The oil pan has been deeply dented for a long time-- some enormous rock or other that I plowed over on a back road in Baja, probably. They showed me that there was basically oil everywhere around the oil pan. So the oil pan is being replaced and the oil pan valve cover gasket is being replaced as well. It seems like crazy timing, and I have to admit to a weird paranoid fantasy that one of their mechanics intentionally caused the oil leak somehow just to generate business. My trust in the world is extremely low at this time, for some reason.
I will still be able to leave on Monday, just a tad later and a stress poorer than I had hoped.
But yesterday was strange in many ways. Heavy, very warm wind laden with grit, dust and whirling garbage and leaves. The wind and I don't really get along. Wind has this weird disorienting and unsettling effect on my consciousness. I have to work to find inner peace on the ferociously windy days that are very frequent in Baja. It's especially challenging when I'm doing field work that requires concentration and attention to detail. It's as if the wind is actually scattering the thoughts out of my head while at the same time buffeting my emotions. I wonder if this is common?
A satellite image showing the dust blown west off the Baja peninsula by strong winds
A dear friend of mine posted on Facebook that she has terminal stomach cancer. Strange and surreal how we often find out now about loss, diagnosis, accident, injury. Via a status update. This person and I have been saying "let's get together!" for months, to no avail. The news is lodged in my heart like a rusty nail and I hope I can be useful to her somehow when I get back in June.
In the ongoing process of digitizing the record albums, I am repeatedly encountering many different memories from the past. Each album has some associations, resonances. I'm also becoming generally aware of how "hot" my musical aesthetic is. I own hardly any music that I could put on in the background at a party,for example. Just about all the music I am attracted to is bracing, energetic, even rattling and jarring. Combined with the wind, the news and the oil leak, the general state was one of sturm und drang.
I meditated for 25 minutes last night as a result. Then I meditated for 25 minutes again this morning, after I woke up obsessing over a very familiar, stinging, stabbing set of things A said to me from January through the end of February. I guess it wouldn't be obsession if it weren't fucking predictable, repetitive and utterly boring. How many times can a person recall the exact same remark or statement and feel pretty much completely fresh agony? Apparently, a great many times indeed. The fucked-upness of this godawful transition is occasionally just as fresh as it was on March 1. I'm sometimes alarmed by this, but the counselor tells me to just let it take its own course. Trust the process, he says. Fuck the process, is how I often feel.
But it is fascinating, how incredibly challenging a 25 minute sitting meditation is for me. I have been at 10 minutes for almost the entire past year. 25 minutes stretches out unimaginably by comparison. The multilayered utter chaos of my mind repeatedly becomes obvious. Roving, meandering, obsessing, worrying, planning, regretting, resenting, and on and on and on and on and on. And on. Releasing whatever it is that has come up, even sometimes multiple things during the space of a single inhalation. Insane. I mean that in the sense of the definition in the Big Book-- a lack of proportion and an inability to think straight. But in this case, an inability to stop thinking.
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