A Very Merry Christmas Indeed...

On the day we were to leave for Phoenix, my little cousin was playing inside a small box, just her size, early that morning. He leened in and lent me a little something and I sucked up what I could to carry it out. Pushing her about the floor sounding off like a train, 'Chugga-Chugga Chugga-Chugga' I yelpped, 'Choooo-Choooo' I received in return and around and around the rooms we went. 'All aboard!' we cried as well pulled up to her mommies new Bichon Frise mockingly. 'No dogs allowed' I whisper her, 'No doggies allowed!' she barks at him, and around we went again.

My little cousin is growing up so fast, almost three months since the last time I saw her but I say there's a big difference. Talks a bit differently, uses a larger vocabulary and I'm more easily able to understand her. She still has her 'don't touch me' and crying moments whenever someone tells her 'No', then again she is just forty-two months old so I can cut her a little slack...but not for long missy!

I enjoyed Christmas weekend with my family in California, it was nice spending time with them. We didn't get to go ice skating Christmas Eve like we had last year as per their long standing tradition, but we did do the Christmas Eve Taco Dinner, which as awkward as it sounds, is beginning to grow on me.

Hope you had a Merry Christmas too!

peace,
~Dixon

Enrolled and eager

Well I'm all enrolled for school in the Spring, really looking forward to it. It's been long in coming and I've been needing this for sometime now. A communications course, computer science (MS Office 101), psych, and a religions history course, all pretty tame and mild for the most part, by design that's no mistake. I may need to drop one shortly after school starts, hopefully not but it isn't a big deal if I do.

Been eating up the weather we've been having, nice and cool, I've kept the windows throughout the apartment open most everyday for the last two months, it's been gorgeous out.

peace,
~Dixon

Simply simple.

I wrote the following September twenty-first of two-thousand and three:

My Day Today.
Why would I want to go day-to-day?
Why wouldn't I?
What is day-to-day?
Day-to-day is a day without loss, no gain, just a day. Every instance of the day is held in pristine detail, no element lost with no need to ever reach any instance.
Why am I here?
I am here because I am not anywhere else.
What do I want?
To be satisfied in knowing the answer. How can I want to be happy?
What is my happy?
Simple. Air feels good. One moment exits without ceasing. I eat to eat and to be able to eat again. I sleep to sleep and be able to sleep again. These things are natural and no strife is required. These things are meaningless without everything else.~Dixon

I remember reading something sometime after that, had a couple of the words still strung together and was able to pull the direct quote through a quick net search which follows:

Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water, and when you're tired go and lie down. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand.~Alan Watts

Well this is where I understood the quote to have originated from, Watts, his was a quote as well however it seems, an excerpt from a work of his he cites as being from "the great T'ang master Lin-chi" and reads in full:

In Buddhism there is not place for using effort. Just be ordinary and nothing special. Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water, and when you're tired go and lie down. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand.

I see this shortly after and it hurts:

In the landscape of Spring there is neither better
nor worse;

The flowering branches grow naturally, some long,
some short.

It's been another year, I just haven't seen what I wanted to from myself. Technically better but I don't fell a damn bit of it, I know this isn't true but I can't write what is, because if I did I would begin asking myself another host of questions that I don't have answers to. Funny, people figure me an upbeat guy, sure, he's around when they are, or some such.

peace,
~Dixon

We got to move these refrigerators.

Tomorrow should prove the last of the move, it got real stretched out from the time schedule I had preferred, but having to rely on other people to save a bit of cash it's something I expected going into it. I do appreciate the help too, a lot, so I can't complain much.

Been looking forward to moving in with my Nan for awhile now, she needs the change, as do I. I've stayed over there for a few days over a weekend once ever four to six weeks now for some years. I like going over to cheer her up, I know she gets along a lot better with me there and she goes on to tell me this all the time, often trying to get me to stay longer. It's nice to know you can have that kind of effect on someone, to really see it. Hopefully she understands I'm not there to stay long. Hopefully her boyfriend will be finally moving in with her soon, he needs to take care of some issues on his own end first though. Have a host of little things I plan on doing for her, things that usually flesh out our time together on those weekends, breakfast and dinner, help her with at the grocer, ease her frustrations with work. She is old enough to be my grandmother but I know she has a good deal of energy and spirit tucked away inside her, I want her to be able to enjoy those aspects of herself, I want to help her release them.

Myself, I'm nine months into my last 'great push' now, doesn't feel like it. I need a change of mindset, a more completeness of heart, something. Something to click. I don't know. I need to turn off feeling certain pains for a time, or to turn to a new way of perceiving them, or some cog in my mind to start turning over relieving the strain on the rest. I keep going back 'there' with most anything I do that means anything, I feel 'locked' into this other being, unnatural to myself. Everything I do is through someone else's skin, its indescribable. I'm not giving up, I can't, I know there's only one way to go about doing so and I've been long settled on that, I don't know if I'm prepared for this to be it though, all I ever come to feel, for this to make up the rest of my days for years on end. It's in me still, I just haven't found how to bring it to the forefront, all I feel are aches and pains, echoes of emotions lingering form my past.

I need something in my day, my everyday, that sustains me. Running and lifting, starting them up again, were suppose to be just that, they haven't worked out as I wanted them though. I feel my body collapsing more then anything. I often go into this idea I'm a walking corpse, doing so explains it all better then anything else I've come up with. I'm missing something.

peace,
~Dixon

Those first few strides,

Today's schedule was rather hectic, but at that I had time for myself to be able to make it to the gym right after coming home for lunch. I didn't go. Unfortunately I ended up actually thinking about it, and that's what got me. Thinking about how it's different now then sometime back when I first began lifting and training steadily and seriously. How when I lift now things pop and I get pains I've never gotten before, lifting less. How my skin's discolored in areas it wasn't before and how I don't feel too great after the session. How I know the difference first hand. It's the most dangerous thing one can have with themselves in this regard, the memory of something different, of a preferable outcome to something that was there before but no longer, I have this, the memory. I attempt the same cause but have yet to reach the same effects. You see, before I wasn't looking for anything, I was simply doing something, now I'm constantly looking for the outcomes I once knew, chasing them, shadows in my memory and catching nothing but acidic air.

I had a moment to sit while waiting to leave for the bus, all packed and ready. I began to call a friend of mine, but I had to think about it. I shouldn't have let myself. I should have either made the call or not made the call. For whatever reason I laid back a moment, kicked my legs out and closed my eyes, I was tired, but not about to sleep. I wanted to take it all in, like it would help or something. I entered one of those 'awake dreams' and within the briefest of discernible moments I was jogging in my mind, and after but the first few strides I tripped as I often do in these and woke to brace myself against a fall that never came. I turned to see the time and it was ten till, ten till the bus departs, I always set out ten till the bus departs giving me plenty of time to get there, and at this exact time is when I awoke. And I still didn't leave.

I hate it, I have this dream all too often; while setting down 'just for a moment' as I did here, or while turning in for the night, its the first dream I come to, tripping, whilst running, in the first few strides. Somehow its all too symbolic.

Staying wasn't any better. I think I'm waiting for the move to pick things up again. Waiting to get the go ahead to start running again. Waiting to see some doctors on some other issues.

peace,
~Dixon

The present distance...and the coming monsoon.

I'm going out to CA again soon as I wrote about earlier, it's 'again' as I've been for last Christmas. I was looking forward to that Cali coastal air back in December, I suppose it was there but it's hard to recall, cool breezes haven't felt good on my skin for a long time. I remember what it felt like on my feet here in the desert years back, when a gust would come along and the wind would pick up, even in triple digits it was a nice feeling. Nowadays sandals or not I'm just not able to bring myself to 'feel' it. I'll be in CA in few weeks again sure, really though just like for X-Mas I'll be somewhere else, roaming through my mind trying to mimic what I once knew as natural.

Hoping it rains a bit before I get out of there, monsoon season has yet to kick off (it doesn't usually roll around till mid July), and even though I'm not running right now due to some knee pains (I've been sticking to a stationary bike and swimming, we'll see) I'd like to kick out a few before I drive out, would be nice to run along right after a light drizzle at least. There's some isolated storms lined up for the next ten days here and there, low chances though.

Most people don't like the rain I imagine, I rather enjoy it. Rain to me means people are huddling up under awnings and crowding their friend's umbrellas. Extended heavy rains could get to me I suppose, I wouldn't know as I haven't really been exposed to that kind of weather, maybe for a bit back in Boston, but even then I came to enjoy it. I loved hanging out back of my grandmother's house and checking out how all the bugs were handling the weather right after a storm came by, ants scurrying about with their young moving to higher ground, I can still remember playing with little puddles and setting up makeshift damns with leaves and twigs under the water runoffs for the roof. Her house would swell up during the rains and I thought it gave the interior a more cozy feel. Granted I could do without the humidity, and of course monsoon rains here in AZ come with a lot of dangers: dust storms people don't know how to drive or what to do in, high MPH winds costing millions in damages and persons lives, but overall I guess I've managed to retain a child-like fascination with it.

peace,
~Dixon