Morning

Most days when I get up, I make a strong cup of  Goya espresso coffee; while waiting for the water to boil, I feed the cats a pouch of Whiskas (not because it's good for them but because they like it) and I sit, in the zazen sense of sitting,  not to meditate but to awaken and to focus.

I sit on a couch facing the fireplace focusing my eyes on the mantel just below a Civil War sword—a family heirloom—that I hung  there with "Stand by the Union" engraved on it's blade as I sip from my cup, held with both hands, waiting for the intoxicant to awaken me. 

I have a mantra.  I silently repeat this as I inhale the quiet morning air with the light coming through the blinds; the air is perfect, the light is perfect, the time is perfect, I am perfect.  And as I exhale I silently repeat that which encompasses everything that I would rid myself of: my resentments, my fears, my regrets, my impatience and all the other vain deceptions and clinging imperfections of yesterday or tomorrow that make up who I am. 

I'd begun sitting there with the purpose of replacing the  uncomfortable that of life with its beatific this.  But after several months of mornings before the mantel, I realized the most important word of this mantra was not this and the wished for perfection it stood for; nor was it that and all I wanted to shun.  It was a new word that slowly came to me lightly on my breath; one that inserted itself between the two. A simple and beautiful word.  That word was and.

I would not try to replace one part of my life with another, I would "Stand by the Union."