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About once a month or so, when I’m sitting on my meditation bench in the morning, my hands get big. They get, like, really big. Approximately house sized. And sensation seems to subside, except that I am keenly aware of my hands, and everything else. My whole body gets big too, sometimes bigger than a house, but no matter how big my body gets, my hands seem to remain bigger than my body. All the while my focus is on every little scrap of breath, while at the same time it’s on everything else too, including the occasional thought that might begin to pop up, but they hardly have a chance of growing in this environment. It’s all quite something. The borders between me and not me become less defined. It’s not an easy place to describe, or to arrive at, but quite simple and easy to reside there once there.

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From Friday to Sunday I was in Las Vegas for a long-planned sibling+partners get together. We did wonderful things. Visiting. Eating. Shows (we saw LOVE and Blue Man Group). It would be an easy matter to write many words about the events and ideas and feelings of those three days. I could put up some pictures. I could recall on this page — as I have already done on my bench in the morning using my little hyper-detailed-reconstruction-while-putting-myself-in-the-scene mental memory gadget that I’ve developed — the finest details of the settings and events.

And I probably would. Except that something happened yesterday, at the end of the trip, that is still kind of sitting on top of everything like the huge flowing white sheet that covered half the audience during part of the LOVE show. The good news about the thing that happened is that it was really amazing in general and really wonderful and good for me in particular. The bad news is that by the very definition of the words “thought” and “experience,” the thing that happened cannot, and I mean that literally, cannot be described. It can, by definition, only be experienced. To even attempt to describe it reduces it to non-existence and non-reality. And that’s why it always sounds insane to some people when such attempts are made. So, because of the limited nature of ideas and words, here come some that know they are insane.

On the flight back from Vegas, Kay was asleep in the seat next to me and I decided to stay with my breathing for a long time. I do this whenever I fly. About 3/4 of my flights are alone, so I’ve gotten pretty good at meditating on the plane. The result is always the same: good. Good takes different forms. It changes as it happens. Good is better than not good, in other words, meditating is better than non meditating.

I’ve gotten used to residual good that follows me off the plane, even after my thinking mind wanders away and gets lost in the not-now. Good usually keeps wedging its way in there as a walk through the terminal thinking about what I’m doing and where I’m going and all that. Good usually uses my feet and my breathing, sometimes my vision, to scamper back up and sit on my thoughts.

And that’s what was going on again yesterday. I was walking alongside Kay, and we were in the middle of a little stretch when neither of us was talking, and I noticed to my left an especially beautiful woman walking toward me. She was everywhere impeccable and appealing, not just visually, but her walk and her demeanor too. A thought arose about the labels that my thoughts had assigned to her: attractive, appealing. I have been giving thoughts like these much thought these last few years, so it didn’t take long to tread this familiar ground. I understand the evolutionary forces behind the existence of and the determination of attractiveness. I know that I am an animal organism with a mind that sees and rates. I know what’s happening while this happens. And I do like looking at people I like to look at. It’s pleasing now in the same way that looking at any pleasing thing — such as The Wynn, or a horizon — is pleasing.

I looked at her, and I smiled inside. I looked at the next person, an obese person, and my smile was unchanged. I looked at the next people, an anxious couple walking very fast, and I breathed in their tenseness and breathed out my air and my smiling gut widened. I noticed all the people all at once all together, and they all died. I noticed the carpet, and it was living. The floor was as dead and as alive as the people. I was dead. I was good. I was moving, depending on where you stood, and I was still, and the carpet was moving, depending on if you happened to be a human or a wall. There were no divisions.

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The next million times you’re alone, try this.

Touch a thumb to the index finger of the same hand, and breathe in. (You can do this with one hand or both. Either way is fine.)

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Then touch thumb to middle finger, and breathe out.

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Repeat a lot.

Now, if you want something harder, do an in-breath AND an out-breath on the index finger, and then move to the middle finger for the next in-out combo.

And if you really want to get exotic, you can work your other fingers into the act.

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Here’s a picture I took on my way to Vegas. (You can click on these pictures for full size viewing.) I was on the left side of the plane, heading south. I think this picture is very cool because of the low altitude. My flights to Vegas start out going north from San Francisco Airport, then they break into an immediate 180 degree turn directly over The City and head south, giving me a view of home while the plane is still climbing. I estimate this view is from 8000 feet.

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If you head east for about three miles from my place, to where the land casually merges into the bay, you’ll see an art installation I call Polehenge:

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The poles are different lengths, but they are all the same height. I mean, the ground has its ups and downs, but the tops of the poles don’t. I mean, if you sat a huge sheet of wood on top of these poles, it would be level. The result is eye candy from every angle.

Polehenge is in Silicon Valley, so it’s not too surprising to find out that these poles are implanted in a high tech landfill. Mountains of trash are covered with earth, in typical landfill fashion, but they do it in a way that recreates wetland, right down to the bugs and birds. Lots and lots of birds come by and act like everything is normal. They pretend not to notice the occasional platter-sized metal plate sitting a couple inches above the grass from which exudes little geyser sounds — pshhhh — pshhhh — evenly spaced. It’s methane belching from below. It’s the earth farting.

Swans and pelicans and geese and grebes and dozens of other kinds of big birds and small birds and fast birds and slow birds and birds birds birds from all over the place come here. Way too many kinds for me to want to learn all their names. Most of them spend some of their time floating around so I just call them all ducks. Some of them zoom around in formation just barely above the water and they remind me of the Starfighters that Luke and his friends flew in Star Wars.

I can picture George Lucas sitting in a place like this 40 years ago, watching these birds doing their impressions of fighter jets, thinking, hmmm.

They made a walking path so that I can come and visit the ducks up close. I call it the duck walk. Along the main path there are these little offshoot paths that lead down closer to the waterways where the ducks hang out. At the end of each offshoot path there is a two-tiered wooden deck about the size of two doors. I sit on these decks. Sometimes for a long time.

One day I was sitting on this deck and something funny happened.

You couldn’t see me from the main path because I was at the right end of the deck, behind the bush. I was facing the water, sitting very quietly and very still, and I could hear everything. I could hear the sounds coming from the mouths of two people walking on the main path. I could hear their volume go up as they moved closer. I could hear the sounds of their clothing and I could hear the sounds coming from the ground when their feet were on it. I heard them stop at my little offshoot path. I heard one of them slowly walk toward the water, toward the birds, toward a surprise.

Then I heard the sound of feet making a quick stop on the gravel path. Sounds came from the organism in the form of gaspy, high-pitched, sudden words. “Oh! I’m very sorry to have startled you!”

When my dad died in 1996, there was one uproarious moment during the formal mourning period, a story that has been told and retold, tilled and retooled.

First came the evening wake at the funeral home, a highly populated event. The next day there was the funeral at the massive Catholic church with aisles filled. It was our parish church. My siblings and I all went to the grade school next to it. The next day was the burial, a ceremony that began at the church. The immediate family had a final viewing of the body, then we went out the side door of the church to get in a hearse that would lead a procession of cars to the graveyard. There were many emotional spikes during these days, and for me, there were two major ones on this day. One was during the final viewings. The other was the uproarious moment I’m working toward.

My mom died in 1986. Four years later, my dad married an angel. Her name is Jackie. The immediate family that was in the hearse was me, my three siblings — Jude, David, and Paul — Jude’s 16-year-old daughter Josephine, and
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The graveyard was several miles due north from the church. But we didn’t take the shortest route. Instead, because of David’s brilliant idea, the caravan went south and west, about a mile, to the fabled Horseshoe Stadium on the campus of Ohio State University, where my dad taught for 31 years without ever missing one day. And he went to every home football game. And he used to play handball with Woody Hayes. People around here like to say “I bleed Scarlet and Grey.” Buckeye fans remind me a little of how poker players can all think they are better than everyone else. I’ve seen Buckeye fans enraged over who is the more maniacally devoted fan. But they’re just fans. They don’t live right next to campus and spend most of their days on it every year for a lifetime. I never saw my dad with an open wound. I can’t help but wonder though, just what color his blood really was.

So this huge trail of cars went down to the stadium and lapped it. It was the right thing to do. No doubt that just like the rest of us, the stadium wanted to say goodbye to Ralph.

Back on High Street, heading north, the mood in the hearse was light. Ups and downs are really just two sides of one coin, I began to notice during this time. We’re driving along, and Josephine said something that was incorrect. I can’t recall what it was. I can’t even recall what kind of error she made. It could have been something grammatical, since that is one of the types of things that people in my family are in the habit of correcting. Or it could have been something stated as a fact that wasn’t. Whatever it was, she said something that was incorrect, and my brother David quickly corrected her.

And Paul said to David, “So who died and put you in charge?”

We laughed and laughed and cried and laughed and did it some more.

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I was walking through town just now, pretending I had superpowers. It was the coolest thing. I made believe I had this thing called a body, which was basically a self-propelled, self-operated sensory array. The main piece was on top. It was like this orb stuck to the end of a twist-o-flex segmented cable-holding rod thing. The orb had one big hole in the middle, and several pairs of holes, where the magical information would go in. See, the way I was making it up, and I know this is kind of crazy, but there were these weird invisible rays that were basically everywhere, moving around, and they would bounce off anything they came across, and then they’d carry some sort of residual images of objects around. Now, these rays didn’t actually do anything, unless they happened to go through these two tiny holes in the orb that stuck out of the top of my body thing. Oh, I meant to tell you, I wasn’t the only orb toter. Because of the magical information rays and my superpower, I could tell that there were other bodies with orbs and ray holes around me.

Another superpower I gave myself used two of the other holes. They let in a different type of information altogether. It was like, invisible vibrations, that got more intense sometimes, and less sometimes, and they came out of things, and they seemed to sometimes have an upness and downness to them.

And the most tripped out thing I imaged I had was this super flex-o-stretch sheathing of sensing cells that covered my entire body. It allowed me to know, for example, when I came into contact with anything, such as objects, and also I could tell when the stuff that the vibrations moved through was moving.

The other day I was in a conversation with an old friend, and some new acquaintances who I would most likely never see again. We were jawing away about rock and roll. Twice I tossed out bits of pertinent trivia, and twice I was quickly told by one of the acquaintances that I was wrong. Both times I knew I was right, and both times I backed off immediately.

The next day I was walking with my friend. He had done some research since the day before. “You were right. Joni Mitchell did write the song ‘Woodstock,’ and Bill Bruford did drum for Genesis on their first post-Gabriel tour.”

“Yup.”

“So why didn’t you call that asshole out yesterday when he said you were wrong the only two times you even said anything? You’re always avoiding conflict. You should show some balls when you know you’re right.”

“Okay, as a favor to you, I’ll give you some conflict. You’re wrong.”

“That’s more like it! [laughing] Please hammer me some more!”

“I don’t avoid conflict. Actually what I do is just the opposite. Avoiding conflict is easy. What I do is much harder. I end it.”

“Oh please do explain.”

“Avoiding conflict is what a bullfighter does. He sees the conflict coming, and he moves out of the way. If a bullfighter were to stand still, and face the bull as the bull charges, and allow himself to be impaled and killed, that would be ending the conflict. When a person charges at me with words and ideas that are in conflict with mine, I just stand there. But it’s different than bullfighting in that words and thoughts don’t draw blood, so when I end a conflict, nobody gets hurt.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

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If life is like a giant river, deep and wide and long and moving, then I don’t want to ride it on a jet ski. That’d be too noisy, and too fast. And I don’t want a cruise ship with extra little boats hanging from it in case something goes wrong. And I don’t want a submarine to lurk around in. And I don’t want a barge to haul tons of crap around with. If life is a river, just give me a raft, and that will do fine. On a raft, I’ll cruise at whatever speed the river wants me to, and whichever way I look, I’ll see beyond my vessel.

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Last week something died. It happened right across the street and I took pictures. One way of thinking of what happened is that one organism of one species was dismantled by several organisms of another, like what hyenas do to a gazelle and what slugs do to a lettuce plant. Another way to think of it is that somebody took out a tree. Either way, the way I think of it is that death happens, and it’s always just fine, no matter who does it, who it happens to, or why.

The first three pictures were taken from my balcony, 30 feet up. The last one is of ground zero.

A few hours before this picture was taken, the tall tree on the left looked a lot like the one on the right. (It’s a little tricky to see what’s going on here because behind the tree on the left (the one being cut down) is a third redwood tree that has had the top half cut off.)

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Some fun facts about Coast Redwoods. In a Coast Redwood forest, it’s pretty much all redwood trees. They “compete” for sunlight by growing really tall. The tallest ones are 380 feet. And sometimes the lowest branches are way high. When they stand alone in a city, like the two trees in these pictures, there’s plenty of sun for everyone, so they top out at around 170 feet no matter how old or thick they get, and they have branches all the way up the trunk, giving them a Christmas tree look.

The next picture was taken right after the top came down. The guy tied the top part of the tree to his gondola, then he buzzed part way through the tree with his chainsaw, and he used the crane itself to tug on the tree until the top part split away and fell, but not to the ground. It remained suspended by the rope (as it is in this picture), and then it was lowered carefully to the ground.

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If a tree falls in the neighborhood, does it make a sound? (Answer: yes.)

Next came the making of a stump.

I’m a treehugger. And a people hugger. Heck I’d be a slughugger if they had arms and weren’t slathered in slime. Years ago I would have thought there was “something wrong” with the scenes you just saw. Now I don’t see it that way. Now I see every death of every kind as the most inevitable occurrence there can be, and each death serves as a happy reminder as to why I’d best get my hugs in now.

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On June 19, I woke up in Ohio and I went to bed in California. Meanwhile, there were delays. My flight from Cleveland to Houston was a little late getting off the ground, which gave me only 20 minutes or so to walk from gate E14 to gate C32 at the Houston airport, a distance of eight restrooms and two Starbucks. When I got to gate C32, they were still boarding. I stood in line. I scuffled forward with my linemates. I handed my boarding pass to the attendant. The machine rejected my pass. “Where do you think you are going?” she asked. There have been many answers to this question over the years. Now I understand that there was, is, and forever shall be only one answer. “I am already there.” But I didn’t think that was the best answer in this situation, so I said, “San Francisco.” The attendant said, “Well this plane is going to New York. The gate for your flight has been changed. Your flight is departing from Gate 42. Walk back to the intersection and turn right.” She pointed toward a distant Starbucks.

I started walking like a trotting horse struggling to contain a gallop. Then I remembered. It’s all about just remembering. I remembered that nothing matters, as does everything. I remembered that if I miss my flight, I will retain total control over my own disappointment. I remembered that I have been training myself and taming myself for five years so that the thought of and the act of spending the night in an airport not only doesn’t hurt, but is actually perceived as and cashed in as an opportunity for even more training and more taming. Suddenly, I was walking calmly to gate 42, and I was smiling at people and myself, because I was free. There was nothing to fear at gate 42. So I was naturally experiencing the journey, because there was simply nothing else to do.

As I approached gate 42, I saw a standing crowd, so I knew my plane had not left yet. Years ago, I would have been walking quickly and nervously to gate 42, and upon seeing the crowd, I would have felt a huge sensation of relief. This time, seeing that I had not missed my flight gave me a very small tinge of relief, which I have come to understand to mean that I would have felt an equally small amount of anxiety had there been no crowd. And that’s what this is all about, this mindfulness thing. It’s about little or no anxiety or unhappiness about anything, even major physical damage or illness.

The woman with the microphone told us that the flight crew wasn’t here yet. The crew would be leaving nearby Hobby Airport soon and they’d be here in an hour or two. The crowd produced a collective groan. And now I had a fresh excuse to feel frustrated and disappointed. Which meant I had a new opportunity to put my training into practice. And I did. I stood tall, and I breathed in with full awareness that I was breathing in, and when I breathed out, I sent compassionate waves of understanding and mending to my crowd mates. It’s okay. It’ll be all right. We’ll get where we are going eventually. Let’s just relax together and enjoy the ride as best we can.

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