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So I have kinda finished the design for this tee shirt gig about Tom Robbins coming to San Miguel.  I am taking the finished product to Mexico City on Saturday morning to see about  production…this should be a challenge and an adventure.  The guys are down at the Chapel creating the bottle encrusted walls…this is very outrageous…I will hopefully have some photos next week.  The roof has been totally tiled and grouted…My next project here is percolating…I may need to put a fire under my idea burner and let inspiration have it’s due and then I will dive into the whoop-de-do of it all and follow the listening…it will happen…is this posting
vague enough for you?  Am I succeeding in masking my verbal smokescreen enough to hide the fact that I feel a bit empty of ideas?  I must put that inner editor on vacation…I am listening way too much to garbageous thoughts…I just made up that word:  garbageous or is it spelled garbagous?  My o my…I do know that I have gessoed the panel three times and possibly I have come to the door…now, Anado, just turn the knob…open open open

Richard just sent me this photo taken awhile back…maybe 2000?  God I have had white hair for a long time….does this mean I am permanently old?  Lolita?  How do you deal with this possibility in yourself?  The rest of you who never  leave comments, how do you deal with it?  I guess, I am an aging groover too…as they used to say at the Donut Shop on Stanyan Street way back when (1967)…"I can dig it…if you can dig it…."

…it was all about me until I looked up.  I remember it clearly like it was yesterday.  I used to drive a cab in New York back in the 70’s.  My vision was always street level.  I rarely looked up.  Then one day, I was on Chambers Street heading for the Brooklyn Bridge.  For some reason, maybe it was the books I was reading at the time, I gazed up.  It was as if the sky opened a thousand doors at once.  My survival instincts made room for something much more…something grand and ordinarily exquisite.  Later I learned that a phenomena known as "opening your heart" had occured.  Bittersweet tears became my companion.  It was not to be confused with sentimentality….it was the knowing of something more…something beyond me but connected to me at the same time.  Oh sure, I forget about this all the time, but it always occurs again.  My friend Carolyn calls it the magic…the chord that connects the whole thing…sometimes it is referred to as
the Big Enchilada…perhaps that is what beckoned me to Mexico…hmmmmm

I had some visitors yesterday, Kirstin, Fay, and Sharon.  Fay lives in LA and Kirstin and Sharon live here, but both of them are from LA.  When I was sixteen, I almost ran away to LA to be a surfer.  Not only was I baptized by the Beatles, I was also in sacramental association with early Beach Boys music.  LA was the capital of cool and Oklahoma City was a far off waste station.  I waited till I was 18 to make my pilgrimage to the Endless Summer.  All the kids were so absolutely cool, I was in awe of the culture and felt that I had reached heaven.  My social skills limited me to just one of the many numbers gathered on the golden sands.  I did see Wally from "Leave it to Beaver", buying a frozen chocolate covered banana.  I wanted so much to be a part of the scene, but I wasn’t ready.  The girls with ironed hair and the boys in their Pendleton shirts just looked past me…I was a face in the crowd…a Wanna-be.  Now I just wanna-be here…there is no Endless Summer…just forever and ever and that is where I am…and in this photo: surrounded by California Girls!

This is an urgent message that I am sending to myself:  "Don’t grow old and angry!"  I find myself (due to weird childhood), reacting to situations time and again.  When, if I step back, I can respond while riding my breath.  I heard Bhagwan say so many things.  Words that I felt were penetrating my being and leading me to my own Noble Truth.  My tricky little mind (product of that same childhood), however, huffs and puffs and threatens to burn the whole house down in any situation that I find remotely uncool in my match stick Cathedral of Do-Right.  Amidst it all, I recall that Bhagwan once said that if one really listens…really listens…you will hear Existence calling you back to yourself.  Back home…where the deer and the antelope roam in the interior of the silence within the silence…where there is no around the block or shock and awe..only the silent whisper calling me home.

Lucy would be happy with me.  I have been slowly simmering a dislike for the people across the road who are always playing their music.  What I need to learn, is that living in Mexico, one must learn to accept a non-democratic soundtrack in one’s life here.  However, is it not nice to sometimes just hear the birds sing and the burros neigh?  But such is life.   Today I had stepped out on the patio to read a Tom Robbins book that I am
researching, when I heard the crackle of flames on dry brush.   There was a grass fire across the road that was threatening one of the houses on the neighbor’s land.  Kath and Liz, our neighbors were up above on their side of the road tryng to combat the blaze with a hose from Carlos’ house where there is essentially no water pressure.   The wind had picked up and there was the chance that the fire might jump across the cobblestones to our land.  I ran across the road to tell the boss there was a fire threatening his property.  He actually thanked me as I went back to our house to get a hose to water down the upper part of our property.  He sent his gardener up the hill with two buckets of water…when the kid ran out, I filled his buckets from our hose..anyhow the blaze was extinguished and all is well.  Maybe now I have ace in hand at the Karma Cotillion… perhaps now the music may be lowered now and then.  Ahh the Grace of the Universe.  Not only do I love life, but I love Lucy!