2023-01-09 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Monday 🗓 Date: January 9, 2023 📅 Week: Jan 9 – Jan 15, 2023

It’s once again raining pretty heavily in San Francisco. I quite like the sound of water outside my windows, like the water sprayed across your window in a car wash. But I do worry a bit about my retreat tomorrow — partially worried about just driving out there and partially worried about walking around the grounds if it’s terribly muddy. I suppose much of the purpose of the retreat is in the sitting, but it’d be nice to be able to do kinhin outside at least some of the time. Oh well, relinquishing of preferences and all that.

I don’t really have much on my mind this morning. I’m a little tired, but I actually woke up around 6 of my own accord today. I explicitly took melatonin and tried to sleep around 10 last night, so the math kinda checks out I suppose.

I need to get some water. One second.

Alright, I’m back. Thanks for your patience.

Last night I did several hours of work for a reason I don’t totally understand. I just realized, ah, there’s a bunch of stuff I can go ahead and do, so I did it. None of it was particularly important, but it felt good. I always try and be wary of “snacking” work, but also this work is mostly pretty useful actually, at least in the near term.

I’m digging a bit for something to talk about. Maybe if I just keep typing the words, something will come out of me, like dew forming on the grass in the early morn. It’s not that I have nothing to write about, it’s that my inner monologue has nothing in particular going on. I feel a bit sleepy, a bit hungry. Whole Foods doesn’t open for another hour and I don’t have any food in the apartment, so I’m going to go the ultimate lazy way and just get the prepared breakfast from there. It’s always Good Enough and I don’t really feel compelled to go much beyond that. Especially with breakfast, where I feel like I just need something and exactly what it is isn’t all that important. In fact, I’m drinking this glass of water and I can tell that even just that is causing my stomach to wake up a bit.

A few weeks ago, I had this terrible stomach flu and I was either on my bed or by my toilet for about 4 days straight. One of the weirder outcomes of that is that I feel like in the last month or so, I’ve been far more aware of how my gut feels. For example, when I get into bed, I often can tell that I’m actually ready to fall asleep when my stomach growls and kinda shifts a bit in my belly. It’s as if it were softening and going alright time to shut things down. I imagine other parts of my body do the same thing, but my stomach is pretty vocal about it.

Those sorts of shifts in the body are always kinda weird to me. The other example that comes to mind is what happens when I become more mentally present. It’s that feeling of going from default mode network to the non-default, and it often feels like some weird combination of my mind “moving forward” in my head combined with the “shimmering” sensation in the rest of the body. Zen masters always talk about the “brightness of mind” that comes with shikantaza, and similar effects are mentioned in deeper concentration states like the jhanas. I wonder if “brightness of body-mind” is maybe more accurate, given that I feel some effects all over the place. In fact, reaching that state often means having the mind cede more control to the body and letting it “just be,” which seems to me to be whole point of the exercise anyways.

All in all, I’ve really come back to Zen and Metta practices over insight practices. I understand the value of insight practices, but they’ve ended up feeling a lot like navel-gazing, peering into the mind and trying to study it as if it were just in some test tube in a lab somewhere. When you poke it this way, these are the series of mental movements it makes. Write that down, write that down! Zen feels more spacious and playful, where you can set up this big wide field of potential experiences, and then as things enter that field of awareness, you can see what happens. Ah I’ve got some joy here today. There’s also some grief waiting in the winds, let’s see what happens when they’re both in the field together; ah I feel something behind my eyes when that happens, how interesting! Maybe it’s just my own personal take on the practice, but the latter feels more fun. Not sure if that’s actually a goal or not, but it’s kept me going back to the cushion recently, which is about all I can ask for.

I get so distracted by Twitter, fuck that. I feel like it’s the biggest barrier to ever finishing these morning pages, or at least they’re the reason they can sometimes take me an hour or so. I think these really should just be stream-of-consciousness, let things flow and keep going and never look back until boom-clap-sound-of-my-heart I have 1500 words on the page and no you can’t tell me otherwise. Like I want these to be slightly nonsensical and going just a little too fast to the point where I feel like I might veer off the edge, driving down the highway by the coast going over the speed limit so it feels like the car might tip over. And I don’t really even know what all will come out of this, certainly not the most useful material in the world, but rather a sense of abandon, the blaseball-type-beat where anything could happen, nothing really matters but also everything excruciatingly matters. Who knows what could happen next, perhaps eaten by crows or bursting into flames or spending the week reading a nice novel or getting sucked up into a UFO (universally fiery object). I honestly don’t know what most of this means but I also don’t think I’m supposed to. The more I’m writing this, the more I feel like I’m writing a manifesto about creativity but that’s assuredly not what I’m doing — I don’t know anything about that yet, but I suddenly do feel like there’s fire in my lungs and I just need to keep coming back to that over and over and over until it just doesn’t go away because it’s what’s keeping me warm right now. Explosions, Toxitown, DATURA, I read Coin Locker Babies a while back but didn’t finish it because halfway through, things just lost all their steam. Things felt absurd but not really in the good way, more in the Okay I get it kind of way, which isn’t fun.

Ah, a paragraph break. That last one was getting long. I see the appeal of writing the whole thing in one long paragraph, in one big fat steaming nonsensical shit pile, but that’s not really too fun to look at now is it. It’s kinda like when people write novels that are all one sentence. I guess I see why that sort of constraint can be interesting, but as a reader it’s like okay so do I actually have to read 1000 pages in one sitting because there’s literally no breaks in this. You’ve got to be pragmatic to some degree — if your book is more than ~300 pages, it’s practically impossible to read in one sitting, so you better damn well give me a spot to take a break. I don’t know how much writers normally think about their readers, but there’s the Vonnegut book “pity the reader” which to some degree is the thought I’m having right now — give them space to breathe, to process what the writer is saying, and then to come back when they’re prepared to keep going.

I’ve only got about ninety more words from this point on, so let me take the chance to say this: you’re not inferior to anyone. I love you. I’ll see you in tomorrow’s morning pages. Ah shit well I still have about 50 more words to shoehorn in here, but I love those words and think they’re the perfect thing to say to those you love, and I love you. Shit, all of these sentences keep coming to poignant endings but I need to hit the 1500 word mark so here we gooooo (said in the voice of Mario) ah there we go, okay now goodbye love you much smooch.