The answer is zero.

Let go of everything that can be let go of. Unaccumulate.

Notice a new way of figuring out. If many places are held by nothing at all, more actions are possible.

More actions are likely--all that room.

Many things in the world that I don't understand are good.

Many things in the world that I don't understand are good.

There are many ways to die at work. It's a privilege to have a job that is physically easy that only kills your soul or eats away at your soul and lets it squirm.

John Henry was a steel driving man who may or may not have existed as an individual who got in a contest with a new machine that did what he did. He won the contest and died, in the John Henry song, Lord, Lord.

In "John Henry Days," a novel by Colson Whitehead, we spend some time with John Henry. He is an awesome steel driver. The railroad is digging a tunnel through an Appalachian mountain. He drives a steel stake as deep as possible as fast as possible. Someone else inserts explosives. The explosives go off and the tunnel moves forward.

There are two work sections. When a collapse has killed a group of men at the other location, the boss proposes a steel-driving contest between John Henry and another man, an Irishman. John Henry is often in these contests. John Henry knows that the boss is proposing a contest now to distract the men from the deaths. He knows that the boss has chosen an Irishman to go up against John Henry because that plays into ethnic bad feeling between Irishmen and African-Americans like John Henry. The animosity will further distract from the deaths. John Henry knows the bosses think that way.

Everyone but John Henry is sure he'll win. He does win that contest with a human, as he has won many others.

We see John Henry at his regular work, not a contest, driving a spike in with a holder who isn't good at the job, who is new. The holder messes up, and John Henry's hammer smashes his hand.

He's young. He starts screaming. John Henry starts carrying him out of the tunnel to help, and tells him if he doesn't start screaming, John Henry will leave him to die. The inept spike holder stops screaming.

In "John Henry Days," we spend some time with a man who does the kind of work John Henry does, hard, physical work, and who also creates and sings songs.

At first, I thought this was the man who first created the John Henry song. Then it seems that he is the man who thought of the "Lord, Lord" part. He thought of other people singing it and passing it on, and he was happy.

It is a gladness that I'm plowing through this book and that this book is plowing through me, rearranging bits of the ground of my being. Future harvests in my life won't be the same-old same-old.

Is appreciated.

Gurgle, gurgle, biffle, boffle--little kids at play.

I can't do it. All the times I say inside to myself, "I can't do it," I could be saying, what the heck, thoughts are easy, "I can do it."

I need to find the knowing how to do it. The brain is vast, deep, includes the whole body. And the body includes the whole world as I hear someone on the street speak who just got back from a place I think of as elsewhere, as I breath air that who knows where it's been.

Who knows how to do this that I've been teling myself that I can't do? Maybe me, as is, now, if I get confident, listen to "I can do it," and sink into what I already know. Maybe I need to hang with someone else who's been doing it for a while, and watch, listen, move. How big the world.

Doors and bridges--thinking of you.

Flowers and flowers. Thanks. Things that bloom and seed the future, and things that flow and go someplace else without a break.

[corrected the name of the cross street to Hillway. Added which side of the street it's on, Golden Gate Park side, in line marked] A flag that was yellowish beige and a blue a bit on the light side that was toned down with grey would be a mild-mannered flag, and rather pretty.

Some painting on the side of the building at Hillway and Parnassus, looks like different versions of a flag like that, rectangles of slightly different blues and beiges painted next to each other on the existing paint, which is beige without yellow and worn and fairly dirty stucco.

The building is now that pale and yet dirty beige with the windows trimmed in dark brown. I think they're looking at a yellowish beige, light grey blue repaint, which shows promise of being a big improvement.

The building is part of UCSF (blue and yellow are University of California colors, but dark blue and yellow yellow. It's at the end of the UCSF campus that is toward the Haight rather than the end toward the ocean--the east end, on the side of the *street toward Golden Gate Park.

If humans had flags that were a little big more like the restful bedsheet colors, would we be a little bit less warlike?

**[added "Every life experience we have. . . in paragraph marked with asterisk ]"Fracking" is a word that falls trippingly off the tongue as a substitute for "fucking," and for occasions when "fucking" means harm and making damage, the meaning of "fracking" fits, too.

Fracking is a way of getting natural gas out of shale. Financial Times' Sheila McNulty describes it thus, (ft.com 3/8/10): "The process involves drilling down for up to 20,000 feet and sideways for up to 4,500 feet. Water and find sand are pumped through at pressure, fracturing the shaled and leaving the grains propping up the rock so the gas escapes."

Pretty fracking intense. Some worry that it will hurt the ground water. It's been happening in wide-open, boom-mentality places like Alberta, and now the frackers want to do it in many more places, many of them close to where lots of people live.

I think I find it hard to wrote about nuclear power production and nuclear weapons because what I don't like about them, at the deepest level, is not bad stuff they can do to humans and other living beings. It's that I feel, in my hard minerals bones, we should not do that to matter.

*Matter has been so very generous to us, and still is. Enclosing our souls, maybe, or spirits. Or maybe we have no souls and spirits but matter enables to feel that we do. Every life experience we have is a gift from matter.

We shouldn't torture matter apart, as we do in nuclear activity. I see the mushroom cloud as matter's agony and we shouldn't do it.

That is how fracking feels to me. Wrong because mean on some basic level where we shouldn't be mean to our mother, mater, matter.

Nuclear is nuclear, fracking is simpler mechanical bullying--really different process as science and technology are taught. I think they are, on one level, the same kind of offense, which I feel in my body, below t he smarts of my head, below being the local person I am, below being a mammal--down at the level where I am matter.

Moving through dates that have all been Easter at one time or another, we start to feel revived.

We view with alarm; therefore, we are important.

We state our scary views, and some people who believe us look at us and cower at the same time. They are not exactly cowering at us, but it's close enough to give us a despotic thrill.

Some organized sports have records that go back decades, sometimes more than a century, of who won and who lost. Viewing with alarm is an unorganized sport. Detailed, objective records are not kept of the accuracy of the forebodings of pessimists, either individually or as a group.

You might as well check with your smart heart and your sense of fun, and do what you generously want to do.

More like a weaving than a shield--a nest that is safe.

The right strand is there at the right time to block what shouldn't get in right now, and the spaces between are there for air.

In some parts of knowing, I've worked to overcome automatically thinking like people around me think. In other parts, I drink from a shared cup of stupid again and again without noticing either the cup or the stupidity.

Big mosaics near sidewalk level sometimes have in them a number of mosaic pieces, tessarae, that are mirrors rather than bits of color.

The pieces of color make the pictures. The pieces of mirror make it seem, as a walk by, that the background of the mosaic is walking with me. Friendly.

At the size at which our animal eyes can see, much of what's going on between living beigns involves sex.

At the size that is too small for our animal eyes to see, much of what is going on between bits of matter is trying to even out electrical charges.

Around here there is an idea that a good way for us human animals made of bits of matter to learn things is by sitting still. I think the originators of that idea were thinking of some other universe.

I heard an American teacher who had visited schools in Japan say that in the lower grades with the younger kids, the Japanese teachers had much more tolerance for noise and movement that U.S. teachers usually do. What the Japanese teachers see and hear as evidence that the kids are engaged, United States teachers would tend to experience as a bad kind of chaos.

Chaos can mean a jumble that is about to be pointless or is pointless. Chaos can mean a jumble that is about to be dangerous or is dangerous.

Chaos can mean a process that makes patterns that our animals minds can't predict but that our animal eyes can see as beautiful. I'll help you with your gorgeous chaos. You help me with mine.

Retaining walls 22nd Street and Church, two walls that meet right at the corner, under a lot with a house on it, are painted, over all, reddish brown, color of lives.

Flying against the reddish brown background are butterflies painted as tall as a toddler. There are around them some proportionately large plants for them to like and feed on.

The J-Church is in the tunnels when it's downtown, and after it comes out of the downtown tunnel it is mostly on its tracks running on the streets with cars.

Between 18th Street and 22nd Street the J-Church is in its own track space, not on the street. First next to the green lawns Dolores Park, then between backyards of homes.

As the J-Church turns away from the personal taste in planting backyards and the folky geometry of San Francisco outdoor back-of-the-house wooden staircases, it comes upon the butterfies on their walls, still and waving.