The color and taste
of our mental space
is the air
the spirit breathes

You have to wind down a bit. Relax. Corral your thoughts. Abandon them. Deep breath. Have some air. Easier said than breathed, though. Still, give it a go. Better, no?

Air, about four-fifths nitrogen and one-fifth oxygen, plus a small percentage (as in around 1%) of other stuff, such as hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and, yes, some water as well.

All that in with every breath. The oxygen-hungry lungs grab all they can and pass it on to the equally oxygen-hungry blood for immediate forwarding to the…

Who made such a world
Where for one being to live
another must die?

This, I admit, is a recurring theme because it is a thought and a notion and a perplexity and a question that refuses to leave me alone.

Here it is expressed for the first time (well, for my first time) in a five-seven-five Wolfku, and it states my quandary quite clearly: on this planet (and for all I know, in this universe) we have to compete for food, and in this competition someone always has to die, whether that someone is a blade of grass, a…

I don’t remember whether I began writing this song in England or in New York, but I do remember that somewhere along the line I felt it to be a tribute to Mike Heron, my early inspiration in all things music and spirit.

Looking back I also see that this is one of those songs (and there are quite a few in my oeuvre) that more or less wrote itself, pressing my voice and fingers into willing service.

And I still wonder today whether the heart of song is not where all true and virtuous poets end up when they…

I have read my share of weight-loss and healthy-eating books, some quite fantastic (like Fit for Life by the Diamonds, which still stands out as a direction-turner for me), some not worth mentioning — obviously written not to help but to make a quick $Million or two.

Looking back over this small sea of books — okay, perhaps a lake — two books stand out as not only a cut, but an Everest, above the rest.

The first, and the most impressive of all, is Eat to Live by Dr. …

Aging

We have now come to the longer-life part of the story. Here I cannot offer conclusive personal experience to back my take on Earth Alone and my exercise routine, i.e., that they are conducive to long life — check back in forty or so years. But what follows is as much common sense as it is based on the fact that at seventy-this-year and counting I feel not a day over thirty, and that at the last checkup the doc said I had the blood pressure of a teenager (a healthy one, we assume).

Aging is of course a…

Mennas, the Patriarch of Constantinople — at one time slim as monk, now stout as patriarch — found it hard to relax, hard to stop his labored pacing back and forth of his chambers: from his overly ornate writing desk, to his sofa (unused this night), to his window looking out on the square — filled this morning with stalls of many colors, farmers and their goods, pot makers, metal workers, many trades. They had begun arriving even before sunrise and he had been vaguely aware of the rumble of wheel on stone, of the neighing of horses and the…

One fundamental
problem
is that Life
is addicted to Living

Let go.

Two words. Two syllables. And so incredibly much easier said than done.

The Buddha Gotama puts this down first to craving and then to its intensified sibling clinging. Craving and clinging to what?

The answer: pleasant feelings.

And, he hastens to add, that sense of a Self that experiences the pleasant feelings. This Self, a continuous and elaborate construct, always in flux and always unpinpointable (really), seems the most valuable possession ever. Anything to not lose that.

And so, when Death comes a-knocking, “Okay, folks, drink up, closing…