Little Ramble #38

Published in Kosmos Journal, 2020

A fire in the wood stove.
A long-haired girl cat stretched out on my legs.
A friend's essay to read and comment.
And a perfect spider web hanging between two vertical lines of cable that come to the house. Delicate, drooping threads of silk dotted with droplets of water strung like silver beads, and not a single tear.

I think that I can't write to you about this because spider webs have been "done before," the poets and authors of children's books and photographers and painters all in awe. To write about this would be
like painting a sunflower in a field in southern France.

But there it is and I want to share it with you in all its curvilinear perfection. Its creator is absent and there is no prey caught in its web for me to say, "Better luck next time." It is just this work of art
hanging outside my window, in a gentle rain, with a wood fire, a cat on my legs, and a story to read about someone's perfect marriage disintegrating.

Good Enough. For Now

Excerpt (published in Fourth Genre, 2015)

I didn’t hear the sudden thud. I was busy doing things. But I did hear my lover’s cry, “Lauren, come. Quick.” I ran to the bedroom. There she was, still in bed, her beautiful bald head covered in a black sleep cap, her reading glasses perched half-way down her nose. “Quick, lock the cat door, a bird just slammed into the window.” I hesitated for a moment because I had thought it was she who needed help, that she was throwing up or falling down, the chemo causing horrible symptom #32. But she was fine. It was the look in the beautiful blue-eyes of my girl cat, an excited, crazed look that she gets when prey is near, that launched me into action. . .

The Full Catastrophe

Excerpt (published in Memoir Magazine, Nov. 2017)

I am almost a Buddhist, the kind that hangs out on the threshold and pays attention, tries to be mindful every day, and who also eats meat, and is fond of irreverence. I am also a wanderer, rarely returning to the same place twice. But for over forty years I have returned to the Tassajara Zen Center in Carmel Valley every summer but one. The place sets me right; I think of it as guerencia, a Spanish word that means, the heart's true home. Every year, I am among the intrepid souls who are good drivers, whose cars are in good shape, and who are willing to hazard the last hour drive down a steep, deeply rutted, dirt road with a few hundred foot drop off on one side. This road has defeated many a car and driver. The sense of entering in takes on layered meaning . . .