THE TOPS OF THE ROCKIES

One thing they don’t tell you when you start re-walking after a cerebral hemorrhage is how far above the ground you now are. The new reality is a bit of a shock. As a  young man of full height I topped out at a bit over 6 feet (183cm); then, over the course of a lifetime of impact sports, hand-delivering groceries and newspapers, body surfing, motorcycle and other collisions, lugging’n’tossing firewood, general aging etc. I’d bottomed out for a time at about 5’ 11”, with lower elevations anticipated as time arrived. I never expected to be towering like this.

But when in the semi-Lazarus phase after my comet ride I rose from my bed and began to walk with a cane, I was astonished at my elevation. Though the distance is subjective, that doesn’t mean it isn’t real. You yourself are starkly aware of the skyscraper you have now become, teetering atop record-breaking legs, head in clouds-- but you could never prove it. 

It is a new experience, far more disquieting than mere hallucinogens. Equally disturbing is the fact that no one else perceives this change; all relate to you as though you were at about the same elevation as before, and wave their friendly greetings right in your face, in all kindness destroying your focus and aggravating your instability way up there alone in the head at the top.

As to the bottom, where not long ago your leg/torso relations were congenial - a matter of longstanding trust, so to speak - now there is a profound distrust of your old rambling partners, with whom you've shared your life, on all its many paths, right down to the ground. But now, as you peer from your teetering summit in the lower stratosphere, you know better. Just look down there. A mere two legs stand below, one of them questionable. Yet folks expect you to operate this bipedal  behemoth with a common grace. See those feet down there, wanting to move? Put on your glasses. There. See them now? Recognize those two shapes in the big, look like shoes? Next to the hospital? Be careful, there are a lot of good folks in there. That’s it, now take a step. 

No, a step; try for the old normal. Of course you feel dizzy now and then. For not-dizzy, you need a normal world with a normal you in it. That’s nowhere around for the moment, but just keep practicing, reality will return. At least most of it. And your leg will less and less think it’s maybe a wing. Trust me; soon it won’t even be thinking of stepping over a car.

Control is the operative word here; that’s what your leg doesn’t have right now. A raw nervous system component is exemplary of chaos; it is the way the universe was just after the Big Bang, so it's familiar to a leg, which had its start in the caldron of universal hardware development. Chaos, amok, rampant -- these archaic words, arising directly from the raw aftereffects of the Big Bang, also apply. And like that early chaos following the primal dawn, they are also temporary.

So enjoy gazing over the Pacific at the tops of the Rockies while you can. 

That perspective won’t last long.

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.

THE MUSHROOM UNSEEN

Shiitake have IQs. You don't believe it, just ask me. Admittedly, it's a kind of intelligence most folks don't encounter in everyday life, outside certain areas of finance; it's an intelligence we who prefer full daylight don't know much about. I've never read any scientific studies on shiitake IQ either, but if you actually raise the savory creatures, you come to understand the shadowy time-transcendent intelligence you're dealing with. You get that eerie Twilight-Zone feeling, as in the presence of chronic bankers. 

One example of shiitake savvy, apart from the amazing hydraulics of their existence and other unfathomable skills, is that they always grow biggest in places you don't look for them. When you're out searching for lunch on a log and at some point realize that there aren't any shiitake worth harvesting and are willing to swear there are no places on that log that you didn't check for shiitake, just a short time later you’ll see a giant sofa arm edging out from the very same log, with that TZ theme deedling in the background. You swear to yourself once more that you checked there, you checked everywhere, you've been doing this for 15 years now, after all, you should know, hunger doesn't overlook food, but your time and experience mean little to the brown-hooded brood...

This happens year after year; they always grow biggest where you definitely looked for them. I can only conclude that certain places are forever invisible to non-mushrooms. This is not standard reality we’re dealing with here, this is shiitake reality; they live in multiple dimensions and are not fully of this earth. I know the round-earthers and other reality-restricted types are right away poo-pooing this idea but of course they do not raise shiitake and probably work in finance or its vicinity. They react with knee-jerk responses like "Of course they grow biggest where you didn't look, it's because you didn't look there, so they weren't found, but were left to grow big!" The obvious is often all the reality-prone can command...

The metafact is not that shiitake grow big because I don't look where they are growing, it’s that they grow big in those places because they know where I cannot look! I understand this because of all the times I have left a good-looking mushroom in place to grow bigger in a couple of days, and it NEVER DOES... That's right, it knows I'm going to harvest and consume it, so it doesn't bother growing any further! The resources go elsewhere: they go to the mushroom unseen.

Moreover, the shroom I haven't spotted knows I haven't spotted it and thus that it has a chance to spore, so it goes for it, rockets out and up, aiming for the fences right before my unseeing eyes. With every fiber of all the mycelium backing its effort, it goes massive. It then permits itself to be spotted, because by then it doesn’t care, it has grown beyond edibility. It stands there jauntily, in plain sight now, doing its oh-so-subtle victory dance and wearing that protosmirk they get at that stage, like the good guy at the end of the war movie who's dying but has managed to blow the bridge.

Still. I get most of the newbies sooner or later, so in some ways I'm smarter than most mushrooms, if the monkeys don't get them first, though in other ways I'm dumber than mushrooms, and throw the monkeys in there too for good measure, it all works out in its own way-- monkeys, mushrooms, humanity, finance, all one big cycle bobbling in its own kind of balance, just ask the universe. 

The evidence is always right there before your eyes, where a shiitake isn't.

GLAD TO BE BACK

I was in LA for an hour or so this morning; glad to be back on a mountainside in rural Japan, I realized, as I stepped out onto the deck into cool air and birdsong, summer green on every side except for the ice blue of the Lake down there, dotted with green islands beneath tomorrow’s LA sky. A little bit of the traveler’s singular homesickness left me. 

I’d spent that earlier time googlemapping my way around several nice areas in LA, looking for places where I'd spent some time in my travels, but those old places were gone; they’re all new places now. I also wandered among areas where Kasumi and Krew are soon going to be living and moving around in for varying lengths of time, starting this summer and beyond, depending on the ultimate selection of scenarios...

Those sunbaked neighborhoods were generally pleasant, tranquil below their palm trees as I moved like a ghost along their streets and walkways, but to the me of now they were no longer places where I would reside... no people on the streets, just cars (Nobody Walks in LA, as the Missing Persons still sing so well), it all had that daytime noir feeling Chandler captured to classic effect in his scenes-- wonderful to remember, electric history, great to visit but not my place to live anymore...

My head was still in those places when I stepped out through the kitchen doorway onto the deck and found myself returned to this forested mountain with cool air and birdsong, summer green on every side except where the Big Lake is ice blue. Glad to be back.

Thanks for that, LA. You’re a fine, fine lady at night, though.

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.

SPIRIT BREAKFAST

This morning I had the huge dawn fortune of going out into snow-cleared air and walking past all the fence posts with their high snow caps and beyond them the views of frosted mountains, the Lake like wet granite glazing off to mountains on the other side, then mountains beyond them, and beyond all the unrisen sun casting pastel glows and purple charcoal shadows out over everything as the mountains allowed, all hanging still in the silence of the air, just hanging all around out there, timeflake by timeflake: Lake, sky, mountain, air, all that spectacularity just being there and doing nothing in particular, just the everything it always does, seen or unseen, praised or unpraised, loved or unloved, the same everything that matters to the seeker who is the living soul within a body that, just risen from the winter of night in deep need of a spirit breakfast, to feast upon such colors and lights, scents and silences, distances and shadings, nearnesses and brilliances, topographies, delineations, and so in snow boots I alone in all that majesty walked, slowly, down, through, white, toward something that had to do with - a matter, I was sure, that in other moments I have deemed important somehow, and when I got to the car, which was mine, I opened the door with the key I happened to have at hand and started the engine as I remembered, shook my head to get back closer to this life of time and moments, having just been for some immeasurable measure among heavenly things...

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.

 

my iPod nudges

and nudges - but The Frogs

are performing live

Citizens go

$2,400,000,000,000

deeper into trillions of debt -

politicians applaud

A National Debt Of $14 Trillion? Try $211 Trillion

LONG NIGHT OF ANOTHER KIND

On my routine way out the routine doorway to routine work this routine morning, as I closed the heavy dark-brown paneled routine door in that part of the routine, the corner of my eye noticed something non-routine, something that was - how shall I say it - different, something that broke the obsessive continuity of the quotidian.

Nature loves to do that. Some kind of reality insistence was being foisted upon me, something that was on the door and that resembled the door, but that could not be of the door, as my eye corner - which gazes always outside the routine - had insisted. This kind of thing is meant to grab your attention and save you from a conventional bout of zombosis, if you have any attention left.

It will snap your head and focus your eyes, make you lean in closer, make you say What the fenk? To a door, for godsake, all of which I did, excepting a letter or two in the last part. There was a lump on the door. A brown lump. A granular, mottled lump, doorlike in color and texture but not conforming to the panel molding. It shattered my zombie mode into a random number of little pieces that lay scattered invisibly on the ground. I stood there for a take, then hunkered to look more closely at this door tumor. As I got closer and put on my glasses I realized it was staring at me.

I found myself staring into the two onyx eyes of a large, dark toad, in whose mind I was of no importance whatever. He was precisely where he had decided to be. He had climbed up onto what he didn't care was a door, conformed his color to that of the wood (in the night!) and there he was, Jabba the Toad, fully in charge, focused and ready for the day when I zombied out in the grip of routine and found a chance to step out of mode, for which moments we should all be thankful, that's why we love nature so-- not just because of her beauty or wisdom, vast as they are, or because a few of her countless secrets led to the miracle of tv and suchlike artificial distractions, but because she rescues us even from ourselves, breaks the zombie spell, brings us back again and again to where we actually are, if any of us is still paying attention.

As Jabba indicated by his austere presence, there ARE other ways of living and being, and we should be aware of them just in case, the zomboid way being nowhere near the only way; the ways are countless; but then again, he who speaks of the way etc. In any case, you never know when we might need a big cosmic door of a kind to hang out on throughout a long night of another kind; besides, the cool shall inherit the earth.

LISTEN RIGHT NOW

Near sunset, stopped mid-labor at a sudden song sounded way up in the oak tree, an intense and passionate song, with a special finish to it, repeated over and over with variations in the curlicue ending. Finally spotted the bird, but only in silhouette against the easterly mackerel clouds. It looked like a wheatear, but he was even a blur as a silhouette, bouncing around up there all alone like something of transcendant importance was going on, and I suppose it was; this early taste of Spring swells the buds in us all, summons that ancient urgency from long before we were. That natural aria up there carried all of that plus something extra, made me stop my next year's work and listen right now to what's really going on.

MAYBE SOME DECORATIVE GOURDS

Each year at around this time I start experiencing fantasies that have to do with vegetables - no not like that, get your mind out of there - more like maybe I'll grow some yellow crooknecks this year and order some wax bean seeds, put in some zucchini, some acorn squash and of course a few butternuts, some corn too yes a couple rows of corn, to say nothing of tomatoes and cucumbers and what would really be good would be some of those wait a minute Bob you're getting vegedelerious, get a grip, how many fingers am I holding up, let's not get carried away here you don't have the entire mountainside to plant, it's just a few dozen square meters you got out there, with already spinach and chard in the ground, onions and garlic, turnips as well, and Japanese veggies, get hold of yourself put down that catalog, those catalogs too, and those-- Walk around don't run, take some deep breaths and don't forget there are bugs and monkeys you're supporting out there and -- I don't know who's doing the talking, some inner therapist who's always hanging around trying to keep me on some ridiculously rational path and sure enough, the commonly agreed reality slowly creeps back into my seed-filled brain, I shake my head it seems to rattle like a decorative gourd, I rub my eyes to clear my vision; I look at the calendar and sure enough it's right about the same time as it was last year when this happened, same point every time, just on the cusp of Spring, same sort of thing used to happen when I was a kid, I'd get kind of a groggy fever of unspecified desire that would clarify in those younger, suitably objectiveless years into marbles or yoyos, and since I was regularly fed by others I could care less about things like seeds and planting and growing stuff you could buy right now but instead wait MONTHS for, are you kidding me, and flowers? no way, what would the guys think, you crazy? That was how it was back then, but Spring ever has that effect on the mind and this year now that I'm at the promontory of life with these delightfully chronic views I'll settle for my usual garden stuff plus a little something new, though in addition I think I'll maybe I'll plant some of these and these... sorry can't chat anymore gotta order some seeds now where did I put all those catalogs...

IF YOU NEED SOME PERSPECTIVE...

[Click to enlarge]

CHERRY MOODS

Yesterday was a day off, and when I walked out into the garden in the early morning the cherry tree was like a different person, it was so polite and considerate in its pinkly fluent majesty-- not a trace of irony anywhere in its blossomy mannerisms or the gestures of its elegant limbs; its perfume even had my name on it.

As I worked in the garden in the rich morning air the tree's blossom-clad limbs hovered over me considerately, shading me from the sun, the entire tree emanating a magical light blended effortlessly from the basic materials of sun and blue sky-- it made working in the garden even more of a pleasure than usual.

But then this morning, when again I had to head downmountain and off to work in the Big City, as I passed through the village the arcade of blooming cherry trees that lines the road to the station looked pretty flippant, flaunting their whole roadful of perfumed beauty in the same saucy and ironic way they had on Tuesday.

The cherries have really been moody lately. Either that or the mere prospect of an office can warp reality.

FORECLOSURES

Even splitting as many logs as I do, I'm always surprised when now and then I find living creatures inside one. The other day I was spitting a 50 cm section of hard pale oak, straight and unblemished, with no holes or cracks, and the clean white halves fell apart to reveal a long brown enclave filled with stunned and hunkered-down ants: Armageddon, right there at the heart of a log!

There they'd been, just a minute before, sandbagging securely into the future, safe from the cold, instinctively anticipating warmer days to come and thousands of little ones running around, and the next thing they knew there was a great pounding and cracking, their world split in half and they had no plan, didn't run or attack, scramble or panic, just stood there in shock at the impossible, this sudden intrusion of light, cold and actual weather into the dark silent paradise they had found and made-- not even tending to the eggs! The warriors just standing there, with the frozen air that I suppose always attends the big question...

So I set the halves of the log down on the ground, sunny side up (fine day) to give the little society time to gather their wits about them, find a new paradise and clear out in peace. I can't really preannounce these foreclosures, can I; still, I felt a bit like a US banker. Came back the next day and the ants were still there, but I don't have a sheriff.

Then some days later I was splitting a ca. 50 cm section of red oak and it fell cleanly apart to reveal a wood beetle larvae about 10 cm long, reaching out in a 'What the hell...' sort of way into a new and unimagined air, slowly moving his head back and forth as far as he dared into this unfathomable space where there was no wood, that had nothing at all to do with wood, trying to be where the rest of his world used to be...

The split had gone clean down the middle of his comfy-looking home of narrow darkness, his almost flatland universe, and suddenly half his reality was gone and something inexplicable had taken its place, he couldn't figure it out, I watched him try and try...

He'd been snug and safe and zoned in all there ever was, when half of it was gone in an instant, replaced by light and air containing mysterious fuzzily moving objects like myself - though I'm not sure he could see - he doesn't need eyes in the zero light of his world, all he has to do is chomp and doze and await his great changes - then there he was exploring the nothingness of a vast transformation, probing whatever the absence of wood was, like nothing in his life or history-- His jaws - his best-functioning apparatus, which does everything that to him is worth doing - worked on the air, trying to chomp it, there's always been chomping in his life, that's his job, but this, what is this... looking for wood to grab and bite a path through as always, the only way into his future, but it's too late, I'm the new owner and I have to foreclose...

Again...

THE BEST SELLERS OF 1855

What do you think was the best-selling nature book of 1855: Walden? (Published 1854.) And the best selling novel: Moby Dick? (Published 1851.) Best-selling book of poetry: Leaves of Grass? (Published 1855.) Fact is, apart from a bit of negative notoriety, those three classics bombed at home for half a century after they were first published. It took that long, and a lot of murky water under the bridge, for the general perspective to come round to these visionary ways of looking at the world.

Few people in the present day see the world the way top-ranked authoress Lavinia Braithwaite did, in her runaway best-selling nature book of 1855, The Truth in God’s Word as Manifested in the Geometric Flower Garden for all Mankind, Who Should Dress in Black.

Nor can much of today be found in the best-selling novel of 1855, Black Hats, Black Suits and the Wrath of Paradise, a gripping saga of irrepressible redemption, wherein author Livingston Hornthorn explored the salvational possibilities to be found in dark garments, tight collars, cold water and daily prayer at home with mother and father.

And there’s less now than ever in the best-selling poetry tome of 1855, Three Posies and a Nosegay in Black Crepe, a leatherbound heartstopper by author Pangborne Thorogood, who epically visualized for all of his contemporaries a world of funereally pale virgins dressed in black holding a lock of hair of the deceased and some violets, loitering among the lilies in a graveyard, a veritable heaven on earth.

But now that we’ve gotten through all that, and are here at last in the comparatively loosened up and more organically responsible future with its burgeoning Henry-Herman-Walt perspective, our attention is being fought over by such bestsellers as Bonecrunch and Bloodbath and Suffer and Die Vicariously, semi-automatic page turners surpassing even the blockbuster Absolute Misery in their ability to kill time with an Uzi, then just toss it in the landfill.

For illumination after a fashion there’s Cellophane Prophecies; for the more hardy there’s Ten Easy Steps to a Lifelong Journey; then there's the presidential biography Appear to Have Scruples, popular diversions from sugarless reality via lo-cal bromides.

Do we moderns deem ourselves deserving of these sentences imposed by our own Lavinias, Pangbornes and Livingstons, when so few have even heard of the elegant and heartfilling Waldens, Mobys and Leaves of our time, that can assist in our creating and reaching a worthy future, even show us around when we get there?

You’ll have to exit the best-selling book hangar and search where few ever go, to find out how tomorrow has been foreseen and forenourished; what’s more, you’ll have to have taste-- so seldom a thing of its time.

[Previously published - in different form - in Kyoto Journal]

THE GAME

The kid in the grade school uniform gets on the train in the mornings as part of the crowd and maneuvers expertly to be the first to stand beside the only guy in the car who will be getting off at the next stop, making the seat available. This is commuting 101, but somehow every day the kid beats all the experienced grownups.

At first I thought: that kid is on the ball for his age, he's figured out the Game already, he bests all the professional commuters who get on at the same station and who, despite the fact that they take the train every day, don't seem to be paying attention, never seem to become aware that this guy in the seat next to me always gets off at the next stop after they get on, so they could quickly have a seat all the way to BigCity.

The kid runs sometimes to beat others to the spot, or just gets to the station early so he can be at the head of the boarding line, but even then he runs to stand beside the seat to be certain to get it first as soon as it's vacated, and if for some reason he isn't first he slowly maneuvers until he is; he's small, and none of the big people notice him wedging his way in there. He's only eight or nine, but he's already an ace at the game, the big folks standing all the way while he gets the seat next to me and plays a video game, reads a comic book until it's time for him to get off and go to school.

At first I had to admire him for his skill at the game at his age, how that skill would stand him in good stead as he commuted through life, but the more I thought about it the darker it got. This is no way for a kid to live, these are not the things a kid should strive for and weave the fabric of his being from, no way for a kid to learn or to grow up, already getting good at the Game among all these dour faces.

But maybe it's me, maybe it's just because I never liked the Game. When I was a kid, I disliked just about every aspect of the Game, from uniforms and schedules, rules and rote manners, upward to suits and ties and getting ahead, rungs up the ladder to higher income before I outgo; making connections, getting in the right places, knowing the right people, making the right career moves and so on, keeping my true opinions to myself so that the "prizes" would be mine, but for some reason they never appealed to me, those prizes, any more than the whole endeavor did; so, beyond getting into and out of college for the sake of the knowledge - not the career path - I never played the Game, never got wrapped up in it at any stage. So I suppose that colors my thoughts.

This kid is trapped though. He is deep in the Game already, so deep in it and so good at it that as he grows into the Big Who of himself he'll be one of the best around, may never have an inkling that there is a profound and genuinely meaningful alternative, let alone find the ability to break away into a world where he can fully exist - he'll learn nothing of that from school or dogma, peers or society... He may well spend his life on such demeaning tasks as being first in one line or another, on weighing the worth of his life in mean scales...

In time, he will perhaps acquire a professional command of mediocrity, like so many of today's politicians. He may look back over his life and passively wonder what it is that's missing from that perfectly straight line he has traced with his being-- unless somehow he finds the power to take his own direction, follow his own lead, though that gets less likely every day he notches up a small, dark victory. Perhaps video games will be his doorway...

Later I came across this article in the Chicago Times that had this subtitle: "Defying the group is a noble, necessary American tradition." In it was this line: "Once upon a time, each American's objective was to become an individual."

REAL RAINBOWS

This bright morning I traced a rainbow that arched from somewhere around Steve's house all the way to Mt. Hiei, and stood there swimming in the vision. We get full and long-term rainbows all the time out here, as compared to the couple of minutes of barely distinguishable portions of arc we used to get sometimes in the city, kind of faded and archaeological, like an artifact that disintegrates on contact with modern air, such as that is, but these arches of light we see against the mountains and the Lake are real rainbows, rich ones, wide ones, full ones, all the way from here to there, pots of gold everywhere, from violet to orange with all the in between, and you can't help but stand and ponder (unless for some criminal reason you're in a hurry) that you can't find the edges to the rainbow (but the rainbow is distinct, isn't it; yet it isn't, is it), and none of the colors have an edge but they too are distinct but not, which leads you to realize as you stand there, fully rainbow-minded by now, that this small band of colors we are vouchsafed to see is but a small segment of the infinite stretch of vibrations there are; that sound and gamma rays are of the same continuum, as are all other 'waves,' including us, and why in the world should we see only this little bit, would it be too much if we could see it all; and in a way we're seeing with our ears when we hear sound waves, and hearing with our eyes when we see light waves, and hearing/seeing with our skin when we feel heat waves, all part of the one continuum we chop up into different senses; and in the very same dark-age way that we used to think the world was flat and the sun rose, so we still think our senses separate, our perceptions isolate and all distinct, 20/20, and at the edges where only the senses get fuzzy begins the dogma...