to publish. Writing has been more of a self-indulgence, analyzing what is going on with me (as this blog is doing) or recording ideas or memories that have somehow captured my attention. 

To write for publication, a dream I've had for decades, I have to be more disciplined and organized. Writing for myself is a different animal altogether. To write for public consumption is not the activity I look forward to doing when my eyes first open in the morning and I rouse myself out of bed by visualizing the first thing I would do. Writing for public consumption feels, like the other projects over which I've been dragging my feet, like work!

I write best when writing to someone. Email from Castor has been my inspiration for writing essays about my memories of life in the Philippines and life now in America. Writing with panache does not happen as often now that the energy of first meeting someone has faded. An old Pacific Bridge correspondent, Kody, recently established contact again. My letter to him the other day had elements of writing that I had not seen in a while. I am still "looking for my voice," something I am starting to think is simply another pussyfooting tactic.

Work on digital imaging has not been as consistent. I did start photographing models in April when Kaleb drove up from Bloomington. Shooting him was an eye-opener. I loved shooting an attractive man. It was, frankly, like making love to a fantasy image. Photography makes possible an idealized fantasy. Relationships are too quirky. While I have not completely sworn them off what I've experienced have generally been more of a chore than the fulfillment of a dream.

Dreams, it seems, are fine when sleeping or when we look into the future for what we desire in the present. They give us something to work towards while we continue to take the present, passing moment for granted. Dreams add electricity to the images we conjure when we indulge desires. To live without dreams is a possibility I have not realized.

Meanwhile I find myself moving ineluctably towards old age and death. My letter to Kody was a response to his letter that continued to speak about the loss of his one lifelong relationship, his mother. Going down gently into the night evokes elegiac beauty but in the main I am not ready to go that route. I feel I've paid dues to arrive where I am now when dreams finally can be worked on and turned into concrete realities.

Since starting the sabbatical I've resurrected another activity that had disappeared from my daily routines: cooking. Cooking used to be an art form. It is starting to be that again. Tony, another old Pacific Bridge friend who re-entered my life a couple of years ago now, has taken to coming over for lunch once a week. That's helped inspire me to plan and execute beautiful meals.

Through all this I have been neurotic about measuring the daily surge or lack of creative energy. In clinical terms that I refuse anymore to accept, this is the old "enemy" that was labeled depression. I believe depression is more than just a clinical entity to be addressed with antidepressant chemicals and therapy. It is brain chemistry but at the core of it is something more essential and subject to being altered by modifying my perceptions. 

Desire is critical to dreams. The real task is to extract the way it illumines experience and apply that to moment-to-moment living. Dreams prefigure a reality more dazzling still when we live it now. While I busy myself listing again and again the dreams of a lifetime, the future, just a moment from now, takes its own shape, more amazing than anything I plan. So I'll husband my resources to use the time I've created for these old dreams while recognizing that the reality that comes about is more than what I know myself to be.

Maybe going old is simply rejoining the stream of everything that changes according to a governance we can only intuit but never quite know. We learn to trust, and not judge ourselves and our accomplishments so harshly.