Birds and the Green Party

7th day of 10th Pig (Sow . . . Phagmo) moon, 2135 Earth Mouse Year

Wednesday, November 5, 2008       10:40am

Here it is: facing west, writing in front of an open window, lovely fall breeze billowing the sheer purple strips of cloth left by the former tenant of Mom's second-floor tiny one-bedroom apartment (Brenda, the black opera singer whose creativity is everywhere) . . . some far off construction drone fails to drown out the sweet chirps of birds visiting each other at the tops of 150- to 200-year-old chestnut (in the Buckeye state) and maple(?) trees between Mom's two huge Victorian mansions . . . clear symbols of her worldly accomplishment in this lifetime. I didn't intend to move back to this memory-besieged apartment, but the intention to bring happiness and aid and to repay the kindness of my mother brought me here October 1, 2008. I am accepting the wounds and wars of the past and moving on. It is a daily, moment-by-moment task not to be self-involved and only seeking my own pleasure. I fail often, but a little less each day. I suppose it is the skill of mindfulness that I am cultivating (I like that word).

I don't know who won the presidential election. I voted, mostly for show, for Mom's and Allen's sake. I left everything blank except for Cynthia McKinney, running in my professed Green Party. Then I voted for the single person running for coroner, and, because my second of two ballot sheets got kicked back out of the scanner because it was blank, I voted for a reduction in interest rates at paycheck loan places.

Nothing is different today (well, of course everything is different in an impermanent universe) but these purple veil drapes are no lighter or darker because McCain or Obama won. I don't want to turn on the TV to find out. Maybe I should call Allen or Mom or Bonnie to give someone the pleasure of telling me the surprise. I feel remote from the high anxiety of it all. Whoever won, I'm glad it's over and we can now turn our focus to the cruelly-neglected poor and besieged beings of the world.

The last two nights, I have had wonderfully unusual dreams. I know I am talking out loud in response. Two nights ago, Katie Laur, the local country singer and DJ at WNKU, gave me a long, hour-long "teaching" without words. I never nodded my head or said anything. I didn't see her, but I "heard" her in my head in a language without words. I think the teaching was a biography of Luigi's (my old jazz dance teacher in New York) life. . . .