LINEAGE

The sublimity in simply sitting here, with only nature as company, that calls to the nature in myself, of eyes and sounds, scent and touch, that quickens in me all the roots from which I stem... all the implication of my direct lineage with sunlight and branching trees, my kinship with running streams and rising clouds, insect song and moving air-- the colors, the music, the graces of motion, so vast in their ways to my clockworn being as to hold me in their time at last as one among them, together in the sublimity of simply being...

ON THE WAY TO THE BIG GARDEN OF EVERYTHING

I was making lunch and had just trimmed the greens off the first of the radishes I'd harvested, when the radish rolled off of the cutting board and then underneath it, as though trying to get away and hide. Then the next radish did exactly the same thing!

So I said: Hey little radishes, you runnin' away from me? You don't have to run away from me, I'm the one who grew you, I'm the one who bought the seeds, I'm the one who planted them in the ground and watered and weeded them so you could grow into round red radishes. Then when you were ready I pulled you from the ground into the light and now we're gonna become each other! You're gonna become me and I'm gonna become you!

You'll have eyes and be able to walk and talk and I'll have roots in the earth and green leaves reaching to the skies! So just calm down, radishes, 'cause we have a distance to go together on our way to the big garden of everything.

After that, the rest of the radishes just smiled those round red radish smiles that radishes smile and lunch was great. Now I have new radish roots in earth and sky, and the radishes are enjoying writing about "radishes." They really seem to like the word.

INFOLDINGS

I was just musing the other day, probably while folding laundry, on how the respective meanings of all the words I've listed below (and others that didn't then come to mind) hinge upon a very finely nuanced aspect of the root.

Few (if any) of them were simply coined; they evolved into the common parlance out of a deep and tacitly shared semantic understanding that was never expressed but was instantly understood, much as the words themselves are now.

That depth is no longer explicit in the words as they stand, or as they are are spoken and heard, until - while perhaps folding laundry in a notably foreign country - you get at the root and think how it really is that the words mean what they mean; then how awesomely appropriate is each word's perspective on the meaning and life-relativity of 'fold'!

comPLICation (complicity, complex, comply)
exPLICation (explicit)
imPLICation (implicit, imply)
supPLICation (supply)
rePLICation (reply)
duPLICation (duplicity, duplex)
apPLICation (apply)
simPLICity (simply)

(plicare - Latin for ‘to fold,' as also in ‘plex/ply.’)