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By Root 945 0

out the night on 301, about twelve miles away, and of course the distant occasional Diesel baugh of the Atlantic Coast Line passenger and freight trains going north and south to New York and Florida. A blessed night. I immediately fell into a blank thoughtless trance wherein it was again revealed to me “This thinking has stopped” and I sighed because I didn’t have to think any more and felt my whole body sink into a blessedness surely to be believed, completely relaxed and at peace with all the ephemeral world of dream and dreamer and the dreaming itself. All kinds of thoughts, too, like “One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls” and I reached out and stroked old Bob, who looked at me satisfied. “All living and dying things like these dogs and me coming and going without any duration or self substance, O God, and therefore we can’t possibly exist. How strange, how worthy, how good for us! What a horror it would have been if the world was real, because if the world was real, it would be immortal.” My nylon poncho protected me from the cold, like a fitted-on tent, and I stayed a long time sitting crosslegged in the winter midnight woods, about an hour. Then I went back to the house, warmed up by the fire in the living room while the others slept, then slipped into my bag on the porch and fell asleep.

The following night was Christmas Eve which I spent with a bottle of wine before the TV enjoying the shows and the midnight mass from Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York with bishops ministering, and doctrines glistering, and congregations, the priests in their lacy snow vestments before great official altars not half as great as my straw mat beneath a little pine tree I figured. Then at midnight the breathless little parents, my sister and brother-in-law, laying out the presents under the tree and more gloriful than all the Gloria in Excelsis Deos of Rome Church and all its attendant bishops. “For after all,” I thought, “Augustine was a spade and Francis my idiot brother.” My cat Davey suddenly blessed me, sweet cat, with his arrival on my lap. I took out the Bible and read a little Saint Paul by the warm stove and the light of the tree, “Let him become a fool, that he may become wise,” and I thought of good dear Japhy and wished he was enjoying the Christmas Eve with me. “Already are ye filled,” says Saint Paul, “already are ye become rich. The saints shall judge the world.” Then in a burst of beautiful poetry more beautiful than all the poetry readings of all the San Francisco Renaissances of Time: “Meats for the belly, and the belly for meats; but God shall bring to naught both it and them.”

“Yep,” I thought, “you pay through the nose for shortlived shows….”

That week I was all alone in the house, my mother had to go to New York for a funeral, and the others worked. Every afternoon I went into the piney woods with my dogs, read, studied, meditated, in the warm winter southern sun, and came back and made supper for everybody at dusk. Also, I put up a basket and shot baskets every sundown. At night, after they went to bed, back I went to the woods in starlight or even in rain sometimes with my poncho. The woods received me well. I amused myself writing little Emily Dickinson poems like “Light a fire, fight a liar, what’s the difference, in existence?” or “A watermelon seed, produces a need, large and juicy, such autocracy.”

“Let there be blowing-out and bliss forevermore,” I prayed in the woods at night. I kept making newer and better prayers. And more poems, like when the snow came, “Not oft, the holy snow, so soft, the holy bow,” and at one point I wrote “The Four Inevitabilities: 1. Musty Books. 2. Uninteresting Nature.3. Dull Existence. 4. Blank Nirvana, buy that boy.” Or I wrote, on dull afternoons when neither Buddhism nor poetry nor wine nor solitude nor basketball would avail my lazy but earnest flesh, “Nothin to do, Oh poo! Practically blue.” One afternoon I watched the ducks in the pig field across the road and it was Sunday, and the hollering preachers were screaming