Amazing how easy it is to just not write this stuff.

A few days ago I got food poisoning from Hugo's Tacos.  Spent the next day feverish, nauseous, achey.   The funny thing about being sick is that it is one of the only times I can stop worrying.  I drop the incessant thoughts about all the things I should be doing but am not and relax into the fact that I am sick. 

So, a touch paradoxically, being sick means I have more moments of ease, more moments when I can gently drift and truly appreciate whatever is in front of me, be it the schmaltzy movie I am watching because I get emotional when not feeling well or the trees, telephone wires and birds outside my window.

I went to do some laundry in my foggy headed state and misfigured how long the washer would take.  So I got down there and it was still going.  I sat down and, having recently been over the four reminders in a meditation class, decided to contemplate how it would feel if I knew I would die when the washer stopped.  I've tried to do meditations on death before and what usually happens is I get a weird, almost dirty kind of thrill.  I mean, I've got a pretty serious fear of death and so trying to go deeply into the idea of my death always has something of an illicit charge, like I'm getting away with doing something I'm never supposed to do. 

The other thing that happens is I get very into appreciating the details of whatever is before me (not too unlike being sick).  So I'm sitting on a wooden bench in a small room, listening to the washer, staring out a window.  And its just very pretty.  Everything I look at is.   

I've been reading The Idiot and there is a long speech about a man who knows he will die in twenty minutes and how it suddenly feels to him as if that is all the time in the world.  I'm sure that was on my mind as well. 

I will die in a few minutes (or however long it takes a washer to stop) and there is no time for the usual bullshit of the mind.  All those thoughts about what I should do, who I should be, what I'm going to do later, what so & so was thinking the other night, will have nowhere to be held when I am gone.  So they are gone.   And I'm just relaxed and waiting to die and the tree outside the window, its leaves, their shaking in the breeze, the light that reflects off them, its all just gently beautiful and a nice last sight.