I just received junk mail with the following printed upon it's white surface:
Toni Morrison
Author
DO NOT BEND

I don't blame him. Authors are a sensitive lot and bend very easily. Once bent, there's not much you can do. Oh, you can smooth them out again, but the crease is always there and frankly they are never the same again.

Imagine my disappointment when I opened the letter and did not find Mr. Morrison inside. I plan to write the Postmaster General or one of his Captains tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I have smudged the house tonight, though not with the smoke-alarm-triggering sage, but with sandalwood incense. I walked through the rooms speaking my intent and calling upon my allies and then I moved to the porch to watch the white gradient into darkness.

As I sat, I asked myself one of the usual questions, "What are you afraid of", which usually intersects and dredges up a number of oily customers that form my demonscape. "What is holding you back"... "What is causing you to hesitate"... "What is preventing you from bliss".

In general, I've felt a lack of wildness that stems back to my last birthday and I think is influenced by some of the events around the closing of the year and the beginning of the new. But as I've written before, that disconnected wildness comes in cycles, and the difficulty in gaining and regaining connection is pretty familiar to me. I have gained a tremendous depth of understanding of practice and meaning over the last six months, but I feel in many ways that understanding is sitting happily in my brain and hasn't moved to my body or my spirit where I need it to be.

As I was thinking about this, really feeling some clarity about my desire to let go and leave behind the anxiety of holding on, I noticed a silhouette on the eaves of the building next door. Just as I was perched slightly forward, gazing towards the mountains into the growing shadow of the east, a robin was standing on the very point of the roof, pitched forward as well, peering in the same direction.

We sat a while, looking absently at each other, then off into the middle distance where the sky marbled into a dark blue and white sea that passed with a slow hiss towards the north. And then as the sun set, almost to the minute, the robin began singing. In the dim light, the grey fuzziness of his feature, the ruffles of his neck warbled as his tiny beak opened wide. His breast swelled and his body seemed to shiver out his melodic exhalation.

And when he was finished, as the twilight turned into night, he shot into the sky with a high-pitched call and was gone.

After a few minutes, I shuffled my sock feet across the boards and returned inside to the fragrancy of sandalwood and the call of sleep.