I can’t not write about the war, and yet I can’t write about it at all. I'm just overwhelmed by the flood of information and my thoughts about it, to the point where each piece slips from focus and is lost. The work of organizing my thoughts is too daunting and so I don’t say anything. I wish not to be silent, but to find some way to manage my thoughts or to overcome my fear of being shallow, trite, or wrong.

I drove around a bit in the pain of what has been lost to this war. The knowledge of that supply crew taking a wrong turn and ending up dead or captured looped on a tight circuit in my chest. I’m confused by the impact of that event. Their deaths and torture are no more significant than all the death and torture in the world.... Except, that they are Americans, people like me, people I might know. Maybe that event is the fine articulation of what could have been avoided if the war hadn’t started (a wrong turn). So many of us have known all along that it would look like this, though our government still doesn’t want us to see—How do people ever calculate these losses to be acceptable?

So I drove around, thinking, People are dying for the oil that makes the gas that fuels my car, so I should use it all up, right?

I paint my toenails only because it’s fun to look at them when we are doing toe exercises in yoga. Added fun is seeing the little red toes peaking out from under the comforter or as a surprise when socks come off.

Speaking of feet. I have been devising ways to thwart the pain I get in the tops of my feet from sitting in seiza. That I like an activity that requires me to sit in pain drives me nuts—I mean, why should I sit like that?

Awhile back, someone in tea class said that she sat that way until her feet bloodied and callouses developed. She said it as though it were a rite of passage, a symbol of commitment. That was it for me. I decided all that pseudo-Buddhist talk of overcoming the pain over which you have control was bunk—it’s a hindrance, a delusion you develop to fit into a false path. That’s not how I interpret the path to enlightenment. Save the meditation for the pain over which you don’t have control; there’s so much more of that.

Save the soft, supple feet and paint the toes a lucky red.

I cut up a mouse pad and put the pieces inside my socks. It worked, but the neoprene pieces migrated some. Then I discovered ready-made neoprene ankle braces that also happen to completely cover the tops of the feet. Woohoo! Paydirt. Now I sit there in relative comfort, thinking, Suckers!

In the afternoon the rain cleared and while it wasn’t sunny, edges were sharp and the colors of the world rich. I was driving again, this time feeling lighter and listening to pulp, which will always lift you up from the depths of the world.

I’d just read a couple of those "war blogs" now linked to from the main media outlets. Those soldiers don’t say much, but their kill-‘em-all-and-sort-‘em-later attitude is striking. My first reaction is to think they are naive: unworldly and probably uneducated. But their position is only half told: Kill ‘em all (or they’ll kill me), of course.

I remembered the man serving talas in Turkish Delight today. He had gold eyes. I thought about the beauty we never see of people borne from the oldest places of civilization; how their features are saturated with time, like eyes that carry the desert. I thought of that lust in My Name is Red.

Then, just like all the newly sharpened edges, so salient was the magnificence of being a distinct person: of being the soldier and owning the mindset of that identity, or of being me, the opposite of him, and appreciative of his conviction, because I could not ever get my mind to accept his role. There was just this overwhelming sense that every type of person is necessary, and how incredible that is, if you could accept your place within that sphere.

It’s strange to try to articulate these kinds of moments. They feel like teasings of transcendence, which if it ever happens, would happen just like that: momentary and without your own doing.