me in the studio

when you die

WHEN YOU DIE, and you’re wandering through the bardos, you’ll be terrorized by various demons. You’ll be very very afraid. But the important thing to remember is that, however terrifying the demons seem to be, they’re not real and they can’t hurt you. Remember that. Just keep going. They’re not real and they can’t hurt you.

twig

lycan

indestructible dog toy

MARY says this new indestructible dog toy, for once, is actually indestructible. So far, at least, her dogs have not succeeded in destroying it.

i am a bunny

THERE’S A BOOK called I AM A BUNNY. It’s about this bunny named Nicholas who lives in a HOLLOW TREE, and when you turn the pages he hops from season to season.

the wisdom of the body

BOTH BUDDHA and Jesus showed us that the surest way to propagate wisdom is to embody it. God embodied in human form, in the case of Christianity. And in the case of Buddhism, realizing through contemplation and meditation that the ultimate seat of intelligence is not some lofty conceptual fabrication.

very moist lichen

sisters on the run

INTRIGUED by a small headline in the state roundup section of the newspaper this morning — Sisters arrested for stealing from casino. What a delicious little Louisiana story, I thought to myself, grabbing my cup of coffee and sitting down to read more. Nuns stealing from a casino! I do love a good nun story. Then when I read the article, turns out the sisters weren't nuns. They were just sisters.

indestructible

MARY says this new indestructible dog toy, for once, is actually indestructible. So far, at least, her dogs have not succeeded in destroying it. Which reminds me of my own indestructible toy I played with when I was a young boy. Fast-forward forty years — I can pull it down from the closet upstairs and play with it just like I used to. One of those chunky plastic oblong stackt cubes games where you have to shuttle a small white ball from one end of the oblong to the other with a TWIST of the yellow KNOB, a PIVOT of the green DIAL and an in-and-out SLIDE of the red LEVER, or maybe it was blue. Forty years of use, and it still works just the same. When it turns sixty it'll still be working. So far — indestructible. Not many toys you can say THAT about. To me that’s what a good poem is: an indestructible dog toy. You can use it over & over but you can never use it up.

picking up the pieces

ONE OF MY PATIENTS is a young man, twenty years old, who sustained a brain injury last year after shooting himself in the head. He can’t remember how it happened, which is commonly the case with injuries of this magnitude. There’s often a chunk of memory from the days or hours leading up to the injury that’s lost, as well as a period of time after the injury during which the person cannot remember any details. Sometimes the amnesia goes back for months, often erasing major events such as getting married, the loss of a family member or having children. In this case, he can't recall what led him to shoot himself, so it has remained somewhat of a mystery.

nutria skull

rose hill

BEFRIENDED a roadrunner on my bike ride up Rose Hill this morning. This is not a dream. I actually met a roadrunner. Ok, maybe befriended is too strong a word, but we definitely had a moment together.

author note

STEPHEN KING likens the job of a writer to that of an archaeologist. He’s come to the conclusion, after writing the books he’s written, that writers don’t make up stories as much as they unbury them:

visitation

A CROW cawed. We’re haunted by crows, I thought. But the thought escaped me before I finished thinking it. Then the crow left.

the sunrise

THE SUNRISE was pink glaze scraped across lavender gingerbread, a nuclear orange jellybean playing peek-a-boo through the treeline. It was rippling lavender bayou water mirroring the sky’s pink sugar. It was a duo of bluejays reconnoitering overhead, squawking like pterodactyls.