INCURIOUS ROUNDNESS
Each year more and more I miss the great rickety bamboo racks that in not-long-ago days used to stand in every rice paddy at harvest time, hung with just-harvested rice stalks tied with the rice straw itself into bunches by grandparents, wives and children, then hung in golden bundles head down...'And wisely so,' I always used to realize afresh each year I saw the high golden walls on my autumn wanderings and stopped to look, inspired to recollection by the sight: how wise, to let the energy of the stalks drain down into the rice grains, let all cure over several days in autumn sun and wind, let every bit of goodness find its place before the rice is threshed and the straw is used for feed or mulch...
Nowadays the harvested fields stand raggedly empty, with no need for grandparents, wives or children, as more and more farmers dry the whole shebang in an hour or two using electric dryers in their garages, unseen and uninspiring to muse-hungry passersby, who perhaps are becoming fewer too, as a result of such diminishments in the general wonderscape...
How inspiring things were in the slower days, when wonderment was a common pastime as I recall, wisdom-seeds falling on the wonderer's mind from every direction for careful germination. In the now we have now, where no one even sits around whittling, ocasionally looking at the sky, wisdom is acceleratingly co-opted in the big whiz of speed and convenience, instant ease, strapped into chambers, retort packaged, zipping by or sealed in black boxes beyond our reach and care, no longer inspiring or even visible, merely reclusive, cryptic, plasticly hermetic...
Not much slow wisdom around any more as the corners are cut ever smaller, to what one day may be fully incurious roundness, no more corners remaining to slow us down, give us pause to ponder... By then where will we be? Encased in sleek pods, perhaps, fully systemed by black boxes, well-governed and as empty of wonder as fields of their harvest...
Now that we in all our autumn doings tend to turn inward, away from the importances that nourish the roots of our going on - that permit us to be - now that nearly all the rice has been harvested, now that farmers too are busy indoors and their fields lie empty, bleakly shorn, puddles of mud and scattered chaff lying fallow as even the weeds themselves begin to lie down and the flowerless air to chill, on slender green leafless stems rise the elegant gestures of 
of the bright ballet now dancing across the fields from out of the ground: one morning there they are, rising in the light, you never know where a new scarlet cluster will show up or how the flowers get around (since they make no seeds) but now they are dancing to the wind's music even on our recently reorganized mountainside, where they gesture in their red clouds along the untrammeled streambanks, reminding us that we have reached the turning point, the time of equinox, when the silent skyhinge swings us and all into winter and future: we've made it this far we're reminded by this red dance of velvet gestures, randomly presented about the landscape, though most impressively where the earth has lain untended, for nature dances best where humankind least sets foot…
