WE ALL CAME FROM THE COUNTRY

I grew up in a city, under crowded circumstances, but when you're young everything is food of a kind. When I grew old enough to develop a natural taste of my own for a place that would feed my older soul, the country was where I found it.

Whenever I make the trip into the city from the country I feel a loss, I miss the sky, I miss the quiet, the space, the breath of trees, the way nature arranges things, she has good hands. I miss her native friendliness, her infinite language, her random acts of beauty.

In my youngest youth I’d always sensed what I later realized: that the big city was where we still yearn for the Eden that pulls at the tides of our hearts, that city folk use for picnics and vacations, summer homes when they can get them; but that knowledge did nothing to ease the feeling of being away. I couldn't wait to get home.

Now when I return home, the closer I get the quieter the air becomes, the calmer the people and the closer we are to the heartbeat of the earth, source of our destiny among the stars.

We all came from the country.

EXCERPTS FROM SOMEWHEN #3

The fragrance is and isn't, like a light bulb on the fritz - suppose that happens more and more as you get older, the thought slips in - he can’t catch and hold it, that magic and uplifting fragrance that takes him back to a self he’s lived in before, like those romantic moments themselves, whenever and wherever they were, impact like a freight train made of air, like any romantic moment in fact, was it a moment on a park bench or just walking along a street somewhere somewhen...

He’s no longer where his body is now, but is strolling in the past along this big city street toward the intersection just before the office, wandering among the kinds of memories that come flashing back into life on wings of the air like this, suddenly there they are, those powerful connections that no longer really connect, just reach back into who you once were and are no longer, like starlight into outer space...

EXCERPT FROM SOMEWHEN #2

Gardens of light are better than gardens of darkness, rows of nourishment better than sloughs of toxicity. How much nicer to turn the deep and living soil, watch it gleam in the sunlight, alive with tomorrow, than to foster shadows of past illusion... When you till your garden you till yourself; when you seed the earth, you grow; when you nurture life, you live the more.

WHAT YOUR HANDS DON’T TELL YOU

You may think you’re in charge of your hands, and they’re content to let you think that. But you were born knowing practically nothing about "hands-on" hand management, because we have a life to learn to live and must get on with immediate matters while our hands delve into the ancient archives of handiness. 

The infant initiate must accrue practical hand skills slowly over the years, using the massive database of ancient handcraft. Right away giving you all they have in the handy archives is not good survival policy; you have a long series of more important lifethings to do than spend your waking time on the finer points of hand operation-- slicing onions, painting the Mona Lisa etc. The nanodetails of pinky lifting alone are formidable, with vast archives in the genetic database.

It’s better we remain in the dark on these points. Too much detail can be hazardous, as hands have learned from long experience. These distal experts don’t need you mucking things up with Oh should I this with the knife or Oh should I that with the club, so wisely they don’t tell you 99.999% or more of the background particulars; once we’re out of the way on this, we have a shot at survival. We should be thankful. Hands have been clawing forward for a long, hard time, in situations beyond our imagining, and that info is stored in a safe place within. We ourselves, on the other hand, are new here. 

So there’s lots of stuff that hands keep secret. If there’s something you personally want to do, like hit a bullseye with an arrow, carve a Pieta or write cursive, hands just say “Ok, show us what you want over and over, then stay out of the way. Leave the details to us.” Hands prefer simplicity in their personal relations. 

Nonetheless, we generally believe we’re in charge, since we appear to direct our hands, to bid them do our will and it is done; we seed the avocado, play some Chopin, change the tire, perform the surgery etc. -- i.e., we believe that we are ruling these dandy handy devices at the ends of our arms, to say nothing of these footy items at the ends of our legs that we we think even less about, other than that we are tacitly their masters, if we're asked. 

Historically cunning creatures that they are, hands are perfectly willing to let us go on through life believing such balderdash; pride has no place in hand character, despite the truly stunning amazing breathtaking awesome things they are capable of, right down to the atom, electron, quantum level and beyond, as they well know. 

Hands put miracles to shame.