Obviously, the only reason I’m putting a few of these very first draft, rather random sections of my work ‘in progress,’ I’ll call it loosely, is to find out whether any readers out there would be the slightest bit interested in continuing if they stumbled across this: would you want to know any who, what, why, when, where? Please remember, compassion is a very mindful trait.

Snippet Two:

And now I was staring at a ditch that didn’t exist yesterday at the edge of a woods that was mostly brush and scrub pine with a roommate who I didn’t even really know at a retreat lead by a mad monk. “Everything changes.” “Accept the Now.” I was trying very, very hard to do just that but  was also thinking about why the ditch had appeared, who had put it there and where did it begin? Or end? Somewhere up in the pines above the dunes. Without saying more, I began to climb the hill. Sam followed, his rolling lumber heavier than mine as was his breathing. As the hill went up, the path turned from slushy grass to rocks and then to no path at all. But the ditch was still there beside us providing a trail when the trail had given up.
Finally, we stopped. The ditch stopped. The trees stopped.. We were in a clearing, a hole in the woods, nothing but dirt and a few wisps of bad grass with a few stumps dotting it. And at the very edge of the ditch, face down, head on one side, torso the other, lay a person. Or “once was a” person because she looked very, very dead. I knew I was letting my expecting mind get in the way. There really wasn’t any certainty that the body was a she. There was very long white-blond hair but it wasn’t like I had never run into a metal band before; and the figure was slight and didn’t look very tall but one of my favorite friends was a 5’ 3” drag queen so that meant nothing. And really, even the “dead” part, was I so sure about that? Who knows how comfortable lying face down across a ditch to sleep off a drunk might be, after all?

A few years before, I had taken a CPR class and I remembered at least the first part—the whacking and shouting part. To be absolutely correct I should first shout “Call 911” to Sam but there were no cell phones allowed at the retreat so that seemed a bit needlessly dramatic. I skipped straight to step two: I walked over yelling “Are you ok? Are you ok?” and started hitting the—person—on the back with the palm of my hand. Hard. There was a girl in the CPR class who had just said in a quiet voice “are you ok?” and she got reamed out by the instructor. I wasn’t making that mistake. “Are you ok?” I screamed as loud as I could and thwacked the—person—again.
“What the hell are you doing?” Sam snarled. “You can tell she’s dead.”
“How do you know it’s a ‘she’? Aren’t you bringing your expectations to this? Shouldn’t you approach it with ‘beginner’s mind’?”
“Well, she or he or it is still dead.”
I paused my back slapping, looked at the unmoving—body—the new position I had just promoted the person to.
“Yeah. What do we do? We can’t call the police; there’s no phone anywhere around. And in all the good detective shows, you learn not to touch the body, so we shouldn’t, but…”
“But you’re really jonesing to find out whether it’s a he or she, aren’t you?” Sam said, tilting back his neckless chin to peer down his nose at me. “Well, do it. Don’t keep me waiting,” he went on, smiling like the good little enabler he was.
I thought about at least waiting until we told Leon, the director of the retreat, the “monk” who ran the place like Mussolini on meth but I wasn’t sure the “mad monk” would be the best person to do the turning over. I already had him pegged as a main suspect. So my slapping hand now became my turning hand and I rolled the—woman–because she had now had a second promotion—over.