“Your actions are your only true belongings.” the Buddha
I was thinking it would be really cool to be the Seinfeld of Storytelling. I know I have written a lot recently about feeling exhausted dealing with what could easily be called The Shit Show of 2025. How could I write and ignore the obvious, without feeling both ignorant and insensitive? To make matters even worse for me, who wants to read about some ordinary guy? I should be laboring over semi-brilliant insights, coming up with unique word combinations at the same time, but here I am, Larry.
My cat, Shelby, interrupted my morning Zen sit for at least the one hundredth time a few mornings ago and that is when all of the above came up. First, I need to tell you a little about my Rain Man compulsion to sit cross legged every morning, except Sundays. I don’t know how long ago I figured that if God could take a day off, it had to be OK for me, too.
In my early thirties, I started running out of pieces for my erector set life, feeling increasingly unfamiliar to me. We are born from water and for many, going with the flow is how you avoid drowning. How I am now wasn’t even a whisper back then. Please don’t get me wrong and assume there is a dose of judgment between then and now, because you ain’t gonna find it. I couldn’t be here without having been there and I am not looking for a refund.
After all this time, I am not sure when Zen slipped into my pocket. It was some time during my ten year stint in therapy. I am not sure how young we are when we discover the mirror and the mimicking twin looking right back at us. You can’t trick it, because it does whatever you do. At some point, it just started feeling like it wasn’t someone I knew as well as I thought.
For some of us, therapy is the doorway to introspection, not to be confused with delusion for even a second. It’s like, all of sudden, your life game has a referee and even if your toe barely touches the foul line, you start losing personal, perfection points.
Somewhere in the midst of all this, looking at other ways of making sense of the world can find a home. I started to become curious about less conventional rules for this personal, board game of mine, which seem filled with illusions and dubious, emotional real estate. The years of therapy provided me with a license to not accept the status quo, simply for its own sake.
I with I could say for certain when I ventured out of my spiritual cocoon and dared to read a couple of books on these weird Eastern religious practices. I remember reading, Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki and feeling totally confused. I toyed with sitting, but I was very much an outsider, untethered and floating in an overwhelming universe.
For a couple of summers, before leaving NYC in ’87, I rented a farmhouse in Honesdale, PA. I remember every Saturday and Sunday, I’d get up before sunrise and walk outside to the fields where the cows grazed. I just sat there cross legged and felt a stillness completely foreign to me. It still wasn’t official, but the magnetizing had slowly begun.
I was already a dedicated runner when I moved to Santa Fe, NM. One day, walking downtown, some lady yells at me from across the street, “Hey Superman!” I had a couple of Superman shirts from days in the NYC broadcast advertising business, when swag was abundant. It turns out, she was my neighbor out in the Cerrillos Flats, south of town. She’d see me every morning doing my thing and we’d wave, but it was the shirt that gave it away.
We became friends and I’d visit her place, a couple of dirt roads away. One day, she told me I really ought to look into exploring Zen, because so much of what I had to say meshed with this practice. Like most everything else in my life, that is a full story, even with a touch of mini-drama, which I will spare us both. Through her, I was introduced to a wonderful group of people and became a dedicated sitter, along with learning some ritual and finding a real compatibility with much of what it is all about. My stories very often end up bumping into it. I am still learning, now looking into a mirror that just as often, looks unblinkingly right back at me.
Although, I have found the missing erector set pieces that now fit perfectly together, the damn shape keeps changing. The idea of permanence is very sexy. You mean I can have as much chocolate as I want and still want more from an endless supply? I tell you what? Getting older slips a real monkey wrench in that bullshit. I know that my writing has a lot to do with beating the system. Without a single additional reader, my stories get to live forever, because I have left a paper trail.
Now, I want to get back to the cushion and Shelby’s intrusion. I thought to myself, there must be a story in here. What struck me is how unimportant it could be. The idea that I have to make every story important really pissed me off. Creativity, for lack of a better word, even though it makes me nervous, is supposed to be transportive and not necessarily transformative.
This story about a cat interrupting a Zen sit and all that followed is simply that, a story. I’ll tell you something else, for the few of you, who have gotten this far, my job is done. I have taken your mind off the smothering rhetoric that greets us each day. Shelby didn’t screw up my sit, she gifted me a reason to write to you about nothing.
I have gotten to this page, because of my history. You have gotten to this page, because of your history. Look at what has become of us? We are strangers to each other and yet, we have so much in common. We can’t see past our externals, lifeless images in a dirty mirror. So, when Shelby fucked up my sit this last time, I decided it had to become a story, but what kind?How about a story that takes you away from your world for a few minutes?
“Hey Superman!”
LISTEN TO IT HERE
https://www.buzzsprout.com/admin/1292459/episodes/17713762-hey-superman