I am so glad to come into this holy blank page space right now.

The days come in irregularly sized chunks.

This moment is on the cusp between them.

A few nights ago during bedtime reading, I came across a passage where Maturin, finishing off a long arduous chunk himself, fell into a sleep in which his body was perfectly relaxed. I’m tempted to go find the passage, but that would be too distracting. It was just the single image, that struck me with an aching and longing. I want that. Unknotted carefree sleep. It seemed like an tragically impossible thing to wish for.

Sunday, yet another day where nothing seemed to happen. A pretty successful day for quitting purposes. Also, I’d got some major old prof things boxed, labelled, and put aside properly–the maelstrom of paperwork is thin and manageable. Still many important things undone.

In the evening I felt weary early. Maybe about ten, ten-thirty, I took the off-ramp into slumber with another dose of altumal fiction from two hundred years gone by.

An hour or so ago, four-thirty in the morning, I found myself on the edge of waking; still dreaming. I was at the owned house finally, cat-ranching … once again, the detail is just a distraction, for the current purpose. I became aware. Conscious, that my body was perfectly relaxed.

The connection to the literary passage hadn’t happened yet. It was just an independent fresh experience of wonder. Perfectly relaxed. How oh how did I make it here, and how to do it again o lord …

I don’t believe it can be manufactured.

I think life is a long series of hateful bullshit, punctuated by these momentary experiences of complete bliss. They’re gifts.

The best we can do is remain open to receiving them.

A couple minutes into the gift, it was shattered by the neighbor letting her dog out at a quarter to five in the morning, like clockwork for two years, and specifically by its idiot barking at nothing.

I held on to the evaporating happiness for a long moment more.

When the canine bitchery started up again, I pulled the window open wider and bellowed at the motherfucker to SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Which it did. My dutiful training paid off, in a Pyrrhic victory.

I fell back with regret. The blackened sticks of the fading moment were blessed again, by a soft strong cool breeze flowing in from the flung window, and I smiled.

A few chips of insight can be salvaged from it all.

Falling into a tension-less state is one of the highest goods.

Dying free is a goal. Living free, of such tension in particular, is a lived process.

One of the watermarks of freedom is freedom from noise, and that one is a rare luxury, even on a dirt road. (Part of the perfection of the paradise downtown of my waking dreams is that it is so often so absolutely still, in the night.)

Add it to the list.

• Free from addiction

• Free from debt … those two are easy and obvious.

• Free from worry … tension … a much more nebulous thing, partly consisting of …

• Free from their noise–literally of course, and it’s a good symbol.

• Free from illusion, particularly about the immortality of my own ego or work–a working copy of what the Zen Buddhists mean, I think.

We’re (still)’ talking about what the philosophers call negative freedoms’.

Stuff it all in a life pipe and smoke it. Judiciously, without dependency.