MAJESTY

Now and then we get into deep rhythms that are more of the world than ourselves, rhythms of breath and time, of heartbeat and task, of that goal we must reach using hands, legs, feet, eyes, whatever we can bring to bear, and by the time we've gone that deeply the who of the action is mostly an absent participant-- like me of whatever name out there in yesterday's clear winter dusk-- a body following its breath around, assemblage of hands, legs, feet, eyes, heartbeat, powering a wheelbarrow amidst stacks of firewood here and there,with a task to complete before dark by over-and-over loading the barrow with firewood and getting it by whatever means up onto the deck and thence into the house beside the stove to warm the coming winter night, for which process the nameless fellow has over time developed a rhythmic system and so disappears into the systemic rhythm, minimindedly lifts the wood from the wheelbarrow, hefts it up onto the deck, carries the first load into the house, stacks it beside the stove, emerges empty-armed for the next load and stops awestruck, reclaimed at sight of the vast rosy herd of sunfired buffalo clouds wandering by overhead, grazing the blue prairie of evening sky on hoofs of silver, drifting slowly southward, no hurry, what's hurry, what's time, what's a heartbeat, how much can it hold? Firewood can wait, warmth can be later-- the darkness is coming in majesty, and I have eyes.

WHO NEEDS OXYMORONS?

The three-day weekends plus Wednesdays off I've been enjoying since my "retirement" have convinced me (as if I've ever felt any doubt about it) that the three-day workweek is ideal for the various aspects to which life in fact pertains, such as lying back and looking at the clouds, forgetting what day it is, dozing off, picking an apple before or during that task you've set for yourself...

A five-day workweek, in disturbingly stark contrast, leaves only two seemingly half-hour days in which to make work appear to have been worthwhile only as a means of getting you to this gasp of a weekend, but it just isn't enough, it just doesn't work out: by the time you slip at last into the near-realization that you're actually not working, you've got to get back to work! That makes a five-day workweek basically indistinguishable from a seven-day workweek, which is the same as death unless you live to work, which is a big oxymoron, like a former boss of mine.

I think we'd all agree, if we weren't so busy at the moment or late for work or running for a bus or getting a license or something equally mazy, that we all need more time in which to ponder and create methods by which to minimize the noxious need for 'gainful' employment, thereby leaving us free to enjoy what is clearly the most important thing in life: i.e., life itself, in all its measures, not just from here to the office-- which enjoyment is, as I see it, the prod that gets us going to work at all, so that maybe now and then we can do a little living.

Trouble is, it takes about 40 years of jobsurvival to at last get even a taste of that freedom, if you do it like everyone else does, which bureaucracies, corporations and governments simply love everyone to do. And by then, if you do make it, you've lost that youthful glow, and totter into your hard-earned freedom leaning on a cane. I got there quicker by living first and working later.

And on the basis of my experience, I hereby formally propose the universal three-day workweek as the solution to the growing problems of unemployment and less-than fully-lived lives, as well as to those outrageous executive pay packages. Moderate employment for everyone, and a moderate salary, for a small workweek and a large life, fillable with the actually good things.

Think those big oxymorons will ever stop to listen to an apple-eating fellow who spends so much time looking at clouds?

PERFORMANCES

The way the kinmokusei trees moved in the freshening wind this morning it was clear that they knew spring was arriving-- only the first edge, but they knew. They were dancing. Their movements weren't stiff and grudging, the way they'd been only a few days ago, merely shedding snow; they were softening and sinuous, the early part of elegant. They looked greener too, each leaf filling with light, each tree more in sync with the earth and its airs, as though it was all music.

They even seemed a bit playful with each other, like newborn animals are. Watching them, I felt that feeling I get when watching kittens. Soon even the curled-up leaves of last year had joined in dancing to the wind; now that the snow was gone and the wind warming, it was party time. I was just a tourist, watching those local old-timers swirling in the air above the road, kicking up as though they were green again, not even touching the ground, like a bunch of human village dancers back in the day when villages danced like that in spring, whirling giddily, getting high, celebrating the newcoming...

Not long after that, as I was working in the garden tilling for a half-row of Inca potatoes - which look interesting ("Inca-no-hitomi is a diploid potato variety known for its yellowish-orange flesh, very high carotenoid content and chestnut-like nutty flavor" pdf link) - (only half a row 'cause I have to spread what's left of last year's compost pile before I can start tilling the other half) I looked up at the sky for an eye break and there, up in the gradual blue was the white crown of Mount Fuji - higher than the actual mountain - precisely created out of a bit of thick cloud floating by, the shading of the lower sky shaping the blue mountain itself in my mind's eye, the sky-Fuji slowly drifting toward the southeast where after a few moments it merged with a series of cloud dunes.

You really gotta watch it, there are performances everywhere.

THUNDERSTORMS

Thunderstorms rise up in distant jeweled towers all around the far shores of the the striated rose and gray Lake, all quiet on this shore but for the insect song, the high chatter of swallows bathing in the last of the sun, flashing the white of their underwings, bursting now and then into clouds of aerodynamics... The rising columns of clouds insist into the sky, like insect song into silence, like clouds of wings into empty air-- they are each and every moment's thought of the earth, working things out, balancing all, earth and sky negotiating like sea does with shore, like birds do with air, like we do with our employers-- wait,,,,what??

FAR BEYOND MAJESTY

Late afternoon is the time of sky when the light is entering its golden phase, when the trees and grasses shine undaunted into the face of the sun, as if to say, in strong green words: I am a masterpiece. There is a great and unsung pride manifest in what we are pleased to think of as mere vegetation.

Then as sunset nears, all the air itself realizes the transition and rises over the sun-warmed lake, as the cooler mountain air floods down in replacement; the whole mountain, lit aslant by the hovering sun, becomes the bed of a vast river of cool air, rushing down in cosmic obligation. To sit in that river, feel that flood, after splitting firewood in the hot sun for two hours, is like whitewatering the grand canyon while sitting still, all in the country of the soul...

Those same dark leaves lift into paleness at the first touch of the downmountain winds and gleam white in the setting sun - clearly they have an old local relationship - they carry their vastness in their seeds...

The repose of the mountains in such settings as this, shaded green, gray and black in the summer evening sun and breeze, is often described as 'majestic,' but there is more in those ancient faces than aristocracy can ever aspire to; it's a matter of interaction with eternity, not immediate lineage or ambition.

Then when all the air is balanced at last, from out of the overmountain light come galleons of windblown pink clouds, sailing over the mountains as slowly and stately as on a tropical lagoon, wending across the calm of the sky toward unknown shores...

And when all up there is yet light, as the earth below grows dark and cool, the dragonflies enjoy the same calm air, their dashing silhouettes clearly visible -- way up in that silence they zig and zag in the way of their kind on glassine wings, like thoughts in a blue mind, with no aim but to be...

Then comes the full moon, laying her tapestry of light over the darkling land, revealing lineaments we are blind to in the day... who has not stood out in that vapor of silver, lain over all with the touch of a goddess, and not grown thereby?

We can do no better in our dreams...

In their little pink-cloud hats
they act like stone-faced clowns
those mountains

SOMETHING AKIN TO SPRING

Freewheeling down the mountain these early mornings through the old dun landscape of winter - and in the old dun mindscape of winter - I suddenly sense a change ahead, something there... new... around the curve... the light on the leaves is different... I slow--

I round the bend, to behold a startling brightness laid out right on the ground where there was no such thing yesterday; "it's the same color as the sky," says my old dun mind, "with some sunlight and clouds in it..." it's a flooded rice paddy, the first of the year! And there's another patch of sky over there, shining on the dark earth... and one more there in the distance...

Each morning I go through the same new startle to the old winter mindscape as more and more patches of light are added to the quilt of sky piecing down the mountainside, day by day transforming the mountain into a creature of Spring-- and greenleaf summer to follow, nature willing.

There at the bottom of it all shines the Lake, aquamarine set among brown winter mountains and faceted with light in the same way as the paddies - dappled with clouds, now and then stippling in the morning breeze - and I feel in myself something akin to Spring, new life rising from a winter mind. In my day-to-day awakening, I too mirror the season and its sky.

LIFE IN THE CLOUDS

Was it only yesterday that I, swathed as I was in my prototypical human ignorance of the greater plans and objectives of the cosmos, looked upon all this water in the air and called it "rain"? (Cue inward manic laughter.)

Indeed, I used that term with all objectivity in this very venue, but a few days ago. How fleeting is the bliss of ignorance! I should have suspected something was up. Turns out it's us.

Having just returned from a few moonless yet full-moon night moments on the deck to see whether it was still "raining," (more fool I!) and there being struck with the Great Mallet of Enlightenment, I now realize that as of some time in the past we here actually live in the clouds: the sky has fallen (the world has risen?), and it now rains below us.

Up here in our new world, where the rain is sort of paused as it shuffles in place and gets in line awaiting its turn to fall in torrents upon the lower, broader world of the flatlands, living is more like being softly underwater, a semifishy kind of existence.
Perhaps soon we will experience a strange sensation along the sides of our bodies as we begin reverting to our ontological form and once again take to breathing with gills.

Judging by the still-resounding impact of the Great Mallet, the primordial is never very far away.