by Richard Denner (A.K.A. Jampa Dorje)
The Covid thing. A breathing thing. Smoke from fires, all summer, from every direction. A breathing thing. BLM protests with “I can’t breathe” written on my mask. And then, Waldenstrom Macroglobulinemia, a rare blood disease catches me unaware, sneaks up like a “smyler with a dagger beneath his cloak” and nearly snuffs me out. A breathing thing. So, being a master of meditation, I holed up for a year, took online philosophy classes at CWU and wrote essays on subjects ranging from ecological degradation to psychedelic katabasis, allegorically synthesizing the emptiness within with the emptiness without and doing chemotherapy. I’m in remission. Lucky me, I have a brave son, a Virgil, who was my north star and guided me through the rounds of daily life. I was lucky to have the support of my family and friends.
Next, I was diagnosed with a case of Chronic Obstacle Pulmonary Disease, followed by a bout of pneumonia. Breathing things. The pneumonia put me in the intensive care ward at the local hospital. The doctor said I was septic. I had shot right through the Bardo of Dying into the Bardo of Supreme Reality, and sitting in full lotus in bed, I began my practice of Consciousness Transference until the nurses stopped me, saying I was making their monitors flash. After ten days of intensive care, I returned to the Bardo of Life.
At home in my monk’s hut, sobered by my near demise, I have been inspired to finish two compilations of my writings, one of all the chapbooks I wrote for the classes I took in philosophy over the last five years. Yikes! I finished Æsthethics: The Philosophical Treatises of Richard Denner, Jampa Dorje, and Bouvard Pécuchet, running to five hundred pages, a tome that weighs a ton, and now I’ve completed Jampa’s Worldly Dharmas, a series of tales that is my biography-autobiography, written in the third person about Jampa Dorje by Bouvard Pécuchet—scribble, scribble, scribble, print, print, print—or, as David Bromige put it, “The sad thing is I won’t live to finish my autobiography.” But I’m doing my damnedest and living to the max on every cubic inch of the air I breathe.
You can stand in the doorway and snicker, Death.
I’m not ready yet.
Author Biography: Richard Denner (aka Jampa Dorje)
An eccentric poet-monk-scholar Richard Denner (aka Jampa Dorje) is a graduate of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. The proprietor of an Ellensburg coffee-house bookstore for many years, he moved to Pagosa Springs, CO, to complete a traditional Tibetan three-year retreat. More information can be garnered at his Wikipedia profile.