This last week I attended Naomi Shihab Nye's "Words under Words" five-day retreat with an additional fifteen other amazing, generous, tear-inducing, laughter-provoking, warm-hearted poets at Tassajara Hot Springs. I was able to touch my own halo, and all of theirs as well, so it was a profound experience.

Tassajara is a Soto Zen monastery, located very much off the grid, in a tuck of canyon off of Carmel Valley. The road is steep, unpaved, and treacherous, so I took the proffered "coach" (a weary, but obedient Chevy Suburban) both there and back.

On the last day, on the ride back to our cars, Naomi asked me "Do you know Keith Laumer? He died a few years ago." I told her I last read A House in November.

"We're friends with his daughter. If I had known you back then, we would have given you Keith Laumer's desk!" Naomi said.

See?  Halos.

Chris told me that gangbangers use American Sign Language to covertly communicate with each other. That idea sends chills of both fear and admiration through me.

For some reason, this relates in my mind directly to this quote from a Peter de Vries's novel Wtich's Milk:

"He said that the English vocabulary for sex was hopeless, very nearly all down the line. There were only coarse words on the one hand, and, on the other, the bookish ones, hardly less embarrassing. There was nothing in between, nothing really and honestly usable for two people... For every organ or act for which a foul or stilted word was the only existing alternative, he tried to think of a suitable one, from the phonetic and other standpoints."