"Be careful what you wish for." Not one of my favorite clichés. If it was a good one, I could wish myself into a happy, sorry state with no regrets. And I didn't really wish for anything, but I guess I did set myself up for this kind of trouble.

Last night I slept until 4:30 am, and that was it. So around 5, I got up, made tea and did my "morning pages". Since that involves three hand-written pages, I'll summarize. I have this tendency to let the little things get me down. Monday night, for example, a car that cut around the corner when I was one step for the edge; a truly loathsome, selfish thing to do and the kind of thing to enrage me and really drag me down. I managed to avoid that reaction. Instead, I waved cheerily at the car, "Hi, I was there, hello" not because I thought the driver would but it made me feel better. So this morning, in my morning pages, I wrote about how I need to be careful for just that reason: not to let the little things drag me down.

Maybe it's the fact that the Buddha lived so long ago, that Buddhism has been around for over 3,000 years. But the ideas of "enlightenment" and "Buddha nature" have taken on mythic status. Becoming enlightened seems to be the work of a lifetime. But then I read something like this:

[Right posture] is not just form or breathing. It expresses the key point of Buddhism. It is a perfect expression of your Buddha nature. If you want true understanding of Buddhism, you should practice this way. ...when [the Buddha] found himself, he found that everything that exists has Buddha nature. That was his enlightenment. Enlightenment is not some good feeling or some particular state of mind.

That's from "Zen Mind, Beginner's MInd" by Shunryu Suzuki. I am trying to learn a way of being that goes beyond being a good or bad person, saved or damned; a life without "should" or "should not." Here's what else he has to say:

when Jimmy Buffett was separated from his wife, Jane, he wrote a song called "Distantly in Love". the song talked about how hard it is to hold on through separation — in his case, a separation that threatened to be permanent (but was not, thank goodness). but the song also refused to give up on love, refused to give in to something as mundane as distance and separation.

9 days. That's how long after my 50th birthday before I got my first invitation to join AARP. Holy crap, they must think I'm old or something. I'm certainly not a retired person, and I doubt I ever will be. If I do join, it will be to get the goodies. But after they got suckered by Bush on prescription drugs, I'm not sure I want to give money to people so gullible. Not when there's prime swampland in Florida to invest in or a bridge what needs buying in New York City.

in the summer, the leaves on the trees are full of water (or whatever the technical term is); they are fresh, alive, soft, supple. when the wind blows, no matter how hard, the leaves do not rustle so much as they flutter. the sound of leaves in a spring or summer wind is like cloth on cloth.

with autumn, the leaves dry up (kind of ironic, what with all the rain). now the leaves make much more noise: they truly rustle. like thousands of pieces of paper flapping and scraping, a drier sound, even the ones still alive enough to remain on the tree.

and the best sound of all: falled leaves, dry and crisp, crunching and cracking underfoot, or making the skiffing noise when you kick your way through a pile. the colors of autumn are amazing, at times simply stunning. but i love the music of the leaves as well. there's a harshness in the dry leaves scraping together that serves as an appropriate warning of the coming winter.

listen to autumn and prepare.

that's right. the Substitute Boy really isn't a boy, not in chrono years. he's a whopping 50 years and 24 minutes old (i can't remember what time i was born, so i'm just counting from midnight).

and i'll tell you, half-a-minute after midnight, the significance of being 50 kind slammed up against me like a Seahawks lineman who finally remembered what it means to block once in a while. holy crap.

and it's not that i hate being 50; i just can't be 50! how did that happen? ok, i get it: i didn't die yet. i was born 50 years ago today. but that's the obvious part, the part i don't care about. being 50 is more than age; it's being a certain someone, or something. it's feeling like something was accomplished. it's something, whatever it is, that i feel like i'm totally missing.

I first saw "Cabaret" over 30 years ago; it's been my favorite movie ever since. I love Liza in it, and she was spectacular in "Liza with a Z", the tv special (directed by Bob Fosse) she made right after that. I have listened to both soundtracks several hundred times over the years.

So yay for dvd; now I can have and watch both at any time. I can jump to whatever song and just enjoy that. I love modern technology (when it lets me enjoy music and other fun stuff).

Mostly, I love watching her sing. She holds nothing back in those performances. She gives every bit of energy and, more importantly, every bit of emotion. It's raw and powerful, almost overwhelming. And more than any other song, I've loved listening to her sing "Maybe this time" —

Maybe this time, I'll get lucky
Maybe this time, he'll stay
Maybe this time, for the first time
Love won't hurry away.
He will hold me fast; I'll be home at last
Not a loser anymore,
Like the last time and the time before.

And always, I've longed for that to be true. It almost happened once, but we were so wrong for each other. A few more times it came close, but they both disappeared before the band could get through the opening bars.

Has it changed at last? Is this time my "maybe"? I'm tempted to say "Yes", tempted to say "Wait and see". I know the song means so much more to me right now; I think this time is that time. I think I did get lucky.

I think it's about damn time.

I would not call myself a Buddhist; I don't practice meditation regularly, I don't cultivate the path to end craving. But I do understand that of all the ways I know to cultivate an honest spiritual life, meditation — whether in Zen fashion or the silent waiting of Friends Meeting — is the best "way". The entirety of life, of course, is a spiritual practice, but to overcome what we see as our imperfections — what some see as our humanness, sinfulness and other negatives to be destroyed — we cannot just "live" our way to spiritual health. We need to take time to study, pray, think, meditate. Something, anything.

I'm reading Stephen Batchelor's "Buddhism Without Belief" again, and I finally see the words that explain the concept of "awakening:"

The Buddha awoke from the sleep of existential confusion.