Recently I had an online conversation with a friend who hinted that he wanted me to move back to Texas.

That's probably the thorniest question anyone could ever ask me. Everything else, I have something smart and nasty for.

I don't really have any conscious agendas, back home.
My immune system, on the other hand, has other ideas.

The slightest hint of juniper incapacitates me.
Not just something answerable by even injections of prednisone, I am headed straight for bronchitis and pneumonia.

From Christmas through St Paddy's, my favorite Texas holiday, I simply cannot be there, if I want to breathe.

the theme of my life, should be the gossamer threads of the garden.
I should only be so lucky, to follow just these and the life of the forests around me, each and every day.

Just give me.. 10 minutes of mercy. 10 seconds would be fine. 

The truck misses my dad. 

He has a story to tell, and he tells us. 

It would just take 10 minutes, or seconds,  of mercy. 

We did not get them. He did not get any mercy, none whatsoever, this gentle man. 

Only what I had the staff show him, in pain relief.  Our ministrations, my brother and I, just broke his heart. The hours I spent with my own body holding him down, in sad and gentle combat, as he tried to break his broken body free, and I told him there was no way out but up.. 

We had four days of some kind of mix of mercy and torment. 

I would have given all that

for 10 minutes of mercy. 10 minutes of conversation. 

At the same time, we got to let him go ourselves. 

If you have to go, and we all do, let the ones you love hold you. 

let them play you music and love you. 

there isn't a good way. 

But there also isn't a better way. 

If it's time to go. 

I cannot change time. 

I cannot change fate. 

I can step into the shoes that fit me, and keep walking.

I may quake, I may shiver, I may be terrified and my heart may be broken beyond repair. 

I will come back from it, I will persevere through the tears.

Dad won't tolerate our deep depths of depression, he'll play a joke or sport a license plate. 

Literally, he has made fun beyond the grave for us. 

who else would cause "smelly" to be on a Volkswagen in front of us, telling fart jokes in our uncle's Suburban in traffic.  Who else would cause the random to play "rock steady" A Real Love Survives as I am crashing into tears. 

And then play Driven to Tears. 

Which my random player just did. 

Sometimes you have to listen to fate, and its messages. 

it's with earthquake shivers, I look at my fate this eve.

"My mistakes, brought me to this place, where the flowers
replace the thorns. "
(Sarah Hickman)

My brother and I have been through this odyssey with our father, and we aren't done yet, and he has, in his Pyhrric nature, given us both a way to our dreams.

In all of the additions and subtractions of fate, both of us, would just rather have our Dad, back close at hand. But he is gone, struck by a broad, gross hand, which would ask more than his simple death.

The flowers do not entirely replace the thorns.
Our Dad would have us work to our utmost, to find a way to improve ourselves.

Our Dad was a blue collar man, and I, for my own work, follow his path on a slightly more sophisticated way. I keep people working, despite their pain.

Our Dad was the son of new money aristocrats, and took the path of a laborer when he married our mother, and needed to keep a kind of family income with the US Post Office.

The awards he got, in the beginning, were abundant.
They got tired of him trying to shift the dominant paradigm.

If you don't have people in position, you can't do a thing.
This year, especially.

When I got to East Texas, a long desperate drive after a tolerable flight.. 

I knew I was walking into hell, at the Tyler Emergency Center. 

This is another story, but I walked into hell, fully armed by our father, and ready for battle. 

I can't imagine what kind of knuckle-dragging hell they took our dad into, in Palestine Regional, where they refused to give up his personal effects until I had made contact with the regional director, and made sure they knew that I had done that. 

The money in my dead father's wallet, was bait enough, to make staff lie. 

It wasn't a lot of money, not over three digits. 

They were sure that a few lies and fibs, would pay off for them. 

It took conversations, and texts with their Director, for me to walk in and get my father's effects. 

As would any sentient, emotional person, I fell apart completely upon laying my hands on the belt, wallet, glasses and familiar scent and things of my paternal.. the staff had the grace to do the same. 

I had the presence of mind to call into consciousness for them, my father's presence, hold my hand up to their startled eyes, and say, yes, he is here, and you must feel him. 

Of course I do, because the engrams of our loved ones are engraved upon our hearts. 

Because we, the living, do not know. 

But we, the living, must hold those in sacred trust to the dying, to their trust. 

What would you steal from the dying man, or his children?

What kind of worthless protoplasm are you, to try to do this?

If you will, will you at least submit to target practice?

Because you are exactly the kind of worthless mutherfucker I would like to cut into slabs. 

Come over here, and stand still for a minute.. 

They don't let you post. Forget it. 

useless.
You can't post anything, it disappears.

Blogger totally ate an important post of mine.
Couldn't post it.
Nothing moved.
Useless system.

Blogger does not save stuff you really care about.

Fuck Blogger.

This is not the mountaintop, and I am not the first to pioneer this direction.
In any case, I was never interested in it, or anything to do with Zen, status, flatus, or any of the accompanying baggage.

I am not here, to dance circles round the Sun.

I am just here to Train.
My soul is only rewarded by Shugyo, the simple fact of training which brings us all together in the holy communion of sweat and honest effort.

I only seek a venue for this simple expression of soulful effort.
Perhaps the stars, thorns, sparks and thunders of life can find their way into discipline, through our simple efforts.

It seems so astonishingly miraculous to me, that this so old discipline, can give so much to people so far removed from its origin.

In any case, I will glad and proudly take my place on our little Island of Misfit Toys, no one knows us, no one wants us, but if they are paying attention, they may start asking questions.

Now, we are at this point, and for myself, I find the tight, risky, bare trembling of new beginnings right under my hunter's nose.. you stand, or you don't.

When I know it's right, I stand like the steel I know how to sling.
When I know it's wrong, I stand ready to cut without prejudice.

you can't change the world,
you can only change yourself.

Everyone who has lost someone, is living on a great expanse of empty.
We are all searching for equilibrium.

The fact is, that every plus needs a vacuum, and every vacuum needs some kind of positive energy to fill it.

Trust me,  I have lost the linchpin of my life, of my brother's life, even more so than my own.
Every emptiness begs something to fill it.

Fill it with what sustains you.
I got a personal trainer who is constantly astonished at my bloodthirsty hunger for the heavier weight. "Yeah, you might want to hand me a heavier weight. Yeah, you might want to hand me a heavier weight.. " I have friends in budo who show up at the house and want to train. We practice one of the most painful forms of jujutsu I have ever had anything to do with.
Training as sempai to a gifted kohei, I give the attack best I can, I know it's going to hurt, and I'm OK with it. In these days, this constructive pain is a gift, it is not a pain of loss, it is a constructive pain, and I will take it, gladly, and I will rebound like something mad and rabid, and walk into the pain again and again, because it is a glad, voluntary, constructive pain, and it takes me away from the wildly deconstructive pain of grief, loss, rage and insanity I am dealing with in my deepest levels of emotional control and management.

The other factor is, that I was raised in insanity, and therefore raised to walk into pain.
So in my life, I resolutely walk into pain
again and again.

So I am rewarded by Shugyo, dancing with pain, and dealing with technology.

My body makes me lame, it makes me slow and not able to express the things I know, the things I have been shown, and I fight it.

In combat with my own balky body, I have found ways to make it work.

I call in colleagues, and I ignore pain.
Pain is my friend, pain is the mindkiller, pain is the motherfucker.
Fuck pain. Pain in the am, pain on walking, pain on stretching, pain on sleeping. Typical heel spur/fasciitis. Victim's fault? oh goodie, that's a lot of help.

I am pain, I work through pain, pain is my friend.
This, when my US colleagues can't resolve it.

I am looking forward to the EU visit, see what the perspective is.

some rationality in a world full of morons.
I did the deep work already, don't ask me again.

I feel like I'm sitting in a corner, with several ways to go.

The one that leads straight down into despair, is the one I am NOT taking. Dad would be decidedly disapproving, and he has given me so many signs that he is having fun observing and making fun of the living, that I am not so concerned about him, as he may be about me.

Since I got back from Austin, I have been scrupulous about my support.

And yet, I find myself in frequent tears of crisis, and not wanting to burden my mate.
My grief for my father, a tremendous icon in my life, is gone, and my feelings well uncontrollably. I don't want to tell him, all the time, that I miss my dad. It's a constant, not a comment. Chuck knows that. He knows, at least I hope he does, that it's another spear in my heart, one I will never recover from, and having lost loved ones, I just enter a little more solidarity..

In some ways, Dad is more with me, than he was before he was dead. I left Texas over 10 years ago, and have been dealing with his physical absence at least that long. This is of course different from knowing that he is alive and well, and has opinions, and being able to ask about them.
Now, he can sit with me in the kitchen as I cook, I can serve him a drink at his place (the one I am sitting in now) and no one is the wiser, we can nod and smile at one another, depending on how much I have had to drink, or how insane I am feeling, we can have an actual conversation.

My father never understood my budo practice.
And yet, he raised me to be a budoka.

There's your conceptual dichotomy of the day.
For me, it's just practice.

To my delight, I am not alone.

Horror.. absolute horror..

that is what we entered into, and what we have still not resolved.

What do you do with a man who is too broken to continue.
You let him go.

I'm still living with the horror of the whole procedure, from the lying across his broken breast, listening to ruined lungs, to telling him that there's no way out but UP, to having the staff pull the tubes out, and watching him go.

If anyone has to go like that, someone should hold them.
My brother and I held our dad.

We held him.

He says to me now, Stop crying, I'm okay now.

He doesn't want me to forget that.

And I don't want him to forget, that I'm OK too..
I just miss my Dad..
and I'm still Listening.