Pink Clouds in the Sunset

[From June 17, 2013]

That's what I see right this second: Pink clouds rolling over and through each other sensually, freely as the sun is absorbed by the horizon, a spectacular end to a ruggedly revealed day...

I did not sleep last night. My mind looped over and over with all the failures and stupid mistakes in my past, like it used to before my IWALLK Odyssey of 2011.

Also, I lost my bed when I had to move. I've been sleeping on the floor, on some folded up blankets for the last three weeks. It's not too bad. I have found that if I fold each of three comforters in thirds - stacking them, and add a knitted blanket underneath them all, my hips and shoulders don't really dig into the floor as badly. But this is a kind of blanket statement I guess?

Even though the whole arrangement is no more than about 24 inches wide and 6 feet long, my three-legged cat Buddy can still sleep on the base of the blankets, and from years of self control in other beds I avoid kicking him.

I only sleep on my side. So about 45 minutes per side is all my hips and shoulders can handle. And by the time I get up in the morning my lower back is a mess. Thankfully, the remedy for that is to walk 5-12 miles a day if possible. Walking is also my transportation, heart medicine, mental writing time and time for meditation.

However, LAST night was a frustrating alternation between almost falling asleep and having to turn over to relieve my hips. By dawn the other folks in the house were up with the ubiquitous TV in the background, in the room next to mine, smoking cigarettes, coughing loudly, etc. We are separated by only a curtain. I was exhausted by that time, yet whenever sleep would begin to overtake me I snored and woke myself up.

When I finally, reluctantly, stood up after such complete frustration over night, I knew in my heart that I couldn't take much more... Something had to change.

I prepared my backpack for my daily walk. The sky was unusually clear, blue and bright after such a large amount of rain yesterday.

Finally, out the door and on my way, I felt that characteristically free and relieved sense of temporary peace that I always feel when headed down the road. It is my refuge, my sanctuary, the brilliance of being alive and able to go wherever I want I suppose. Walking is when I am most at peace.

I spent the day video documenting the route, that I might post the images on this revived blog. I also took the time to write down the names and addresses of the several restaurants, bars and pubs that I'd passed in the last several weeks, for later solicitation; to get my band a few gigs this summer.

By the time I'd reached the Naples Causeway (a 6 mile walk or so from my new "home"), I'd accomplished most of the walking goals for the day and sat on a bench peering out across Long Lake at a darkening and blurry carpet of thick grey clouds rolling in from the west, accumulating moisture as they licked at the lake. I rushed through a sandwich and some cranberry juice, while I carefully observed the trend of the distant rain growing ever closer and realized that it was working its way back in precisely the direction I would be retracing my steps on the journey home.

The urgency to begin the walk back became obvious. The blue sky and white clouds of morning were being chased southeastward by the the growing tempest of a series of thunderheads rising off the many lakes and western mountains of this region of Maine.

Video Images from the walk to Naples from Casco

I'm not an amateur hiker, and my blue poncho is always kept at the bottom of my backpack, just in case the worst should occur. Why do I call rain the "worst"? Because no weather related act of God is more uncomfortably received by the walker. Unremitting sun goes down. Blowing snow can be no problem with proper dress. Dark nights walking down unlit wilderness roads are only psychologically challenging... But rain - as a downpour - simply finds ways to penetrate all defenses and it is very difficult to get dry again. In addition the backpack becomes a burden. Flipping the back of the poncho over it raises the base of the poncho up past my shorts' pockets. But not covering the backpack means it will be completely soaked.

This time I elected, if such misfortune struck, to not cover the backpack, because I knew that the only non-waterproof item was my notebook. I knew that no matter what got wet I would be home within 2 hours of leaving the bench and could dry it all out.

I did remarkably well time wise; reaching the 3rd of 6 miles without a drop. Then... There it was, drop number one, streaking over my right cheek, like the spark of a wet falling star.

It was not an ideal spot to venture off the road to en-poncho myself, being the soft shoulder of a sharp curve on Route 11 (speed limit 45 mph). But better to do it then, than in the midst of the deluge to come, when I would risk moistening the interior of the poncho--obviously defeating the purpose.

It wasn't long before the poncho was on, snapped and hooded. I strapped the backpack back on and continued slogging in the loosening sand. Huge drops pelted everything; soft wet bullets... It seemed as though it might even hail.

On I marched. I felt as if I was in the worst part of a tragic movie. Eighteen wheel trucks, dump trucks, cement trucks, and logging trucks raced past me to my right. It was obvious that they were trying not to cast the puddles on the road to my legs, but there was no avoiding it.

After 20 minutes of nearly complete watery immersion, headed home in what I have been lately seeing as my non-life, only to face a broken computer (I typed this by clicking each letter on an onscreen keyboard, since my regular keyboard failed a couple weeks ago), another night of uncomfortable sleep on the floor, in a room that is not my own and a far cry from private, with no money, one or two meals a day, seemingly no prospects, and while remembering - perhaps magnifying in my memory - the almost mythical (though purely material) life I once enjoyed, but hated, spiritually, only a few short years ago... then... right then... I GOT it!

I stopped for a moment.

It suddenly occurred to me what it really means to live in the NOW. That's what I am getting closer to. I'd always considered that my past was gone and my future was incredibly uncertain. But now I surmised that futures never arrive. I also realized that if that were so, neither past nor future could exist. And therefore, even the NOW itself didn't really exist. After all, by the time any moment is being comprehended - in Truth - it has already passed by and never is the "next" future moment arriving, because to comprehend that next moment means it has already become a non-future moment. Terence McKenna called the running consciousness moment "the smallest datum of felt experience." To me there at the side of street that datum WAS/IS/WILL BE Eternity.

This concept had been working its way through my pea brain for a while. At that same time earlier this morning I had psychologically searched for clarification of my own strange life's wanderings in recent years; why I had dumped the distracting complexities of a job as a office supervisor, left my $1,000 per month apartment, largely given up automobile travel and stepped out into the fringes of society full of the shadows that are ignored and even despised by all the people who feel they instead must shun simplicity in favor of such man made complexity.

When I left all of that, I trusted that the Creator was actually encouraging me personally to find a more substantial and long lasting form of satisfaction. And today was the long-awaited confirmation that that was indeed the answer to my search for peace of mind; there should be no respect for conventionality.

As I stood there slack-jawed in a kind of silent astonishment, the rain stopped. A warm breeze billowed over my poncho and the iPod battery died.

When I finally got home I knew that I had been to a separate lucid-dream-like reality. No friend of mine knew where I was anyway on that walk and in a positive sense, no one would have cared. Thankfully, my house mates all had the rare opportunities to leave for the night, giving me a refreshing spot of privacy - a bit of comfort - that I hadn't known for months. Then I took a cleansing shower and dried myself off. And to top it off, I received word that several people were offering ways of getting me a new computer.

Now these might have been fortuitous events, but they were hardly either answers to prayers (I never presume to pray for such trivial, non-spiritual solutions to my struggles in this regard). They were not miracles. They were just commonplace, though still pleasurable, and they came at just the right time.

Their values in the context of my current thinking though were that they are typical of the Creator's action within my minds. 

Collectively speaking, when we struggle and claw our way through homelessness, hunger, danger, darkness, uncertainty, pain, social rejection, and seemingly unending chains of disappointment, because we are following that inner voice, we are setting ourselves up for the maximum amount of spiritual growth in our NOW (or smallest datum of experience). Our Final selves are waking; our souls are becoming literally conscious, as they "dream" already resident in our destinies.

What makes the enlightenment typical - what gives it that Flavor - is all the petty, material things in the world that by "chance" become just a tiny bit more stabilized as icing on the cake; by running smoother. When we actually ACT upon the sometimes socially "insane" Suggestions that arise within us for finding the spiritual goals that we truly desire, we come to places in our lives where we suddenly understand how we are supposed to feel. We are meant to be joyful!

As long as I can keep this lesson in mind I believe I could reach a point where every day can end with pink clouds in the sunset, and the satisfaction of where I am NOW; without worries about the past or anxieties about the future.