All the evil karma, ever created by me since of old;
on account of my beginningless greed, hatred and ignorance;
born of my conduct, speech and thought;
I now confess openly and fully.

We used to chant those words at the beginning of Sunday Zen services at my old teacher Robert Aitken Roshi‘s place on the edge of a lava flow by the sea in Kaimu, Hawai’i. This morning I’m sitting at my desk by the edge of the Bromley-Heath housing project in Jamaica Plain, Boston… in tropical heat and humidity, trying to make sense of it all.

Most people think of karma – if they think of it at all – as “what comes around goes around.” I’m nowhere near enlightened or wise enough to say that’s wrong or right. For my own life, I kind of think of karma as the immune system of the universe. The universe doesn’t really give a shit about punishment or reward… its action is to constantly restore balance, it seems to me. So catching karmic hell is more or less the allergy of the universe trying to sneeze your shit out of its system.

The way I feel that karma works is that you get the lessons you need. What I’m finding as I get older and pay better attention to what’s going on in my life, is that I need less and less violence to achieve a karmic punch in the grille. When I was twenty, karma slammed me through the windshield of a 1973 Super Beetle, giving me a concussion, a broken tibia and fibula, and a six-inch gash in my left cheek. Nowadays, just paying attention and taking responsibility for my choices provides copious psychic ass-kicking. Harder in its own way, but at least it leaves fewer marks on my body.

I’ve been dicking around with relationships since my wife and I split up way the hell back in 2003. One would think that I could figure out grown-up stuff in less time than it takes for a newborn to turn into a first grader, but I’m a slow-ass learner. Anyway I am, at long last and with conscious awareness, taking myself out of the casual dating game. The details are too private for the world wide interwebs, but I acknowledge before friends, family and random Google spiderbots that I’m more than a bit of a selfish bastard, and that I need to bench myself until I can show up with full integrity.

I did a really good meditation/shooting-the-philosophical-shit retreat this weekend, about which I’ll write more in the days to come. I’m still digesting the things that came up and trying to integrate the lessons. But I’m settling down. That much is clear.

Yesterday I unpacked my travel toiletries kit for the first time in – literally – months. I have been doing a lot of moving around. Time to just stay in one place. Jah-make-ya Plain: my dirty little urban island in the sun.

It’s good to be home.