Take a Shot in the Now☕

I don't hit and run, it's not my style.

I went back to the scene to assure there's a wounded life I could save, or a dead body I need to clear. I cannot live with that doubt for the rest of my life. It will tear me apart every time I think back on that moment.

What happened had happened. Anything that happens in time is irrevocable. But I will do my best to mend it, to find closure, so that I can move on with peace.

I will not give guilt a chance to bully me.

And when all is done, I ended up saving the life of another stray kitten from that busy roadside. I had passed it on to a good hand, and it will live a good life now, maybe for a while, hopefully forever.

The feeling of this frail kitten on my palm when I picked it up off the street with no apparent injury, and then brought it to the next safe place, is far more rewarding than what I asked for when I drove back there.

I am grateful for my courage.

There’s a certain stillness that comes when you know you’ve made another being feel safe. I feel it sometimes—with Wallie, with my husband, with the strays on the streets of brutal Bali. This act of kindness doesn't seem grand. Often just a moment. But it touches the heart, and stays.

It has been a swift seven months since we moved to Bali, and at times, I still drown in grief.

I’ve spent most part of these months, especially lately, trying to figure out what the grief means. Not the big abstract grief—the world’s grief, though that too—but the quieter kind. The kind that sits in your chest and doesn’t speak until 3 a.m., when you’re too tired to make sense of it and too awake to ignore it (damn the sleep deprivation.)

I arrived on this island hoping maybe I could write my way to peace. But the days here are loud, and the roads are dense. The beauty is brutal. The suffering is everywhere—dogs limping through trash piles, people walking bare feet on a scorching bitumen. And me, trying to find poetry in it.

And now, I don’t pray for it to stop anymore. I pray to see clearly. To let it carve something honest in me. Maybe that’s the whole point—to watch the dust and not mistake it for the road. To know I’m not the pain, just the one watching it.

Somewhere in all this—grief, writing, silence—I remember who I am. I remember the light. That’s the part that saves me. That I still believe in the return.

That I still believe I’m already on my way Home

At least, there's a meaning in these harsh, suffering scenes I see every day.

Let me remember:

The grief is not mine to hold.

I am not here to carry the world,

only to walk it in truth,

to witness with loving kindness, and to be grateful.

and then to release it back into the wind.

This is an act of being kind– to myself, who also needs it, but often left forgotten.

WE live in a world where there's too much talking going on and not enough acting. We seem to forget a simple law of cause and effect– 'there's a specific cause to every effect in our lives'.

Or something simple like getting off our asses and do things in order to find out the answer we're looking for.

Begin taking steps into the wilderness of the unknown. Stumble and fall, and learn how to rise back up. Lose the way when it's getting dark, be terrified, but strive to kindle the fire to light the way. And you continue.

No action - no result.

Too many resources to consume, too much information and knowledge, freeze us in fear.

"Do I know enough?"

"Have I had enough skills and tools to go on?"

The answer is 'no', there will never be enough if we don't know how and where to put a stop to it, and make the meticulous research you've gathered act in your favor.

Great thinkers don't hoard knowledge; they systematize how to think, then act on it and make it into great books.

Stop preparing to brew the best cup of coffee if you won't drink it after.

Drink your fucking coffee. It's cold.

There's a fly in the house.

I killed two mosquitoes already, and it's only 9 o'clock. I will try not to kill that fly.

Fucking pain in the neck.

I'm still mad. And still don't know what has caused this rage.

I will continue to write until I find out, or until things start to make sense, or until I'm healed.

Took Wallie out to the beach this morning. Fed the dogs on the street. I was relieved that they all seemed OK. Not particularly healthy, but not sick or in any kind of pain.

But then, on the way home, while driving past that humongous wasteland, I saw four puppies. Tiny puppies are maybe a month old, the mother was nowhere to be seen. They seemed to be having fun playing, but were dangerously close to the busy road.

I felt grief rushing through when I thought about their future, but I had to stop my head from feeding me stories that I'll never know if they're true.

Only the heartbreak was real.

I sent them metta. I hope they'll make it to a good life., and I kept going.

And I'm mad at Bali again.

Fuck.

This little soul entered our lives seven years ago. And when he did, he upended my world, knocking me off my feet like no human being could. He changed me for the better and guided me to see my worst. To that, and a lot more, I owe it to his existence.

He's turning eight today, and for dogs, this is approaching senior years. I'm not fond of this fact, but also not mad at it. We have lived our best (and a few worst) days.

And I smile the brightest when I'm with him.

I love you, Wallie. Happy birthday ❤️🎂

That scruffy, angry lady on the sidewalk.

She kicked the scruffy stray dog that followed her with a wagging tail.

I was so mad. Why did she kick him? What if I ran her over now, just because I was annoyed by her too? Fair game?

But then I looked at her face.

Yes, I forgot, everybody is wounded. We all live in some kind of pain.

She, too, must be.

I sent them both metta.

Today is another day that I believe Bali has favored us. Clear blue sky, with the rainbow in it. A reward after two nights of madness of thunderstorm that came in with brutally vulgar lightnings and thunder strikes that sounded like it could bring the roof down (which it did one time, two months ago, on the tree branch to fall and punched a hole in the roof).

We are savoring it at our utmost, while it lasts.

In the wake of yet another darkest night of my soul, I wake up to the night terror of realizing…

“How did I let a whole year slip by?”

I hope it was just a dream, and tomorrow, I will still wake up to March 2024.

A lot has happened, yes, relocation and all.

But.

Life has turned the page, and now I’m settling here in Bali for four whole months, so long that even the most stubborn monsoon has left.

There are still twenty-seven unfinished drafts in my Draft section, a website that houses my essay collection that has had no update since ten months ago, and a fifty-thousand-word first draft of my book, which has been left cold in the forgotten drawer since December 2021.

And here, in the heat of the tropical island away from the wildest dream of winter in Japan, I still find myself frozen at my desk, in front of the screen, like I never left this place.

The place of fear.

Fear of not being enough — a delusional place we know doesn’t exit.

But I still turn up here every day for a magical thinking day like this. Like a terminally ill person hoping for a miracle cure.

What if today is a good enough day?

I'm often caught by the thought that I’m running out of time. And then the more I sit with it, the clearer it becomes: it isn’t time that’s running out. It’s me, forgetting to live inside the minute I’m in and always somewhere away from the now. Backward, forward, jumping around here and there, looking for what? The past that can never be retrieved, or the future good of tomorrow that never comes?

It’s the impermanence of things—the knowledge that nothing stays—that unsettles me. And so I chase, I hold, I hoard, as if I might outrun entropy. But I don’t. None of us do. Everything slips through anyway. That’s the part no one tells you: how much futility there is in meaning, how much meaning there is in futility.

A bloody infinite downward spiral to a bottomless pit of despair.

Don't cling. There's nothing.