Videos hosted by Michael Erlewine

The best I can do these days is a brief update. I continue to work, night and day, on the reconfiguration of the library into a studio, and by work I mean hard physical work, toting and moving stuff from here to there, or just up and out. I have not been thinking a lot. For me, physical work is like a sponge for thought. It just soaks it up.

Oh, there are thoughts that get through all the physical slog, but they are either few or have a "Stranger in a Strange Land" kind of feel to them. I have studied cycles for 50+ years, cycles of dipping in and out of experience, of spending time out-of-the-body (evaluating) and then time more incarnated, deeper within the body, creating something to evaluate.

So I know I am in an incarnation time, where I am simply embedded in the matrix of life deep enough that I am not even watching myself, not self-consciously peeping out and commenting or being critical. Instead, I am just down in there slaving away and it brings a strange kind of dead calm to the mind. Actually it is kind of refreshing, reminding me of Shakespeare's Hamlet and his phrase "the pale cast of thought." I am kind of thoughtless of late, in that sense of the word. Even in writing this I have to kind of work it up, as I have not been in writing mode for some time. I am a bit remote, even with myself.

There was this one moment where I, after having moved books until my shirt was completely soaked to the skin, dragged a little one of those web-backed director's chairs out onto the wooden ramp just outside the alley door of the studio. The warm sun was all over me as I plopped down in the chair and just sat there staring out into the neighbor's back yard. I wasn't really looking at anything and what I saw I didn't really see.

There was no one even watching me, including myself. I was just there in the chair in the sun all alone. There I was, unknown to anyone but my consciousness, somewhere in space.

I was content.

It occurs to me that this may be what old age is really about.