MARCH REIGNS OVER WINTER NOISE

March rains have silenced the highway
Treads on tarmac no longer clatter
Like a thousand rapid horse clops
Echoing down the hill
To the dell where I dwell
Acoustically absorbed in verdant lushness
Where stark, boney trees yesterstood
Out against the grey harshness of winter.
Nor does the gravel crunch beneath my feet
Cushioned by sunlight seeking cells
Of Gaia’s seasonal flesh tone
Between every grain to gain a quiet;
The softer sounds of songbirds
Twittering over new sown seeds
And creeping compost critters
Scurrying back to dinner
Before they are it
In nature’s life of tag.

TIDES, TOADS AND MAYAN ROADS

For the third year the toads came back to the pond last night! I checked my journal for last year and included with the date of 3/30/06 I put the note, “On the night of a solar eclipse the toads returned.” At first I thought that meant they had missed an exact year by eleven days, but checking the moon showed it was new today. Exactly thirteen moon cycles, one lunar year later to the moment, so unlike the much more arbitrary clockwork given so much credit for accuracy or our calendar with its multiple leaping back-up adjustments. The Mayans and the toads beat the Rolex and the Gregorian quartz every time when the time matters to more than a business appointment. Tiny petals from blooming Chinaberry are littering the surface of the water. A little early if I recall, but their cycle isn’t lunar, it's Confucian. My friend, Asenath, also returned from India … a reconjunction of another cycle as well.

Among the many staggering inferences to be drawn from the Mayan system of measuring time, using nine cycles as numerators to measure a date as opposed to our day, month, year, is that the longest cycle completes on the winter solstice of 2012 when the sun is in the dark spot of the milky way for the first time in its 5200 year long count. Think about how long such phenomenon had to have been studied before deciding to build an entire calendar based upon it meshed with all the other smaller cycles like an elegant instrument. If their dates weren’t so detailed I would suspect pre-Columbian interpretations of being cooked up from modern mathematically tortured theory. Rather than taking arbitrary rigidity like the year, decade, century progression of cycles multiplying by ten each time, these cycles seem like asymptotic approximations to a universal common denominator, well, relative to the solar system if it needs narrowing down. Thinking about how long ago observations for such a calendar must have begun being collected makes the vedas seem like yesterday’s newspaper … unless they had a cheat sheet from outer space at some time in their more recent history. The toads had to learn on their own croak. Maybe.

AWAKENING IN A WAKE FOR A WAKE

Amidst a speed run on the Atlantic Ocean from the Arctic circle to the Antarctic, I stood at the fantail of the USS Forrestal and watched as the day’s noon mess waste was dumped into it by the sailors on duty. With the power that sent this monstrous ship at the speed of trains across its surface the scraps were sucked so deeply, so reluctantly that when finally reaching the surface almost out of sight in our wake some pieces literally exploded out of the water propelled by the pressure relief. This event must also occur to any object floating or being swimming within the influence of those giant propeller blades without prior experience and no warning of such a phenomenon. The water remains quite roiled long after the roar of the engines can only be heard by the whales.

I recalled this experience in finding a metaphor for something I always experience when offering my efforts in the service of the wishes of another through my business of graphics. I have spent since 1985 honing the comfort level of undergoing the process of “earning a living.” “making a living” “affording a living” … no matter how I type it or spell it or say it, there’s something wrong about the phrase. But that’s a whole other thing, maybe. I have dove-tailed my learning about the effect of possessions and the benefit of their lack with how much effort I wanted to exert in support of stuff I do retain as beneficial to living around the silo of civilization nibbling at good parts of the grid, as it were. The way I have come to deal with it is by minimalizing both the possessions and thereby the effort to maintain them and maximizing timelessness in being here now. For the past month and a half, I have kept the blog going by combing through old journals for posts because I had one of those making a living periods intense enough to absorb almost all my attention.

Like that oblivious indigenous ocean life I was calmly going about my day tending the garden, playing with the cats, digging the new pond, learning my graphics programs, reading books and blogs, talking to friends all at a pace that suited occasions and urges when along this powerhouse of purpose comes to sweep me up in its intent and, after a period of getting up to speed, the propeller blades no longer appear to spin because I am with them as the water rushes by behind us. We go the length of the Atlantic, around Cape Horn, around Australia, around the Cape of Good Hope and all the way back to Nova Scotia where my aid in purpose’s propulsion is no longer required and I swirl in the wake of six weeks living otherwhere, elsewhen, caught up in dedication to fullest possible involvement in my client’s concerns, crashing on the couch next to the computer, leaving only to move food through me enough to keep up the pace. Now, back in my preferred ideal idyll amidst tending my garden, playing with one less cat since I was gone, feeding the fish I am still stirred by the eddies of checking to see if I have left something undone, accounting to no one the time away from a task I no longer have,— all hangovers from that living earner binge. It also deepens my already almost bottomless appreciation for my time off anyone's clock where whatever happens is the result of the tune that might be running through my flute that day, or some other urge so serendipitous.

Long after making shore from at least two days on open water in a small enough craft, you’ll have “sea legs,” where your experience of keeping up with the constant waves at sea persists on dry land and induces one to rock when standing still. When riding in the back of a pickup truck with your back to the cab looking at the open road being left behind for twenty miles or more, coming to rest for a light creates a sensation of the truck rolling backward in compensation for the persistence of the prior experience. I still have “Java legs” in that I am still thinking about the graphics project just completed, or is it? Because it always seems that no matter what the client has wanted for whatever purpose, I have felt it could have been more. Part of this project was creating a three dimensional landscape from an anthropologists 1931 topography map and using that to help recognize the location in undocumented, just discovered photos of a poorly documented dig in the same year. A modern archaeology of anthropology through geology as revealed through the virtual topology of digital imaging, as it were. After vainly searching the web for applications or tips, I made up a way to use Photoshop histograms to measure the area of any shape that can be isolated on its own layer. Anyone interested in the process, leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.

There, maybe I have blogged out my wake’s worth of whirls and sea-legs and I can get back to purposeless for a while. I like the dynamic, it enhances both. From where I view it, I benefit equally from both in living a life the system can’t even imagine being fulfilling, much less figure out how to make me earn it.

LEFTIST, OR JUST INDIFFERENT TO SUFFERING?

Cornel West

I just watched the most moving political talk since I saw Howard Zinn’s lecture on the function of history in preventing imperialism. Hooray for Democracy Now, the only place I know to find such profound understanding of the realities of the world today. The speaker was Cornel West, a professor of religion and African-American studies at Princeton University, who lit me up with his enthusiasm and clarifying understanding of the roots and soil of social unrest and what it takes to grow through the concrete of imperialism beginning with a very inclusive definition of the spirit of the left, and how acting in positive ways about what most closet leftist only mutter up their sleeve about is on the verge of becoming a unifying reality as radical reform catches on with the emerging youth. I won’t go on, I just wanted to give anyone who cares about the sorry state of US imperialism and we subjects being misrepresented by it a heads up on something you may never forget. He has a book out, "Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism”, which is next on my reading list.

EXTREME? DEPENDS ON WHERE YOU'RE FROM.

Priest and the Jazz men

Whew! I'm sitting at my keyboard from a habit developed over this winter's long hibernation looking at my blog, my home page, not with a new post in mind, but because I came inside for shady relief from the heat of what, during last summer's three months of 100°+ weather I would have considered a welcome icebox relief , 78°F! Last week was nights in the twenties and days in the thirties. All of a sudden it is 40° warmer and it just feels hotter. Weather, innocent weather, the karma of this tilted, rotating geode whose crystals are still molten and is captured by and rotating around a much hotter source of attraction and energy than anything else so close. Imagine how different weather must be on Uranus, whose axis is only 30° away from pointing along the ecliptic at the sun, so that every fall the sun disappears over the horizon even if you live on the equator and doesn't return 'til after spring — and even when it is visible it appears to rise in the west.

Dissatisfaction or, better, discomfort with the weather is a pretty apt metaphor for what, on a much larger scale, amounts to man's alteration of any and all environment that he can rationalize as being his, be it through promises in Genesis or corporate greed or just, plain desire for privacy. As it turns out, the effort or accident of altering any part of the weather, effects the delicate balance within which our life, all life can exist. As evidence and example of the effects of global warming we are shown melting glaciers, stranded polar bears and coastlines moving inward. By the time the Atlantic is in the streets of Manhattan most life will have been fried to crispy critters way beyond Coppertone's cherubic tan lines. While national attention is focused on the increasing dollar damage to developer speculation in untenable coastal property, it ignores the ultimate cost of life and living space for people who don't have a lobby nor money to buy the attention of people they elected much less get the justice everyone deserves.

That's enough of that wander into politics. I meant to remain with the individual preference for comfort and how the recent past shades the present beyond our capacity to rationalize that 78° is 78° no matter what. The love I share with my friend in Johnson City is the same wonderful recognition and sharing of our mutual strength, vision and independence as it has been for over a decade now, but having not seen her in more than a year, looking down at the floor at some strewn rose petals in the wake of her alighting last week long enough to whisk me off to see John Prine brings an especially large gulp of missing her that would not have occurred two weeks earlier. Human perception is a wondrous sliding scale and my engineering background hasn't a clue where to put the cross hairs. Just not at the service of a weapon.

This addition was added the next day's dawn:
Having partaken of the pleasant pre dawn light to plant some okra, marigolds, onions, peppers and tomatoes and having sat in my seat in the green greenhouse house to survey the state of the garden in transition from the salad days of winter (three lettuces, mustard, arugula, spinach, bok choy, carrots, radishes, radiccio) to spring’s early fecundity when axe handles start sprouting and the hide and seek progress of the sun to melt away the morning’s overcast — having enjoyed all that and a sip of eyes and a toke of wings my thoughts gravitated toward the subject of the last post and to what I begin to realize is the beginning place for all my thoughts — the contrast of extremes.

One of the characteristics of an individual is their attitude to extremity, whether it is the weather or public or private conditions. At one end of that spectrum lie the very narrow, life by law, color inside the lines, unaware there’s even a box within which they are sheep for whom anyone willing to keep the boat concrete still is their leader. At the other are the “bleeding hearts and artists” pushing the envelope of human capacity for beholding the full extremity of the universe as a complimentary dynamic spinning out endless variety rather than the competitive destruction of entropic chaos seen by the intolerant reality tunnel of the box dwellers. Pirsig sees this contrast itself as yet another dynamic he calls static quality and dynamic quality in a sort of ratcheting through evolution with the heretics dreaming and pulling and the establishmentarians trying to cling to wherever they are pulled.

This is all fairly easy to talk about on the philosophical, macrocosmic level of humanity. But being able to envision to what degree oneself is clinging or climbing is always out of focus because the “to or up what” is rarely ever understood to be no thing. In my experience, by the time I came to realize the “to what” was to my happiness, the need to cling to or get any more had dissolved from their obvious uselessness.

Within extremes lies the essence of beauty. A thin graceful line across the broad stroke of a blank sheet of paper enhances the quality of each. A dusty side to the thin line enhances the depth of the paper. The area within the shading that the light of the paper equals the dark of the line is the threshold of the extremes, the poignance of both being necessary for either. The value of peace is dependent on realizations of equal measure of war. The value of love is dependent on realizations of equal measures of abuse. At the threshold lies our center witnessing us choose sides like a baby learning to walk on a see-saw pivoting on the axis of a gyroscope blown by the wind. The sea is my life. My home port is my boat. Land is western civilization.

The new spring begins to appear against the dullness of the bare trees like light strokes of the broad side of a piece of chartreuse pastel being captured by the high points of the textured grey paper, and it begins again, this extraordinary renditition of a timeless tradition.

THINKING OUT LOUD

If we didn’t live some variation of the same cycle over and over experience would teach us nothing. Usually it is a bump on the head where there’s a long forgotten bruise, or a blister or, for the truly stubborn, a callous of repeated conflict between the way of nature and the plans of man.

Consider that now is the eternal process in which one experiences a movie projected on the screen of a loop of film whose frames remain the same every cycle through a projector who’s settings react endlessly, differently to the frame before. Consider who is the projector operator. Can he keeps his hands off the knobs for a few loops? Is it getting hot in this booth?

Screens are effective on insects larger than their holes in the daylight, but at night — watch out! Even the larger ones take the effort to squeeze through just get to my reading lamp — practically every page I read is also used as a swatter.

Ladybugs love edges. I have been observing ladybugs on different occasions obsess on running around the rim of plastic containers. Once involved a pair running in opposite directions on the rims of two starter pots side by side, which made them appear to be gear wheels, as they met at the near edges every cycle. Another time a pair patroled opposite sides of a trash can quite unterritorially, just always on opposite sides, whether on the march or at rest. Curiosity, pursuit, xenophobia, flee, or just very efficient at whatever. Who knew, I have movies.

Believers cannot dream
So wound in weaving
The web of faith
Exuded by the need to trust
Others who say they know
Demanded by the rational myth
Upheld by the national kith
Curiosity is anathema to certainty
Imagination is corruption to credo
The true terrorist is ourselves
Outside the box
With the freedom to think,
And feel and be and see
God doesn’t know what all.
Without a theory
All is as it is, it seems
Pick up a thread
And sew the seams
To dress now in yesterday
For tomorrow’s faschion line
Between conformity and free thought.

As curiosity stretches theories thinner
The plot thickens
The juice of imagination gels
Around the cool breeze
Wafting through the holes
Punched in flawed fiber of certainty
Releasing the growing pressure
Of shelved contradictions
What feels like dissolution
Is seen to be a rarity unrealized
As the solid become myriad
Coagulated hypotheses
Hives abandoned by the bees
Black holes eat planets to
Energize the light bulbs of ideas
With their farts.