Of the few notebooks you decided to keep, one is a recent collection of little paintings and snippets of text inspired by your morning readings of the I Ching.The first time you tossed the coins you landed on #52. Stillness. Here you have written down: In the season for abiding, abide. In the season for moving, move. On the next page, following neatly from #52, #53. Gradual: Gradual means moving ahead as an offer- ing. Steely as a mountain in a cloud. Many pages later, you’ve painted the page liber- ally in shades of green for #44. Generative: The gener- ative is everything occurring. At the bottom of the page, below the curtain of green, you’ve added an observa- tional note: Strong Storms. There are some pages in this journal that are painted and wordless, and other pages marked only by the day’s reading with no elaboration, no inter- pretation, and the sparest dash of color. You stopped reading and rendering the I Ching after you tossed the coins and landed on #24. Return: Yielding and devoted as a river. This is to emerge and die back without any anxious longing. In the simplicity of re- turn, there is no regret. This was a season of your life. In your new home you can watch the weather from any of the twelve windows, or from the front porch, and you can hear the rain coming down on the roof hatch, which may or may not be vulnerable to leaks. Yesterday the rough edges of a storm system came through and this morning when you woke up you could see the last of it falling from the sky. It took only an hour or so after your waking for the sun to cut through the dense gray and land on tattered prayer flags and the leaves of a golden magnolia tree, destined to bloom for the briefest time come spring. The storm lingers on in the form of wind, a wind with no end and no beginning, caught up in cause- less perfection.
BTL SRVC LIV: FUGIT FUGIT AWAY Written by Bill DiDonna I was hired to set up a wine cellar for a Brit- ish doctor building a small temple to his ego in Naples. You don’t really ‘put down’ the wines I currently love to drink, but I certainly didn’t mind searching out a case of Gaja 2016 Costa Russi. In fact, I bought 13 with the idea of slipping home the extra bottle in my checked bag. I still knew people. I could conjure up four bottles of Latour ’78 Pauillac—de- spite my love of the naturals, this is probably my favorite wine of all-time. Probably due to my memory of first drinking it. 23 years old with a date so far above my pay-grade it hurt me to look at her. We went to an outdoor affair at the house of a new friend in the ‘biz.’ There were minor celebrities and a lot of Cava and mindless chatter, but as the night lengthened, I pulled out my chef skills and whipped up an impromptu meal for the five re- maining guests.As I was about to start grilling, our host appeared
with a bottle of the Latour, opened it and I achieved Satori. The meal was a success, my date (now a distant fond mem- ory) was mesmerized and we drank three bottles and stayed over in the guest room, so I was happy to score some. I knew a storm was coming, but all the maps projected it heading north and ripping into Tampa. The 2005 DRC Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Richebourg Grand Cru had just arrived, the sky was dark and the wind was high. The delivery woman told me she was getting the hell out of there and urged me to do the same. I was wiping down the Burgundy when my phone blew up. EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY!!
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