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.

MY LIFE ON THE EURASIAN PLATE 

Clockwise - Blue dot: North American plate, Pacific plate, Philippine plate, Eurasian Plate. 

Like everyone else alive today I got here late, tectonically speaking; by the time I arrived, Pangaea was little more than a crackpot hypothesis. 

Soon after reality set in, I learned that I'd been born and raised on the North American plate, which will always be my tectonic home (does one ever truly leave home plate?) but soon flew across the Pacific plate to the Eurasian plate where, during my first years of Tokyo drift, I occasionally traveled to land masses on the Philippine plate and the Eurasian Plate, which, as it happens, bears Kyoto and the Kansai region generally southward, at about 1 cm per month.

Subsequently, as personal transience would have it, in 1980 Standard Continental time I moved to Kyoto via the Shinkansen, which leaves tectonic speed in the dust; even going by foot is faster than any plate on earth. Accelerated existence on my new quake-prone plate has nevertheless been every bit as delightful as my times on the various other plates that go to make up the well-lived tectonic life.

Nowadays, it seems a lot of folks are content just to drift maybe a few centimeters a year on their birthplates while gliding imperceptibly through life, but as a traveler who - like anyone else - can walk faster than any plate, staying pretty much in place while moving indiscernibly is a lifestyle I could never quite accept. The solar system whirls galactically through accelerating space, earth spins and glides its way through the starlit void, its own many plates drift across vast seas of turbulent magma, why in the world should we ourselves remain in place, platefully speaking? It seems not to be in our universal nature; are we not platal in origin?

However big the picture, tectonic movements can be confusing on many levels. As if national citizenship weren’t illusion enough, the constant flux of all these plates, resolutely immune to autocratic fiat, renders them even more illusory than borders. As a native of the shifting North America plate, which glides down over the top of the Pacific plate to add northern Japan to Japan but never quite makes it to Kyoto, all I can truly say is that by birth I am Terran.

That blue jewel is a planet to be proud of.

WAITING FOR MARS

Funny thing the way the world is, turning and turning, wheeling through this galaxy, doing its best always, folks all over it going their ways hither and yon in city and country, forest and prairie, most of them trying their best too, me among all just sitting here in the dark on the deck with some wine, watching the sky above the Lake, waiting for Mars to rise.

We make our choices as we travel through life, mostly as tourists it seems, what with preplanned schools, careers, pensions, although strict adherence to the received plan appears to be becoming less and less a good idea the longer I live. Look at cursive writing, mortgages, pensions, books, newspapers and the PhD, for just a few examples. I'm not being cynical, that's only the way it may appear to certain vested-interest folks. The truth is never cynical.

TRUST, on the other hand - you remember that word - used to be part of all those inscriptions carved over institutional doorways now falling into economoral decline everywhere-- archaeologists dig one up every now and then from another older and forgotten society that made earlier versions of the same mistakes.

One of the first places they used the word TRUST was on the money, when the money was no longer gold and became a matter of faith, whence food comes only by miracle. TRUST was also commonly used in the names of the biggest banks and most reputable finance companies, First Trust this and National Trust that, the word had that much heft; politicians even used it once upon a time, in high-sounding speeches before microphones and tape recording exposed the de facto conversations behind the scenes. The word was embroidered on old flags as well, then later printed on t-shirts manufactured in low-wage countries. Ironically, in the present day, TRUST is still engraved on the US dollar, where the illusory cachet is now needed more than ever.

TRUST was the word, back in the day. You could find it in all the holy books-- and look what they've done with it. Things have changed so much since the word itself could be "trusted" - in the original, uncorrupted sense - to mean what it originally conveyed. We should maybe find a new word for the lost definition, a word like TRUST used to be, when it didn't cause a chuckle - you'd see it in those big bronze angular Roman letters or engraved in walls and gilded, when it still had dignity and semantic power, when it was a word you could... whatever that new word will be.

As for ourselves, there is Truth in us, of the kind we have largely misplaced, or maybe lost, here on earth-- Here's hoping that when next we put the new TRUST over doorways and on our bills of exchange, we've reclaimed the old meaning and lived up to it for at least 1000 years...

YOU ARE HERE...

Earth as seen from Mars.
Just to keep things in perspective...

BEING MIRACLES

Climbing up the mountain road these Spring evenings at the hour of not quite dark, when all the sky is like a throw of velvet reflecting a distant light, almost as if you could reach up there and trail your hand among the tiny, brightening stars...

At about this time the sun-warmed earth, still damp from recent rains and now blanketed with the cooling air of day, sends out from all its secret palaces the richest of its fragrances, that ride on the air I rise through as I climb... All the perfumes are there, if you have the time...

Who knows how they come to be, these spices of life for each inhalation - cinnamon, oregano, thyme, it is a long list - it holds a hint of chocolate, of tea, there is apple, gardenia, mushroom, living earth, coffee, musk... The moments I pass through are rich... The night is an ancient acquaintance...

For whom does the night send out its secret perfumes, but those who can sense them? And why is it so? In the night, as in the day, it is to say in fragrance that all is interwoven, that none are apart. In each of these nights we are given to sense the miracles around us, all the more finely to perceive and enjoy the miracles of ourselves.