At a certain point, the mind falls silent. What happens next? Good question. For most of my life, my mind kept nattering at me about this and that. Now the media does that for me, so I am out of a job. I can put my mind on cruise control and let the ship sail where it is headed, straight for the rocks!

That first paragraph made me laugh; I hope it gave you a grin as well. But guess what, folks, the job of the mind is to steer around the rocks, not run straight into them. What’s a body to do when the mind doesn’t plan an escape route?

I stop to look outside the window on this twilit November evening. The oranges and golds are magnificent and the sky has been pale blue washed with cream today. An acorn actually hit me on the head so hard I said ow. But now I am inside making pixel magic happen. (While the ship is headed towards the rocks.)

Let me put this another way, life is one damned thing after another, as some wag said. We know that fools are in charge of government; it has ever been thus. We know what idiots we are; that is nothing new either.

I am missing Leonard Cohen like crazy. I remember his story of visiting the asylum where one of his friends was “sequestered,” and how funny it was. He was mistaken for one of the inmates. Aren’t we all? If you think this world is going sane, you have another think coming. Vernon Howard said the whole world was an insane asylum; we just didn’t have enough concrete to build a wall around it.

I have fears that revolve around travel and my not being strong enough to endure going to some faraway place. I cling to my creature comforts. When I do think about travel, it is in terms of heading for the rocks. So I might as well give in and let it happen. It’s gonna, sooner or later!

But I don’t. Instead I create worst-case scenarios of making a fool out of myself. But I am already a fool. Gurdjieff called us idiots of various kinds. Why not just let the tao flow straight into the rocks of reality? Why do we live fear-based lives?

I need to wrap this note up. I begin it by saying that my mind had fallen silent. I end it by saying I might as well let it fall directly into the tao. The tao is the nature of reality and we have stayed busy creating mental bypasses. We live in our heads, not our hearts.

Stay tuned. I am headed for the rocks.

Vicki Woodyard