? (Notes From Nowhere #6*)

* Building from the Ground Up (Notes From Utopia #4) never made it online, mostly because I couldn’t find time to write it, much less get on the computer, though it was gonna include a really good George Harrison line...and the more I go inside, the more there is to see...and something from Godfrey Devereux quoted in a class here last Saturday...To push yourself beyond your limits will reduce and not expand them. Rather bring yourself gently to your current limit and stay there for a while; then your limits will naturally and easily expand...whatever...consider it the one that got away, while It’s Rough All Over (Notes From Samsara or a Dark Night of the Soul #5) was too dark, going on about how this place is kinda like a mental institution for people who aren’t particularly mentally ill...or a rehab for people who aren’t particularly addicted...at least, no more than most people...when the uncomfortable truth is that, when you can dare to look at it, just about everybody around you is carrying an almost unbearable amount of pain....culminating in our flight from the ashram following the day of intense silence to go sit in a noisy unconsecrated space and drink tequila...and yet unable to draw my eyes away from the T.V. set above the bar where horrifying images of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan ran on a continuous nightmare loop...and still I complain about having to do yoga all day...and you wouldn’t wanna read about that, wouldya?

Then there’s this post. I have no idea what it’s about.

It's Not Easy...

...there’s nothing more clichéd to be said about green than that it’s the color of spring...though that might be a perfect example of the dictum that a cliché becomes a cliché because it works...though that, as somebody pointed out in a movie...though I can’t remember which...is also a cliché...and, by now, the point that the cliché is a cliché might be as well...and thus far more old and tired than spring-like and green....I’d better start over...

...spring, like green, is more complicated than we might think...April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire...rising fresh and green from the comfortable dirt can be painful...things get buried for a reason...but spring brings it all back up...

...I tasted green for the first time in April 1983...seventeen and far too alienated and miserable to be too bothered that, according to all I’d been taught, green would quickly lead to heroin and death...it didn’t, was actually rather refreshing, for a while ...even if it ended up a dead vine that held on tight for far too long before finally peeling away....nowadays, I’d rather do yoga...

...or take a walk in the woods...consumed in luxuriant green....it’s hard not to be clichéd here, too...might as well give in to my inner muppet...why wonder, why wonder I’m green, guess that’s the way I wanna be...though it might never be the same after I ate that deep fried frog at that Chinese restaurant back in November...like chicken, but a lot more bones...so you're right, Kermit, it's not easy bein' green...

...even worse, though, would be talking about the environment...the green of photosynthesis, mountains, meadows, and life in general squaring off against the most all-consuming green of all...and guess which wins almost every time?...“green” labels seeming to represent the first serving only to bring more of the other to oil and pharmaceutical companies...

...god, is it possible to be more cynical and morose in writing about green?..those reading this in the archives, or the tropics or southern hemisphere might wanna note that it’s February in Philadelphia...my 43rd birthday rapidly approaching...(as mentioned previously, my sign of the Zodiac is Charlie the Three Toed Sloth...though I also share the day with the guy who wrote show me that I’m everywhere, and get me home for tea)...and green seems far away...

...in the end, though, green is a state of mind...I now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin wrote Walt Whitman...knowing, even though 37 back then was a lot older than 43 now, that a person can begin at any time...and, however misused, let’s face it, green will outlast us all...