You Don't Need What You Need











A wise friend of mine, a child therapist, Dr. Leah Levinger, had a method. Get rid of any book you haven't read in 5 years. I don't think that would work for me. I have a lot of books I reference and reread. But one of the teachers at the morning meditation group I go to donated 500 books a month ago to Symphony Space; and while my wife and son were out of the country for three weeks, I set a goal to match her number. And I did.

It helped organize the apartment but the paring wasn't that dramatic. The emptied bookshelves became sparse; the sparse became full, as I reorganized the overpopulation. There are a lot of paper citizens left, but they look and feel great, more ordered, in place.

This has been something I do from time to time; but this time took out a nice chunk. I am pleased.

I got rid of other things too. Magazines which would make a pile more than half as tall as me, do-hickies, thingamabobs, mementos, a lesser cello and bassoon we upgraded. And I remembered a warning, I think from a Feng Shui book, that when you get rid of a clutter of items, expect that right away you are going to need something you threw out.

Well, I did. I got rid of a dozen small picture frames. Then my wife returned with two sepia photos of her grandfather in his Buddhist robes which I wanted to frame.

I think there is part of one's old personality that wants to stay when we change. It likes to cling to possessions and habits and look for a way to say, "See, I did need that." And what the soul yearns for, it makes manifest.

We often have an ambivalence as we progress spiritually. We get rid of clutter, we let go of people we have outgrown, we eliminate poor food habits, we set new disciplines. But we need to not be afraid when afterward, these were not obviously the right decisions. They were.

It is quite the same with meditation. We think we have to think though something, try to remember something else, follow an interesting thought path that comes up, or even cut the meditation short to get some work done, write, make phone calls. But meditation begins as a letting go and focusing, noticing as your brain speed slows to alpha, delta, or Wow! theta; quieting the mind which says it needs its thoughts.

But if we persist, we find that we didn't need what we need. And we progress. We may find "the tunnel" and move up it to that other place. Or get clear messages, "Don't write that book now, move to Montana and raise goats," directions that go contrary to what seems right, but come from a place which connects to the universe, not our cluttered thoughts. And somehow we just know, that was the answer was right. Or we manifest the person or money or opportunity later in the day. But it will start with getting rid of the clutter. And it will often feel like a mistake as soon as we let go.

I am adding to this post afterward.

I started the original post the night before, finished it early that morning, then went off to my meditation group. After our meditation, people started talking about how they the liked the space we were in - the way the architect designed it in an oval, and it's comforting emptiness.

The leader then spoke about when people would visit her on Cape Cod years ago and loved her home. It had nothing in it. She had left New York and had sold her extensive collection of Chinese art, her books, furniture and much more.

Her friends thought she needed money and offered to buy her possessions and hold them for her until she could redeem them. But that wasn't the case. She just felt she wanted to let things go.

Her story was a nice, little coincidence to my writing this.

No Wonder I had So Many Cups Too Wash











I had been clearing out no longer wanted items from our apartment for weeks, and that turned things upside down.

Yesterday, in an all night marathon of my last minute, frantic cleanup before my wife and son arrived back from Japan, I found an old page of practice writing of my son's. It made all the frenetic work I had to put into cleaning up the apartment pay off. I think I may steal it for the first line of one of my stories.

"A few days ago the toothfaire came and drinked all our coffee"

Snowstormlessness













I read a woman's description of herself today. She is in her 30s and lives in Florida. She said she never saw snow.

I feel sad for her. I would not want to miss a year of snows.

On a more serious note, for the past month we have been worried over my friend's 15 year old son who had had cancer for years. He lost one eye and nearly another to it.

Other than that he is now fine and the cancer appears gone, it seems. But, for the past month, after an operation to remove a cataract, his vision got cloudy instead of better. He could just about not see at all. A second operation three days ago was to clear the eye of blood and debris. Now his vision is much better and expected to clear even more week by week.

I thought of the things I would miss seeing. People's faces most of all. Trees and stars. The ocean beach. Small things like birthday candles and the color of the shirt my son picked out for the day. My wife's earrings. A pianist's hands while he plays. It's been said that we first taste food with our eyes. Books, I love the intimacy of paper words in my hands.

And yes, I would miss seeing seeing snow. Snow changes the whole world around us in a beautiful way. But if friends could tell me it was snowing out, and if I could feel it and smell the air, that would be OK. In this week's pilot for the new TV show, Covert Operations, a blind CIA operative tells the protagonist that he doesn't need to see a woman to know she's beautiful, he just listens to the way other men talk to her.

I would rather give up chocolate than snow. To those who know me, that says a lot. Even the chocolate from the basement of this one, old department store in Japan.

We must be careful not to miss our opportunities. Each time I visit Japan, I bring a book to deepen my feeling of being there. One such book mentioned these weary travelers who, 20 years ago or so, stopped to sleep at a monks' place. The monks encouraged them to see their treasure, it was on view. But they were tired and decided to decline, just go to sleep and see it in the morning. They woke up and asked to see the treasure. A monk apologized and said it was only on view for that day. "Maybe next time," the travelers said. "When do you think it will shown again," they asked. "I don't know," the monk replied, the last time before this was in the year 1230.

If you open for a big rock band, you can get a ton of exposure. I worked selling real estate years ago with a woman who looked like Rhea Perlman, (Carla from the Cheers TV show). Eventually, her boyfriend David F. came and worked with us too. He told me he was once in a band when the Beatles came and toured America; and they were asked to tour and open for the fab four. But David said it was cool then to turn things down. They could have been rich and famous.

In Judaism, you are supposed to run when you have the opportunity to do a good deed, you don't know if it will pass quickly or if you will ever have the chance again.

I hope the young, snowstormless lady gets and takes an opportunity to see snow very soon. And that my friend's son will get to see many more years of snow.

The Best Book Ever?













That was what I was asked after reading. . .

"Have you ever read a book that is soooo good it blows all the others out of the water? Last month this happened to me. Seriously every book I reviewed on my blog the year prior went down a notch in my five-star rating system."

What about you, my reader, the BEST? I thought about a bit about this, myself.

As I had learned to type by retyping The Catcher in The Rye, no matter how great another book is, this will always retain its own special dimension.

Cummings' 95 poems comes close to perfection in its category.

Recently, Victory Finlay's non-fiction, Color, introduced me to our world as if for the first time; and also The Cello Suites by Eric Siblin. Read it even if you aren't a musician.

Perhaps I will write elsewhere of music books - of the only theory/composing book to consider; about a book that Julliard wishes wasn't; and on a book that is an advanced technical study on how to play the recorder, but which remains very human.

Not the book itself, but now listening to the text and fine explanations by Jean, a brilliant friend and teacher (in his 90s and dying of cancer), as he explains the stories in a book by Aragon; by it teaching us French at his dining room table. But the book itself too; for Aragon's way of expressing himself is, among any writer's I have encountered, the most similar in thought process behind some of my own poetry. It makes me feel less lonely. And more so too, with Jean reading to us.

My most intimate facts have been learned privately with teachers, but one or a few.

Surely, I exaggerated just now. And one exception was Tides and the Pull of the Moon, where I learned the moon does not circle the earth but the moon and earth, each other; and so, apples do not fall, they and the earth merely are trying to circle each other's center; the center of the earth being so down deep, the apple appears to be falling straight towards that middle.

For sheer depth and breath, the immense Torah commentary, MeAm Loez is unrivaled, building upon Rashi, the Talmud and other tomes.

In the other direction, there is this tiny, Beatrix Potter sized book, odd as small, in translation from Japanese, The Illustrated Book of Living Things by Momoko Sakura. Just get it. Intimate recountings of her meeting various species and wonderful, amateur illustrations. (James Thurber once told his "NYer" editor that he was going to take a drawing class. The editor told him it would ruin his terrible style. Likewise, Momoko San's paintbrush is warmly naive in its own way.)

Incidentally, Ms. Potter choose her small book size for small hands, she said. Of hers, I love Ginger and Pickles, whose title characters were a cat and dog. I love it for the following quote, Edward Gorey worthy. . .

"The shop was also patronized by mice - only the mice were rather afraid of Ginger. Ginger usually requested Pickles to serve them, because he said it made his mouth water. 'I cannot bear.' said he, 'to see them going out at the door carrying their little parcels .' 'I have the same feeling about rats,' replied Pickles, 'but it would never do to eat our own customers; they would leave us and go to Tabitha Twitchit's.' 'On the contrary, they would go nowhere,' replied Ginger gloomily.

As firstborns of man get birthrights and double blessings, the same holds true for novels. Don Quixote says it all and so well that all the authors in all the lands could have stopped there. We struggle within what we believe is happening, but with grave delusions of what is, though this does not decrease the import of our quests.

(OK, "first western novel," the appellation of first novel is more accurately awarded to Lady Murasaki's pen.) I love The Tale of Gengi's beginning. But when my wife was given a choice to study that or The Pillow Book, she choose the latter, a great little work by a horrible court lady and so much more interesting. My wife chose well.

And I see no need for me or any to attempt to write "The Great American Novel." It was already written and has Atticus Finch in it and a real guest appearance of Truman Capote as a child. It is so America.

The early Peanuts books, The Hobbit, 100 Years of Solitude, Moby Dick, the first Harry Potter for it's escorting us into another, here world, flawed though its world structure is. The Dark is Rising series, maybe partly because my wife introduced it to me. The greats have been well thumbed and acolladed with good reasons.

(Well, I guess "Moby Dick" was a previous "The Great American Novel," and it could be time for a third.)

I can't imagine another book that would notch down Bilbo's tale.

And my favorite quote in any of these or between some other covers? It comes from the book on how to play the recorder. You will have to write me if you want it. It's not earth shattering, but important.

(Ohh, I just had a thought. Imagine, as a child, being tucked into the covers of your bed; and the top cover is an imprint of the cover of your favorite book. Or even now, what book would you choose?)