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.

THE ROCK

The Rock is a work

of quiet atmosphere

and simple exterior.

The Rock defines

a place in nature.

The approach to The Rock

is by footsteps

symbolizing passage

from another world.

To passersby, The Rock seems

nonchalant, perhaps even

uninterested.

Yet once inside, 

the visitor discovers

one ingenious space 

after another.

The Rock is conceived

as a series of experiences,

based on its own

compositional logic.

Rock visitors encounter

emotions they would not feel

elsewhere.

The Rock is neither abstract

nor representational;

The Rock is enthralled with

ambiguities of perception.

The Rock evinces 

an uncanny power

to convince the observer

of its spatial impact.

The Rock is the embodiment

of gravity.

A linear path

links all Rocks.

Each Rock is located 

at the center of the site.

SECRET OTHER THINGS

Early this morning when I awoke and sleepily threw the bedroom window curtains aside, I was astonished to see that the red cedars flocking outside in the semidarkness were in fact fashioned of a kind of opaque amber glass, lit from within by a mystical candle, this inner light variegated with a shadowy shifting over the surface of the glass... infinitely finer work than the naturalistic semblances by Tiffany or Lalique.

I was entranced by this realization, and stood there absent with awe until dreams had fully faded and education had climbed back to its lofty place to point out that the stained glass of the cedars was in fact the rising sun dappling their trunks, through their wind-dancing branches...

Thus does the great mother vouchsafe to us, whenever we manage to step ourselves aside a moment, by whatever means, the many secret other things that can be seen with eyes.

THE BIG SQUASH

I know you're fed up to here with monkey tales by now ("No more monkey stories please," "Can't you talk about geisha or something," "Anything erotic ever happen over there?"). Indeed a couple of weeks ago I forebore to post another monkey anecdote because, let's face it, how many monkey adventures do even the most tolerant and perceptive visitors want to read about?

This morning, though, like I.F. Stone I said what the hell, facts are facts, lets get this out there! How an extended family of monkeys came into the garden while Echo was teaching yoga and I was at the office (the monkeys use the Beastberry organizer) and at some point, perhaps during the One-Legged King Pigeon pose (Eka Pada Rajakapotasana), Echo looked out the window and saw a baby monkey in the garden dancing back and forth in great delight, cradling in his arms the biggest butternut squash he'd ever seen in his entire six months of life; what's more it was totally his and didn't belong to any of the other monkeys (I'm nowhere in the picture here). He was happy in the way I guess only a baby monkey with a huge squash can be happy, because all the squashes were still too hard to eat, as some of the adults discovered by trying to bite into a couple of the other big ones lying around and couldn't make much of a dent; I suspect none had ever seen a butternut.

Which I surmised the next day, when I saw the minimal carnage and the frustrated bite marks. But what interested me most, from the aspect of simian sociopathology, was the fact that the beasts had completely ignored the largest butternut squash of all, the one that was growing in plain sight, right outside the fence, on the same side the monkeys approached from! Right there in their face and they ignored it! Why?

That question brings me directly (this is so organized!) to my Big Squash Hypothesis, which holds that monkeys determine value in ways just as subtle and irrational as those used by humans, in for example Las Vegas and financial markets, to wit: whatever you're clearly not supposed to have is more valuable-- in this case, the smaller squashes that are protected inside the fence must by virtue of that protection be tastier; forget the biggest squash of all, sitting there outside the fence: because it's free for the taking, it must be tasteless. Even the baby monkey 'knew' that. Mountains of paper money, anyone? It's in vaults!

The big squash is still there, and growing.

WORK OF THE EARTH

Got riled the other afternoon with the office over some common editorial hassles and I was at home so no point in sharing it there or stewing on it but if I just sat around my mind would turn it over and over, pushing the same aimless mindrock up the same pointless mindhill so I went out to the tool shed and got the rake, hoe and pitchfork, made another couple of garden rows and planted some carrots, which are immeasurably more important than anger, mean more than any argument, are nourishing and delicious, just as the tilling of earth and the enriching of soil are more important and meaningful than cultivating bitterness or digging up bad feelings.

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.

When at the end of the day I looked upon the result, at those straight, dark, rich, seeded rows, at what I had shaped with my hands, my tools and the work of the earth, rows that soon enough would bear little green flags of hope, that in their time would grow to food, I had never been riled at all, it was just a useless imagining back there, spent in a dream from which I'd awakened some time ago.

If you're upset, plant something.