The human body is not a machine. It is a living soul just as the earth is. If you don't think your body is a soul as much as your spirit or your conscience, then please tell me where you would be without your hands, your feet, your senses of touch and taste, the comforts and discomforts of flesh, your sexuality, your incidentals. No, the body is living and rich and knows what to do and what not to do.

It's amazing really. I wake twice. From old monastic habit I wake to do my writing and early praying in the middle of the night, right before midnight. Then I wake up a second time, for good, at around six. I only use an alarm clock for the second waking, and it almost never gets to sound off because my body wakes me up between 5:48 and 5:54. I can count on that. For first rising my body wakes me up between 11:20 and 12:20 depending upon what I need him to do. My body tells time. I don't wear watches. My body knows who is good and who is bad, who to approach and who to avoid. For a long time I ignored him and didn't trust his senses, but he's usually never wrong.

My body seems to know that tonight with it being the beginning of Friday, the weekend, with it being the end of a dark moon I don't need to be awake, and so I stir at about two a.m. It's three and I'll be going to bed now. I won't be working on the novel that's nearly done. That would be like going to a dry stream bed to draw water. Right now what I need isn't there. The flesh and the spirit will supply it later in the day. This is how it is on Fridays. But how it is all the time is an act of mystical trust, that the flesh and spirit supplies what I need if I am faithful to both.