Okay, the first of my purgatorial practice logs, narrative excursions, and literary crappola---
Practice log/April 18, 2020/sesshin day 6/sit 2/0:05:05
This may be the only place i ever do this, but since it all
comes down to this single prayer right now, and this asshole with its gift and
pain, and this breath which could stop at any moment and solve every problem, i
wanted to be explicit about my prayer, my specific, evolutionary state of the
art prayer, which had its seed in 1985, when i was banished from the most
powerful deep-all-in community experience i’ve had until DhO. “Left the
commune,” as they say. I ended up dark nighting something awful, and on days
when i couldn’t conceive of a sentence or write a meaningful word, i used to
sit for the whole designated four morning hours first thing of my writing time
at stare at the blinking cursor on the screen of my word processing program
(Word Perfect 4, i think, for techo-history wonk geeks in the audience; the
commune used Apple stuff then and i was pissed at them). Being also the slave
of the writerly puritan work ethic, as well as clearly Called by the Lord, on a
Mission from God, like the Blues Brothers--
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz9F_YmD6MU --- to WRITE GREAT FUCKING NOVELS, it was clear that to write
those great fucking novels i would have to get down words down first. So from
the depths of dissolution or fear or misery or disgust, i would lift one finger
on a journal page and type, one letter at a time, with whatever interval
between letters proved necessary, usually finding a pace along the way---“and
so, begin again--- with this breath”. (I had already done my zen rounds and my
ashram rounds, and most of my mat time at that point was variations on watching
my breath.) Over the years, this technique held up after cycles and cycles had
pretty much obliterated everything else several time. Eventually i started
adding the occasional praise to the mantra--- “no hurry,” was the first, “no
fear,” came next: self-talk within the prayer on faith and what it took to type
the next letter. Eventually, over the decades, through a tangled evolutionary
bush of variants and periods and shit hitting fans and fans charging in to beat
the shit out of shit, i arrived at a very stable prayer of thirteen distinct
phrase/beats, which in times when i actually wrote it out in my journal at the
worst of writer’s block/dark nighting, would look like this:
“with this gift of prayer, let me first love You--- no hurry--- no fear--- patiently---
gratefully--- humbly--- attend--- abide--- accept--- embrace--- and not i---
You breathe--- Thy will be done.”
I didn’t say amen, that fucked me up somehow. I think because i just went through so many times of hating every fucking
syllable of every fucking thing, and those last two syllables of "a-men" just didn’t hold up through those, though the others did. Don’t get me wrong: this is not a I Never Wavered in MY Prayer thing. I’m just saying that as the dust settles around my now from this Most Recent Major Fuck-iup, So Much Like a Death, Except Still Painful, that is the prayer i find myself with, and to me it feels like it was first inscribed on a cave wall somewhere in Africa maybe 50 or 60,000 years ago and has been handed down from inscriber to inscriber unchanged
every since.
good you mentioned! I've replied.
