WHAT IS HOLY IS THE WILD

All the deep, true feeling that kids feel fully and naturally when they go into a forest, to any wild place: it is a wild feeling, true and familiar as hunger. It elicits the heights of spirit, for above all it is holy. It embodies the sacred. We know this in our natural selves.

For what is holy is the wild; what we call our spirit is the wild in us. Even our cultural manifestations are wild and earnest yearnings to bring the wild into social presence, such as for community, companionship, progeny and fulfillment; the cultural trappings, from creative to monolithic, are collective efforts to organize and externalize the fruits of wild passion...

All these things are there in force each I time go into the forest around, the mountains above, even into my garden, and there behold leaves pushing bright up from the dark plain ground, stems reaching, reachers climbing toward the sun of their own desire, sprouts pushing up and seeking their inborn heights in power and nourishment they spin from nothing but earth and its companions...

What could be closer than these things to the true yearnings of the heart, that beats its solo rhythm in this world, that like ourselves stems directly from the source, that is no citizen, needs no passport, depends upon no government... Like the seeds, we are each our own, self contained, accepting no more than we surrender.

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.

WHERE THE LIGHT PLAYS

This morning when I stepped out the door onto the deck on my way to some garden work I was surprised at how bright it was out there-- the light itself was different, then I looked around the corner of the house and saw that two of the paddies across the road had been flooded since yesterday.

Like the paddies downmountain, these were now as blue as the morning sky and as bright, and as I set to planting my own plants I thought about how every year around this time the entire mountainside becomes a mirror that remains as bright as the sky for a good while after all the paddies are flooded and the mountain becomes the sky's reflection, even at night when it fills with galaxies.

This goes on until the rice is planted, when the sky of the mountain greens with growth each day as the stalks replace light with life, the mountainside turning toward imperial jade at the pace of growth, the ambiance changing as well all along the days as the light travels at vegetable speed, which is quite a switch, and stirs calming perturbations in the spirit, itself a matter of light that takes much of its nourishment from beauty and transition.

The habituated mind as well is reminded, as it steps out onto the deck blithely thinking all to be just as it was, and so comes to re-realize reality. Which is beneficial, by and large, and happens often out in the countryside, where light plays and grows, like widening rings in water.

SWEET CHARIOT

I guess its time I talk about my most recent - and final - motorcycle accident. No, I’m not communicating from beyond, despite the writing quality; I'm just hyporeflexed, which is almost the same thing, comin' for to carry me home.

Yes, I nearly caught the Sweet Chariot last December, while my body chased its bike a ways down the mountain over ice, roadside and some other stuff. The bike was still as trusty as gravity, but turns out I wasn't. I, who grew up much of the year on ice and snow; sledded, tobogganed, bicycled, drove and hung around on ice like a summer sidewalk with never a single accident - thanks to fine-tuned reflexes - reflexes that I continued to count on throughout life, heedless of the encroaching press of time...

Thus it was that on that crisp sunny winter morning I blithely launched my wheeled self from our driveway onto the pure white snow-powdered road - piece a' cake, been there a million times, successfully too - even up here, for the past 17 winters, without the slightest thought of not being able to remember what happened 10 seconds later...

In the aftermath, it wasn't the residual head, shoulder, knee, thigh pain that hurt the most when I finally regained the ability to hurt; the deepest blow was that my Benedict Arnold reflexes, which for all my life had pirouetted me over football field, up/down mountainside, basketball court, down the streets where you live, had departed my person without saying "Do NOT go riding on the ice today or anymore, Bob; I retired on Saturday."

For retire it did, without notice. As forensically determined from the impact pattern on said body parts, at the moment of greatest preventive need I had no reflexive reaction whatsoever; there was statistically no difference between my decycled body and a 190 lb. sack of bleached white flour. I realized, after the fact, that for all these years I have been counting on my teenage balancing skills when freewheeling over any surface - particularly snow-covered ice - and instantly compensating for any slippage by shifting shoulders, hips or legs, sticking a leg out for 3-point support if needed, and never hitting the ground, except after hitting that pole a few years ago.

I rode that way all my life and was still riding that way at the age of 72, setting myself up for a lesson it's about time I learned. Learning requires survival, though, so I'm truly fortunate to be able to say: I think I'll walk the rest of the way...

RUSHES

When freewheeling down the mountain on clear cool Spring mornings like this, I am rolling through a broad and accelerating river of warm air rising from the Lake as the sun begins to warm the mountainside. The tide of air is a rush of fragrances from the fields, the village and the lake below, a potpourri of tilled earth, new rice, lake water, garden flowers and morning coffee, countless other scents all mingling together that the nose knows but the mind can't rightly find, though it enjoys them all the same... Yes I know that scent, what is it -- It's gone, it was -- Now this scent I know; this is... There are some herbs in there, fishing boats and breakfasts, the wild and the civilized blending with the living scent of the Lake, rising toward the mountain summits and thence into the heavens, I down here descending through it all, head back, breathing in the gift...

Then when I come home at night and am wheeling up, the darkling sky is pouring down the mountainside as the land cools and the air above the daywarmed Lake is beginning to rise, pulling the mountain air down in the great daynight backforth that betides this time of year, but this cascade is a rush of scents entirely wild, a bouquet rich with the tang of cedar and pine, whole mountainside forests of sundrawn tree breath, blended with the essence of tumbling streams and the spice of native herbs, the wildflowers that work at night sending out their subtle musks on the moist air as I rise through it all, breathing deep with discovery...

Either way, it's real wealth.

NIGHTFUL OF DIAMONDS

As I cruised up the road on my motorcycle last night, the headlight beam kept filling with millions of tiny diamonds flashing into sight from out of the dark air, all from a big winter cloud that was barely edging over the mountain into the deeper dark, spilling some of its riches on our side and giving me the pleasure of a ride though swirling gems.

It was all the more enjoyable because I tend to ride slowly up the bendy mountain road in the pitch dark night of winter, wherein the occasional patches of ice can be hard to see, but I just roll right over them because I'm not racing anymore, I'm riding wisely now, having painfully realized at last that there's no real hurry for me to be home 20 seconds earlier.

When I was younger I would have taken on the whole thing as a challenge, there were challenges everywhere and a twisting mountain road was at the top of the list, a complex speed-skill-time-agility-bravery challenge, a personal challenge to me from mountain, road, weather, world, time and darkness, with quite a few other things thrown in there as well, to fill it all up. At those earlier ages you're always looking for challenges and taking them on-- what are inexperience and energy for, after all.

It's crazy but it's true, and as you get older and do a few wipeouts, if you survive sufficiently intact, and for long enough, you get to admit vulnerability, you get to acknowledge your limits, you get to feel your frailties, you get to know the fleshy reality of yourself right to the bone and the sinew, so you slow down, and when you slow down you get to see things you're finally ready to see, things you've never noticed before in the blur of being, things like millions and millions of tiny diamonds flashing in the light right in front of you all the way home through the winter dark up a mountainside-- worth the wait of a lifetime, if you've slowed down enough to get to be my age.

BEING THERE

Yesterday afternoon Echo and I went down mountain a bit to scavenge some wild cherry logs (I'm going to try making some cherrywood cutting boards out of some of them) that had been piled there by the landowner, a landscaper who is creating/cleaning up a garden or scaping someones land somewhere. I chainsawed and we carried and stacked sectioned logs amid the bamboo forest for a couple of hours until it would soon be getting too dark, so we called it quits; Echo drove the loaded car back home and I walked up.

Coming out of the tunnel under the highway as I have a few thousand times, thinking about something other than where I was, I was surprised once more by the way the mountains suddenly appear, spread out up there in a high horizon, the whole long chain of darkling snow-capped peaks textured with their spring robes, rising into the Prussian-blue sky that comes at dusk this time of year when the sky is clear, and as my eyes savored the sight, my lungs savored the air, the very cream of air, that comes sliding down from those forested slopes toward the Lake at evening, washing and filling me with the ki of mountainsides...

I just stopped and stood, seeing and breathing, exalting at this privilege, that I could walk here, breathe here, simply open my eyes to view these mountains, merely turn to see the Lake spread out like cooling silver in a dark surround...

And then go up home.

SISYPHUS AND I

As Sisyphus would tell you, if he weren’t busy at the moment, wrestling with a rock is unlike any other activity. First of all, right up front, rocks are the most conservative entities in existence. Resistant to change of any kind, they hate to move, they are monumentally stubborn (granite, adamant etc.) and they are way more familiar with forever than we are.

As I live on a mountainside, ever since I got it into an opaque part of my mind to straighten a protrusion in the stone wall out front (thereby widening our driveway by a meter or so and easing the qualms of Echo whenever she has to back the car in), I have acquired a new sympathy for and kinship with the guy who metaphorizes the hopeless task, having now myself sought to move a giant rock on a mountainside without the aid of any power other than my own muscle, simple leverage of all kinds and my expanding array of international imprecations. But no TNT or power shovels, so the Big Sis and I are still in the same ballpark.

We mythoguys have this funny characteristic: we tackle life's series of rock-moving type jobs all powered up with internal bluster, confident in our ability to get a simple brute-force, all-muscle task done before lunch, the same characteristic that got the Big Sis to where he is today, somewhere on that slope up there. It's a powerful quality, until it leaves the rails. Thus it was that from the toolshed I selected the little handpick and the big prybar, that should do it, and went off to address the pushover.

I’ve never seen a handpick look so toylike so fast, or a heavy duty prybar bend that much. Turned out that the rock, which I've discovered is a member of the Stonehenge family, was no mere surface presence. Apart from its granitic heft, it had an iceberg quality in that so much more of it was underground than above. I had to dig to find out just how far toward New York it went.

Three noons later I'm Sisyphizing out here atop Gibraltar, surrounded by prybar, wooden timbers, a steel beam, two saws, rope, chain, the car jack, a shovel, a full-sized pick, a scythe, another empty water bottle, piles of dirt and rocks and even the comically tiny handpick way over there where I threw it, wiping away sweat, wringing out the towel and admiring the hole I’ve dug beside this distant cousin of the Washington Monument. Before too long after my nap, I’ll be able to topple this baby, maybe as much as a centimeter.

I'll get the pyramids done tomorrow, before lunch.

INTREPID GREEN

This morning after I had motorcycled down to the station I was putting the lock on the rear wheel when I noticed a frog on the rear carrier, where he stood staunchly facing the rear, bulgy eyes blinking rapidly and looking as though he had just swallowed a lifetime.

No wonder-- he’d come all the way down the mountain with me. He’d been up there living his hoppy morning life, enjoying the peaceful blue of a clear dawn from a splendid chrome promontory in froggy solitude, when everything at once began roaring and bouncing around-- then the whole world took off, and he hadn’t even lifted a leg.

Turning toward the rear so as to streamline the wind, it was the first time he’d ever traveled backward, the first time he’d ever stood in place and seen his entire environment moving away from him, the whole mountain (there are mountains!) slip away behind him (there is a past!) into the sky as we descended. The radical effects of these phenomenal changes on the corpus of frog thought are simply unfathomable.

What we can say, with a good deal of certainty, is that the green pioneer was the first of his generation to travel at 40 mph, the first to get to the bottom of the mountain, the first to travel a highway, survey a parking lot, and countless other achievements as yet unrecorded in amphibian archives. No wonder he was standing so staunchly, blinking so hard. Frogically speaking, it must’ve been like getting a Nobel, a Pulitzer and an Oscar all at once.

Now that he’s all puffed up at having joined the ranks of the intrepid, he probably won’t be there this evening, but if he is, I’ll double his achievements by giving him a ride back to whence he first set out, where he can spend the rest of his life as a green Marco Polo. No one will believe him, either.

WINTERSPRING

This 'Winter' has been so Springlike that I've been Springy myself , which isn't to say that I've been prancing barefoot around the mountainside in a toga with a laurel wreath on my head, tootling a panpipe with one hand while flinging flower petals with the other, but you get the picture-- though perhaps you'd rather not, I'm not really the one to judge the aesthetic aspects of a buff 67-year old foreigner tootling about a Japanese mountainside in a toga flinging flower petals, which now that I think of it might well be in violation of several local laws on various aspects of public peace and decency, to say nothing of visa extensions, but like this bizarre tangent of mine, that's neither here nor there… Now where was I... oh yes: WinterSpring.

The Springy things I spoke of included planting seeds in sunwarmed soil, uncovering the tented spinach so it could bask in the Miami sunshine that shone in mid-January and raking the mounds of oak leaves from my upmountain neighbor's lawn (I'll use them for compost). What's more, as night falls it feels almost unnecessary to gather more than an armful of firewood...

Then last night at around three a.m. my deep sleep was torn to fragments by a long savage blast of howling wind from the north, a Siberian beast that ravaged through the trees and roiled around the house until dawn came the silence, when I got up and looked out and beheld what looked like fog but was snow, and each tree around the house had been sliced in half vertically: the north side of each trunk and its larger limbs were caked thickly with windblown snow, and invisible against the white background. Winter had arrived on loud white feet and begun its elegant trickery...