STILLNESS

Nothing like the stillness of a mountain rice paddy on a calm early May dawn, like this one. The paddies up here have by now been flooded, harrowed to readiness and let to wait with the infinite patience of water.

So it is that these fine days the mirroring mountainside is full of blue sky, passing clouds, now-and-then rainrings and rainbows, the mountains themselves, airy grace of hawks, curlicues of swallows and after sunset our entire universe, gliding over at a night's pace. But for now in this emerging morning it is a rare, pure stillness. You can stand here long and gaze at the sight, let it fill you with your own stillness, that brings to the front of mind a number of things that for some reason were stored way at the back...

Now and then, as so often with actual still life, along comes a slight breeze that shivers the water, scrambling the view till a new calm comes. In other nows and thens comes a crow or a hawk to walk the water, sending out perturbations with each hungry step, or up pokes a frog for a breath and a look around at the newday world, after a night of full-hearted amphibian carousing that I caught part of when I came home from the city last night, fell asleep to, woke up in mid-night to, then went back to sleep to. Like the sight of the widening rings and the feel of the reach of stillness, the sound is kin to the natural mind.

It is a good thing to have such a gift at my door for a few days every Spring at about this time, to re-mind me with the bounty that stillness is, nourishing to all around it, a truth that water knows as fully as anything can be known. Folks who have no time for such vastness might as well just stare at some kind of small screen.

Stillness begets all true nourishment, including rice.

THE SUMMER OF OUR DISCONTENT RAMBLE

Here it is December already and there is no snow on the mountains, the oak tree still has green leaves on it, we haven't had a single frost and my potatoes think they're in Hawaii, despite the black hole in the world economy. I too, when I'm working outside, am soon down to my t-shirt when it should be snowing, and as I work I have the distinct feeling that glaciers are melting, ice sheets are shattering, polar bears are disappearing and Eskimos are developing beachfront...

Of course it could all be just a centurial anomaly or something, as the folks who know as little as anyone else insist; besides, what do we mere mortals know about the history of anything, really, short term as we are, just a few gossipy fragments of surmises here and there written down as gospel, either way we don't really know what we're talking about, we can't even explain our own desires or the ice ages, or even the words we say about them, though our minds know more than we do.

The puzzles nevertheless are ongoing, like the strange lack of acorns and other nuts (excluding human) in the northeast US this year, and the disappearance of tuna and sharks from the sea and certain birds from the sky, what does our knowledge really know, the sun's getting weird, the solar system prefers to be alone, the galaxy is acting quirky, galactic clusters are accelerating away from something, space is bent and now they've sensed some strange attractions from outside the universe as we call it; so what else is new, is this all normal, are we having guests, should I put my shirt back on?