It's been quiet at Steinstrasse 1a the past few months. I've taken a few licks off of a few blocks of wood, scribbled a sentence here, a paragraph there, but I've accomplished nothing more than to amuse myself. When you realize there's nothing to prove to yourself or the rest of the world, that there's nothing wrong, but everything right with just being, it doesn't matter if you're 16, 66, or 96. You've still got plenty of time to finish the job of living, even if it's just a year or a month or a day. You can't tell a book by its cover, say the less than sage, who may be sager than the buddha in my copious self. I am not Hemingway, or Rodin, or Robinson Crusoe, or even John Zavacki. I am a buddha who lives five stories above the ground and stares from his balcony into the moat. When I sit quietly, or walk at a snail's pace around the city wall or in the fields and forests that surround it, I am at peace with myself. I realize that all of the failures and sins and omissions of the past are just the paths of particles in space that I may encounter again. If I do, I am better prepared. If I don't, I remember them with compassion, compassion for my self that was and the selves of others with whom I interacted. I no longer need readers or admirers or lovers or even friends to complete me. The kernel of the universe, the fractal that is infinitely recursive, recursive enough to be all of space and all of time, starts here, ends here, and depends on nothing. It's okay to have a lapse in productivity. The universe survives without reading my words or seeing a piece of my sculpture, but it survives differently.
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