The most interesting thing about this book is that it was written under ideal conditions. The author was living a life of elegant retirement in the character of a Zen Buddhist priest at the Hossen Temple in San Francisco and at the monastery of Zenshinji at Tassajara Springs, far in the mountains east of Big Sur. Given ideal conditions, how could life be anything but a joyous round of pleasure. What could possibly go wrong.

At the top of the hill above the Third Culvert (counting from the first one over Cabarga Creek as one ascends the road to and from Tassajara) I sat down for a minute to consider what’s possible. A sentence, a word, a monkey flower. Sun heats, wind cools, simultaneously. What am I after. From this point the road is uphill and downhill. The flowers are too pale to be monkey flowers. They aren't the exact color of wild azaleas. My ears fry in the sunlight. There are monkey flowers no matter what I say, just as K. M. still has a terrible cough this morning. Wild larkspurs have three different shades of blue.

Early the next morning I find that my brains have come loose and are floating up against the skull bones, gently bumping and knocking with the motions of the tide. I used to believe that I could do anything so long as I really understood that there’d be consequences, whether pleasant or unpleasant, consequences of specific size, shape, color and duration. They were to be accepted and digested. (People used to say, “Never buy anything you can’t eat.”) Now I’m uncertain whether all the consequences of any--even the simplest--action can be known immediately; I fear that some of the smaller details which one may have overlooked may bring about a disaster which will arrive at the door on some innocently beautiful Sunday morning. Why not.

At the turnout above the Third Culvert I found a set of juzu beads which I hadn’t realized leaving or losing. There they were drying in the sun beside variegated lupine flowers. At sundown that day I noted that a great wind was blowing lumps and sheets of cloud across the narrow sky; maybe that’s all that was scheduled to happen that day. Later the air was fresh and still. The full moon appeared.

Returned to the city after many months I find too many things in my rooms and not enough air. What can be is a slice of Nob Hill in the distance. Radio delivers KJAZ without hesitation. No ideas or anything; imported beer. There was a visit to the rhododendrons blooming in the Park. In Stockton Street, Gregory Corso hollers to me from the window of his mother-in-law’s blue station wagon, also blooming. (Max doesn’t say hello but appears and disappears, grinning, from under an Army blanket on the floor of the car behind his father’s seat.) Ideal conditions prevail in the city and in the country. I continue, after all; and the consequences.
Tassajara/San Francisco, 1980