In the Beginning

She sits at the kitchen table, in front of her computer, tapping her pen, pencil, mouse buttons, keyboard keys. What will she write about today? It is the first mala, bead, word, document. The first of 108, more or less. Um..um..um...um...um, what to write? Shhh... breathe... let all be as it is.

Her fingers begin the rhythmic, non-rhythmic tapping. She has typed since she was a small child, her father bringing home the ancient Remington when he replaced it in his business with a newer version of same. He needed one to type up the bills he sent the customers who may or not pay them on time, if ever. But it’s a business, and the bills must be typed for the work that he performs, painstakingly, in his shop, repairing electric motors that people bring to him or that he collects when he makes emergency house calls to extract motors of big old washing machines and other machines that you can’t just load into the car or truck and drop off at the small shop that is her dad’s. Lucky her, she got to learn to type before they started teaching those things in her school, and importantly, when it was still fun. The Remington came with a how-to book, dad was big into how-to books, everything he knew he had learned that way. Well, and he was big into practice too, of course. Which explains why he was such a whiz at playing the old steel string guitar (he let her try and gave her the how-to books for that as well, he had long outgrown them) and the fiddle which he no longer owned one of. But you should have heard him play “Turkey in the Straw,” even years after he had last touched a fiddle, and long after his fingers had thickened up.

Yeah, so maybe with a little practice, she could actually do this 108 thing. Or at least 1. 108 begins with 1, which is more than 0 (not to mention what else it is in today’s digital age, or the tight relationship those two, the one, the nothing, carry on). 8 is her current personal year in numerology. It is also the sum of the numbers in her date of birth reduced to a single digit. 1 + 0 + 8 adds up to 9, which is what the letters of the name on her birth certificate add up to, in the way numerology tallies things. It all sounds good, promising, to her. Yes, she likes the new old focus on 1. It is everything, in a manner of speaking. You can add anything to 1: 0, 2, 13, 59, 108, -ness. But in the end, or at least where it counts, it is still just itself. What it is. One.