Dharma Bum

Let your mind and heart release all that disturbs you.
Let your body be still,
and all the frettings of your body, and all that surrounds it -
let the earth and sea and air be still, and heaven itself;
and then think of spirit
as streaming, pouring, rushing, and shining
into you, through you, and out from you in all directions while you sit quiet.
 - Plotinus

"If you're reading this, if there's air in your lungs on this November day, then there is still hope for you. Your story is still going. And maybe some things are true for all of us. Perhaps we all relate to pain. Perhaps we all relate to fear and loss and questions. And perhaps we all deserve to be honest, all deserve whatever help we need. Our stories are all so many things: Heavy and light. Beautiful and difficult. Hopeful and uncertain. But our stories are not finished yet. There is still time, for things to heal and change and grow. There is still time to be surprised. We are still going, you and I. We are stories still going."
 - Jamie Tworkowski

"We can keep ourselves so busy, fill our lives with so many diversions, stuff our heads with so much knowledge, involve ourselves with so many people and cover so much ground that we never have time to probe the fearful and wonderful world within . . . By middle life most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves."
 - John Gardner

A Story About a Story

I wanna tell you a story – about a story. And it's about the time I discovered that most adults have no idea what they're talking about. It was the middle of the summer, when I was 12. And I was the kind of kid who was always showing off. I have seven brothers and sisters, and I was always getting lost in the crowd. And so, I would do practically anything for attention

So, one day I was at the swimming pool, and I decided to do a flip from the high board. The kind of dive when you're temporarily, magically, suspended mid-air. And everyone around the pool goes "Wow! That's incredible. That's amazing!"

Now, I'd never done a flip before. But I thought: "How hard could it be? You just somersault and straighten out right before you hit the water." So I did. But I missed the pool. And I landed [THUNK!] on the concrete edge. And broke my back

I spent the next few weeks in traction, in the Children's Ward at the hospital. And for quite a while I couldn't move or talk. I was just sort of... Floating. I was in the same trauma unit with the kids who'd been burned. And they were hanging in these rotating slings, sort of like rotisseries or spits. Machines that would turn you around and around. So the burns could be bathed in these cool liquids

Then one day, one of the doctors came to see me, and he told me that I wouldn't be able to walk again. And I remember thinking: "This guy is crazy. I mean, is he even a doctor? Who knows?" Of course I was going to walk. I just had to concentrate. Keep trying to make contact with my feet, to convince them – will them – to move

The worst thing about this was the volunteers, who came every afternoon to read to me. And they'd lean over the bed, and they'd say: "Hello Laurie." Really enunciating each word, as if I'd also gone deaf. And they'd open the book. "So, where were we? Oh yes... The gray rabbit was hopping down the road, and guess where he went? Well, nobody knows. The farmer doesn't know... The farmer's wife doesn't know..." Nobody knew where the rabbit had gone - but just about everybody seemed to care

Now, before this happened, I'd been reading books like A Tale of Two Cities and Crime and Punishment. So the gray rabbit stories were kind of a slow torture...

Anyway, eventually I did get on my feet. And for two years I wore a huge metal brace. And I got very obsessed with John F. Kennedy. Because he had back problems too. And he was the President

Much later in my life, when someone would ask what my childhood was like, sometimes I would tell them this story about the hospital. And it was a short way of telling them certain things about myself. How I'd learned not to trust certain people. And how horrible it was to listen to long pointless stories. Like the one about the gray rabbit

But there was always something weird about telling this story, that made me very uneasy. Like something was missing. Then one day, when I was in the middle of telling it, I was describing the little rotisseries that the kids were hanging in. And suddenly, it was like I was back in the hospital. Just exactly the way it had been. And I remembered the missing part

It was the way the ward sounded at night. It was the sounds of all the children crying and screaming. It was the sounds that children make when they're dying

And then I remembered the rest of it. The heavy smell of medicine. The smell of burnt skin. How afraid I was. And the way some of the beds would be empty in the morning. And the nurses would never talk about what had happened to these kids. They'd just go on making the beds and cleaning up around the ward

And so the thing about this story – was that actually I'd only told the part about myself. And I'd forgotten the rest of it. I'd cleaned it up, just the way the nurses had. And that's what I think is the creepiest thing about stories. You try to get to the point you're making – usually about yourself or something you learned. And you get your story, and you hold on to it. And every time you tell it, you forget it more.

Laurie Anderson

"From what I gather in reading ancient texts, right up to the present, human beings have always been confronted by the same kinds of problems. I think that this world is not a realm that admits to a solution. That isn't what this world is about. It's a different kind of activity that we have here. We have to deal with good and evil continually. With joy and despair, with all the antinomies, all the opposites and contraries. That's what our life is about. We can't abdicate that."
 - Leonard Cohen

Good Bones
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I've shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I'll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that's a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
 - Maggie Smith