What is obvious is often forgotten

I was looking out of my study window at around 2 o’clock on an early October afternoon. I decided to get outside - tilt my somewhat spherical head at an angle of 23.5 degrees and revolve around the sun. 

When I walk to the Kaw River - or when I wander in my back yard - I am trying to give myself the opportunity to remember what matters to me. Sometimes, the obvious. The process of trying to deliberately be myself - a living, breathing, sensing creature in an intricate and colorful world - often catches me by surprise. I enjoy it.

Of course, my thoughts and emotions can distract me. I’m not a cat – although I do wonder what the world seems like to that species. I’m not those butterflies fluttering and gliding over a flower bed. And I am indeed glad to think and feel as a human being. But I am able and I do simply enjoy myself when I manage to attend to physical and living realities that are right in front of me and around me.

These photos (see FB 'Walk to the river' group) are a part of an ongoing experiment of sorts. Having you as an audience, helps me to focus my thinking and to frame my observations. But the real point is for me to try to make an opportunity for myself to experience some of the richness of the universe – at a pace my mind can handle.

The first photo in the series is little more than a blur of light and textures captured in real time. This is also how the world – Central Middle School, South Park, Downtown Lawrence, the river – essentially looks to me as I walk along in time. Unless I look carefully at something, it is all mostly a blur. Our brains simple cannot make sense of every photon of light that enters our eyes continuously. And you’ll realize - when I mention it - that you don’t notice that you miss seeing what is out there when you blink. Or that you don’t see what you don’t see – most of the time. Sometimes you have to just let the words go.

But our minds are constantly doing much more than we can notice. Our perceptions must rely on a great deal of unconscious processing. But we can choose to attend.

There is some discipline involved in this practice of walking to the river. The process is, in a real sense, a return to the kind of play I pursued as a kid – but with a more grown up sense of the temporal and cultural and ecological context that the flowers in my backyard, for example, fit into some broader experience. But attending takes practice. What I sometimes want as the human being I am now is to try once again to really see what is directly in front of me. I want to simply see the light and colors and textures for what they reveal – fresh. I want to see the flowers. And sometimes to smell them. And so I practice playing. I try not to think about more than what I am doing. And I also try not to just flit from thing to thing or from thought to thought. My practicing sometimes leads to satisfaction – and surprise.

And so I took my device - and myself - the other afternoon into my yard and I spent a little time looking at what living minds – the bee’s and the butterfly’s and, yes, we human’s minds – are naturally drawn to: bright colors. And then I touched the plants, the flowers – and the button on my device. I put myself into the picture because I was there. Because I wanted to be there in that moment. Technology makes taking photos easy. There is still some skill and time involved in making a picture that I might want to share with you. But a lot of factors came together to give me that opportunity the other afternoon to see something, to touch something, even to smell something. Let me say that I did not much pay attention to what I might have heard - this time. My brain – like yours - just cannot attend to everything at once. Doing less at once is sometimes useful.

That little exercise out in the yard took me about the same amount of time that it will to write this comment. This is obvious: having time to spend is a crucial element in this sort of practice. But when I write about my observations, when I take photos, each word sketch, each photo is really a kind of exercise. I keep practicing attending – like doing scales on a piano, or repeating a chord change on guitar again and again. Sometimes I get something like a phrase or several bars of music to a point that is good enough that I want someone else to see or hear what I have.

And so, here we are.

But step back:  the real point of all of this is for me to find my own motivation to leave the social world and all sorts of ideas out on the periphery of my mind and to give my attention to what is in front of my nose. And to encourage you, perhaps.

Here’s a new angle on an old joke: How do you get to the Kaw River? Practice.

Get close enough to something – and then touch it.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself. And what I assume you shall assume. For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul. - Walt Whitman

Sunlight and time study

In a millisecond I notice the eye. In another millisecond, I notice the light and the shadows. Then I see that it’s a hand over a face. And long before the first thousand milliseconds have passed, I notice that I am looking at a photo of me.

Who am I?

Time is another of my other constant questions. A photo like this one gives me the illusion that time has paused, but within my mind, I am aware that the world is passing by milliseconds at a time. But my mind cannot possibly consciously attend to all of the information my senses are taking in. And by the time I’ve finished writing a thousand words – over and over and over again – I will only have begun to answer the question of who I am.

I could divide my walk to the river into milliseconds – theoretically. In reality, I notice parts of some moments and most of the others just fade away. I sometimes take a photo to capture a living moment, but all I end up with is a still, framed image. Maybe, with my imagination and my memories – or yours – there is an illusion of something more when I look at the image.

As with technology in general, I think that photos are both a gift and a curse. I can see things my ancestors could never see by capturing these images - images that are real and distorting - or perhaps disillusioning - at the same time.

Who am I? Why am I here?

Why, when looking at the sunlight reflecting off of the river for perhaps the trillionth millisecond, do I care?

Why, when someone else looks into my eye for a millisecond, do I care?

Questions are a gift and a curse.

Sometimes I stop in at Aimee’s café and coffee shop. I usually order a black currant iced tea. A barista looks into my eye for a millisecond. I sit up at the counter and stare out of the front windows at the sunlight and the shadows. All at a thousand milliseconds a second. I cannot attend to everything I can see. And there’s a whole world out there that I cannot see.

The glass is smooth and cold in my hand. I bring it to my lips. Ice cold river water with a hint of tea and black currant always satisfies my physical thirst. Sometimes, if I am paying attention, that first sip of iced tea satisfies something else in me. I could write a thousand more words and still not capture the all of the sensations.

That satisfied feeling is an illusion, I know, but sometimes a moment can feel like forever.

Change of pace - a personal note

Old habits die hard. It is Thursday and I am posting to this blog again. This is a little more personal. For one thing, reader, you will not have found this note through FB.

I began the ‘Walk to the river’ blog as the first steps of a journey almost five years ago. It was important for me to at least imagine readers. For one thing, a reader helps to hold me accountable for my words. I want to discipline myself to be careful to speak my part as well as I can. But I have also been continually convinced that a sort of magic happens somewhere in between a writer and a reader. When the reader is also being careful to hear, the meaning of life, the universe, and everything may be sometimes revealed in the interaction.

Or I could say it like this: Sometimes I spit over the railing into the Kaw River and I imagine that part of me will end up in the ocean.

I am ridiculous and serious at the same time. We humans are bits of ubiquitous star stuff and glorious beings. The universe has apparently never seen our like before as we travel through  this present blink of an eye. And I accept the audacity of my existence.

Time is one of the great paradoxes. There is so much of it and not nearly enough, it seems. And open your mind to this. If time is not infinite, then what – or when – came before the beginning? But who can comprehend infinity? I do not know how to hold these and other mysteries completely in my mind, but I mostly try to live within these present moments.

And so I have reached a stage on my journey. I am a writer. I write. I am beginning to get the sense of what I want to try to say. I am joining a chorus of voices who use words to express their sense of … something.

This blog space and this weekly pace doesn’t suit me as well as it did during previous years. In part, I am old fashioned, but am also simply convinced that it is better if readers read my words as they are collected in a paper book rather than on the screen. More physical thingness and less electronic blipness. And still this screen has allowed me to get some of those pieces of writing in front of readers and ready for collecting.

Did you hear the one about the chicken and the egg?

I write for myself. But when I get the words right – and I sometimes do – I want a reader to reader them.

**

I have several writing projects in the works – things that do not fit this blog form. I want to give more attention to them. And I want to present my writing in a way that feels right to me. I won’t abandon the internet as an outlet – but it is certainly not the only game in town – at least not in my book : )

I do occasionally toy with the idea of traditional publishing, but I also still have more writing I want to do either way. One story, well started, is about an older man and a young woman – two strangers traveling on a ‘Time Bubble RV.’ To say the very least, my mind wanders when I am ‘walking to the river.’ Those words are as metaphorical as they are representing physical steps. That’s one of the mysteries.

Again, I extend my thanks to you who have taken the time to listen to what I have sometimes stumbled to say – and what I think that I have sometimes said well enough.

**

And the penultimate word goes to Ecclesiastes: And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

Taste that first sip of currant iced tea after walking.   - bert

Time for a change

I’ll still be walking to the river and I’ll still be writing, but this marks the end of my weekly blog posts. 

I may still publish occasionally on the ‘Walk to the river’ blog and I intend to use the FB 'Walk to the river' group site to post occasional walking and river notes, as well as some photos – but I will not be posting regularly.

The digital record still exists and collections of my writing are available directly through Amazon Books and can possibly be ordered through your local bookstore.

I thank you for reading and commenting. 

And here’s one little bit of silliness:

To my wife, walking out the door 

This poem is short

this poem is short

it is not very long

I am leaving

I am leaving

I am almost gone

I shall return

I shall return

I shall come back

I hope you don’t mind

I hope you don’t mind

that I shall come home to you

The Dusty Bookshelf - a word sketch

If you took the time to sit in a somewhat worn, blue, cloth-covered chair, surrounded closely by books like ‘Buddenbrooks’ by Thomas Mann and ‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullars, and so many other titles that I will not recount, what would be the point?

I suppose that you might consider putting yourself in my place, for that small place was indeed mine for short time on that afternoon -  although perhaps ‘occupied’ might be more accurate. A few books that I had picked off the shelves were settled on my lap and I had opened one and begun to read.

A young man, his brown hair pulled back in a short pony-tail, stepped near my right shoe which I had propped up across my knee. His face was tanned and smooth, his eyes searching for a book.

The young man carefully worked his way around me, alternately standing or bending down onto one knee and turning his head to read the some of the sideways titles on the spines in my little cove of books. After looking for a few minutes, he stepped out past several round wooden tables with their small stacks of books like the hour markings on the face of a clock. And then he was gone - out through the far front door.

It hardly matters - except that it is so – that there are two front doors into The Dusty Bookshelf in Lawrence.

And then a young woman with smooth shoulder length black hair and glasses with stylish plastic frames and a brightly colored summer dress that stopped just at her knees wandered in and out of my distractible gaze.  And there were some uncounted other wanderers, people looking, sometimes picking up a book to page through.

And from time to time from where I sat comfortably, I would hear Manda’s bright voice over my left shoulder as she conducted business from inside the central island, that U-shaped counter piled high with books yet to be processed.

I have not begun to tell you everything of my afternoon. For example, there was the sound of Manda’s boots as she strode over the hard carpeted floor among the many colored books - shelved and stacked and waiting. Or how the leaf-filtered daylight shone through the front windows and around the book faces that looked out at the street. And I did not see Dinah, the black bookstore cat, anywhere around that afternoon.

Books are not dead and that afternoon, every person that I saw was at least a generation younger than me. And on the recommendation of a reader who is a generation older than I am, I decided to go ahead and take along with me the copy of ‘Buddenbrooks’ that I had been paging through briefly. It’s about the lives of some German people – although perhaps ‘characters’ would be more accurate - who lived some time ago.

I had store credit from books I had exchanged on other afternoons.

I sit here often.

This moment

Every moment’s step

is a moment and a step -

farther from the beginning

and closer to the end -

the knowing obvious

and still forgotten

in the moment’s step.

This game of words

goes on and on.

Step slowly.

Step lively.

Step into the moment.

Forget the words -

forget the steps -

look up.

How could I have known?

I think that I may have slept

straight through

the changing

of the world.

I had been awake –

preoccupied –

the long night before.

Then all of this happened on the same day

following.

I saw the most beautiful

woman I had ever seen

in my life.

I had just been drinking

the most satisfying iced tea from a pint glass

in a coffee shop. She

walked in.

I saw only her for a

moment. And then

there was only ice

cubes in the bottom

of my glass.

And then later I was doing

the dishes at my kitchen sink

and I heard a song –

I was wearing headphones

and then the song in my ears was the only song

I had ever wanted to hear.

It was all too much. I laid down

and closed my eyes for just a minute

And then suddenly it was an hour later.

I stepped outside

rubbing my eyes and looking up

and then the stars came out

in a quickening darkness

for what might have been –

just perhaps –

the very last time.