Month: January 2024

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Bucky and Karma

I am the owner of my own karma. My happiness and unhappiness are determined by my actions.

That is part of a Buddhist prayer expressing the brahmaviharas: Loving-kindness, Compassion, Sympathetic Joy, and Equanimity. This line is important to me as a reminder that I’m responsible for how I experience life, and as an elucidation of how most people define karma: our actions determine what happens to us.

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There is short-term karma and long-term karma. Short-term karma is easily experienced. If you open the post office door for someone who has their arms full of packages, chances are that person will be grateful to you and you will feel their gratitude as a psychic boost.

The proofs of long-term karma are more difficult to be sure about. Some people believe how we behaved during our previous lives (if you believe in such things) determines much of what happens to us in this life. That’s a tough one to prove for those of us who can’t remember what happened two weeks ago, let alone what went on before we were born.

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When I lived in Berkeley I had a friend who claimed to have excellent parking-space karma. She thought her good luck finding parking spaces had to do with her frequent use of public transportation and owning the same little car for twenty years.

When I pointed out that her theory suggests unseen forces are rewarding or punishing people for their lifestyle choices, she said she believed the universe favors those with small carbon footprints.

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Buckminster Fuller (Bucky) wrote in his book Critical Path: I assumed that nature would “evaluate” my work as I went along. If I was doing what nature wanted done, and if I was doing it in promising ways, permitted by nature’s principles, I would find my work being economically sustained.

Bucky would later reiterate his belief that nature constantly responds to what we are doing, and not to what we have done in the past. Our behavior in the present moment, according to Bucky, is our karma.

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Many Buddhist teachers believe that thinking is a form of action. Thus our thoughts directly influence the course of our lives.

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I am the owner of my own karma. My happiness and unhappiness are determined by my actions.

fin

Todd’s novel Good With Dogs and Cats: The Adventures of Healing Weintraub is his latest publishing action and is available in paperback, e-book, and audio book.

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Reason and Rhyme

When I was a young writer, I wrote hundreds of poems and even managed to publish a few. The first writing I ever published was a poem in the legendary Santa Cruz free weekly SUNDAZ, circa 1972, when I was twenty-three, for which the editor treated me to lunch, a burrito as I recall.

I remember I was noodling around on the piano in the commune where I lived with seven other young people when someone knocked on the door and one of my housemates admitted a bearded fellow a few years older than I, none other than the Editor-in-Chief of SUNDAZ.

Having located me from the return address on my submission, he fervently shook my hand and said, “I love your poem that clicking sound! More. More. Bring me more.”

I was in a state of joyful amazement for weeks and did eventually publish another poem and two short stories in SUNDAZ, my first published poem also appearing in an anthology of Santa Cruz poets entitled The The. Here is that clicking sound?

that clicking sound?

we have a hundred men downstairs

each employed

in some

part of the process;

breaking

the backs

of crickets

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When I was thirty, having accrued hundreds of rejection slips and a few handwritten rejection letters for my poetry, I got out my file containing the several hundred poems I’d written, read the lot, and decided all but a dozen were failed attempts at writing the same poem, a humorously ironic (sort of) complaint. I was so dismayed by this discovery I burned all but a few of the poems and felt hugely relieved to be shed of that psychic weight.

From that day on poems rarely came to me, and over the ensuing decades I only wrote a handful of poems I felt were worth keeping. Then a curious thing happened. About ten years ago, I wrote a novel in which four of the characters are cracking good poets. These men and women write poems with ease, so I thought I’d try writing poems again. However, poems would not come to me, only to characters in my novels and stories.

In the several books I’ve written since, poets appear now and then, and I’m ever amazed by the marvelous (to me) poems they write. In the novel I’m currently rewriting, the sequel to Good With Dogs and Cats, the main character Healing Weintraub takes up writing poems, and his words flow artesian.

Most recently I reworked a chapter in which Healing quotes lines from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind

 and therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind.

Nor hath love’s mind of any judgment taste;

wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste:

And therefore is love said to be a child,

because in choice he is so oft beguiled.

Later on in that same chapter, Healing writes a bit of rhyming doggerel inspired by his sister’s renaissance.

 The attic is full of things

we’ve fooled ourselves into keeping.

Food for ghosts who came to stay

and haunt us while we’re sleeping.

Through God’s good grace one lucky day

that useless junk gets thrown away,

and ghosts depart, and now we hear

for joy the angels weeping!

fin

Todd’s books and music are available from Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Alibris, Spotify, Amazon, Apple Music, Bookshop.

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Work Report: January 2024

When I would ask my friend Quinton Duval how things were going, he would first report on his poetry, then update me on his wife Nancy, and lastly he might mention his job as an English professor at a community college where he toiled for thirty years.

“I got some good work done this weekend,” he would say, speaking of his writing. “Got a new poem almost ready to show.”

He considered writing poetry his work. Teaching English was his job, and he made a clear distinction between the two. I love that Quinton called crafting poems work. Knowing that most people in our society respect work and consider writing poems frivolous, he wanted to set the record straight about that.

When I had my brief commercial success as a writer in my late twenties, my life as an isolate was interrupted for a few years, during which time I met hundreds of people I would otherwise not have met. And I was surprised by how many of these people said to me, “Must be nice not to have to work anymore.” As if my success resulted from luck and not from thousands of hours of work learning to write well enough to create novels publishers would buy.

So… on the work front, I have been rewriting the sequel to my new book Good With Dogs and Cats: The Adventures of Healing Weintraub and making good progress. The title of the sequel is Raaz & Oz: The Further Adventures of Healing Weintraub. I would characterize this second volume of Healing Weintraub adventures as a deeper, richer, funnier investigation into the lives of the members of the Weintraub collective, canine and human.

Note: Though not advertised as such, my collection of stories Why You Are Here and other stories is the prequel to Good With Dogs and Cats, all but one of the stories taking place in the town of Mercy and introducing the characters Helen Morningstar, Justin Oglethorpe, Ruben Higuera, and Eliana Levine, all of whom appear in the subsequent volumes of Weintraub adventures.

On the music work front, Marcia and I have been working at home and in Peter Temple’s studio with Peter at the helm making a new album of piano/cello tunes and piano solos entitled Ahora Entras Tu. The work has been exciting and surprising and inspiring.

We hope to have a new book and a new album of songs to share in 2024.

Here is a poem by Quinton Duval from his collection Like Hay, the volume of his final works published the year after Quinton died.

LUCK

Lucky I am to have crossed

the ocean in a liner, watched

yellow dozers cover a beached

whale with sand. I chant

the mantra of the coral

snake, whistle the uncertain

song of the meadowlark,

sing the call of local geese

that won’t leave their cushy pond.

Lucky to have loved, in my way,

women who loved me back.

The golden age of love was back there

and we didn’t even know it.

To read poems to a dying friend,

something, with luck, a friend will do

for me—poetry, anything stormy

and vibrating on the tongue:

a tornado washed a sky green

in Indiana;

a hurricane tore the steeple off

the church with God’s howling wind;

an earthquake turned the swimming pool

into a small, wave-tossed sea.

Still, I come back to this harbor,

a room with table, lamp, window.

That river could be the Loire.

That sky could be the gray underside

of heaven. That rain, well,

that could be the world collecting

itself, a silver bullet in each drop.

Quinton Duval (1948-2010)

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Life Story

I am small and helpless. People carry me and feed me.

I learn to walk and follow those people until I am grown.

One day we come to a fork in the path. A strong feeling

makes me choose the way no one else chooses. I am sad

and afraid, but I don’t go back.

Years pass and my fear and sorrow disappear.

I come to a raging river. Many people live here.

They never try to cross the torrent. I stay here until

I grow restless and try to cross. I am swept downstream

and can’t get out until the waters slow and leave me

on the far shore where there is no path.

I wander through a dark forest until I find a faint path,

but I cannot decide which way to go, so I build a hut

and live next to the path for many years.

One morning you come along and we like each other

and we decide to go on together.

We come to a village on a river. The villagers

 welcome us and help us build a boat.

We row across the river and go on. But we miss those

people who helped us build our boat, so we row back

to them and build a house in the village.

This is where we are now.

fin

Tood’s new book Good With Dogs and Cats: The Adventures of Healing Weintraub and many of his other books are available from Apple and Amazon and other online book merchants.