Fast away the old year passes

I sat down on the bench in South Park. It was the one along the sidewalk. But what did it matter. Which bench? Which park? Which dreary year?

The winter solstice had finally passed by the day before, but today was just as gray as a day could be. The ground in front of me was visibly soggy from the remains of a few inches of snow that had fallen last weekend.

The temperatures had then dropped below zero and when I had walked to the river bundled up in layer upon layer of layers. The tips of my mittened fingers still had gotten cold. But for reasons a man would have to make up, I had wanted to witness the hard cold from the levee.

The gulls were crying out in the cold. More gulls than I usually saw, wheeling below Bowersock Dam. Gulls and more gulls. White-winged. Crying. Even through my thick wool cap pulled down over my ears, I could hear them crying. Not bitter - the cold I am now speaking of - but biting. And not so stone cold, only nipping at my nose. Truly, it was not cold enough for tears. But then there was no wind that early winter morning. Some frost on my mustache. The low sun in my eyes.

And then I wondered if it might not have been the hard cold I had come for after all. Perhaps it had been the unexpected gulls that I had come to see – and hear. And then – just then, for a moment - I thought that I understood. The gulls were speaking nearly all at once, each one turning into the sunlight, circling around, and turning again.

And then, I knew not. I realized simply that I must be mistaken. I have heard humans crying at times and I know, now, that I don’t understand. Sometimes I think I catch a glimmer. Sometimes I feel it.

That morning the gulls were crying in the cold. A hard cold. Perhaps they don’t understand ‘why’ any more than I do. I just walked away.

I stopped after several more blocks along Mass Street for a bowl of tomato soup, spicy hot. The baristas were circling the kitchen, turning into the sunlight at the register, nearly vanishing in the glare, then turning again. I could see that they were saying something to each other, but I could not understand. I nearly cried.

I must have still held onto some feeling from somewhere. Somewhen. One I had never meant to let go, but I couldn’t say what it was.

And then that day became another day and then another day - turning, circling – walking into the sunlight and eventually turning into a gray day.

I sat down on a bench in South Park. It was the one along the sidewalk. I saw a young woman approaching me, her hair shiny black spilling out from under a Santa hat onto the shoulders of a black coat. But I was mostly staring outward through the trees in front of me, unlit light bulbs stringing around bare branches. I could not have given attention to every detail of that woman approaching, but I recall clearly now that she seemed not to be walking particularly fast. She might have been taking time.

The winter solstice had passed the day before, but today was as gray as a day could be. The ground in front of me was visibly soggy from the remains of a few inches of snow that had fallen last weekend. A damp cold.

I suppose that could not have missed her red and white hat, pom-pom tipped to one side.

And then she passed on the sidewalk in front of me, right there where I sat on my bench in the gray afternoon and I inexplicably opened my mouth and spoke out to her, ‘how long must I wait here for spring?’ And she turned and smiled into my eyes, her mouth suddenly filled with silver braces.

‘I wouldn’t know,’ she laughed.

I turned my head and watched her walk, still slowly, away from me down the sidewalk, the Santa hat perched on her shiny black hair.

The winter solstice had only just passed the day before, but today was possibly as bright as a day could be.

A tree with lights in it

It was quite some time ago that Annie Dillard put a vision of ‘a tree with lights in it’ into my head. But how can I tell you what I mean?

I could use words. But language is essentially metaphorical. And words are digital. Reality, on the other hand, is analogue – and very real. It must be lived. And yet, reading ‘A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’  - and reading it again and hearing Annie Dillard through a printed page, especially her essay on ‘Seeing’ – prepared a space within my mind for my own experience of reality.

I don’t know exactly what she saw when she saw it, but through her words, I believed her. And then one day I saw the tree with lights in it.

Only it wasn’t just the tree – and not all at once. But each ‘once’ was enough for forever. Where moments before I saw a muddy river bending behind the distant trees, I saw sunlight flowing on tiny rafts. A brick wall became glowing embers. And diamonds flashed in the sky. And ordinary eyes burst into flame before my own eyes – and, then, as I watched, transfixed – they became merely the blue-gray eyes of a little girl once again.

Listen to how Annie Dillard describes it: “It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.” And again, she offers another image: “I had been my whole life a bell, and I never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.”

Earlier in her chapter on ‘Seeing’ she recalls others as they have tried to describe their own experiences. They wrote words that she believed before she lived them.

All of these words are merely tracks in sand. These words mark what has already been in time – in reality. The words can build an anticipation – an expectation – in the reader. But what those writers saw in their time had been seen only in the moment that they were living in. You will see – or not see – what you will - somewhere in the trackless ripples of sand ahead of you.

Seeing happens in the mind. If you are sighted, light enters through your eyes. But all of your senses can take perceptions of reality into your mind, and then you ‘see’ something. What you see is more or less what is out there. What everybody else sees, perhaps. Except everybody doesn’t actually see what you see. Everybody is looking at everything else at different times. Reality is overwhelmingly too much 'everything' to be fully seen. Still, if I point to a seagull circling just off the Kaw River Bridge in the late afternoon sun in November, that is pretty much what you will see. These are commonplace perceptions.

This kind of seeing is a wonder in and of itself, but there is also another level of seeing. You can believe it or not.

Annie Dillard says it - and it has been my experience - that you cannot make this seeing happen. Certainly if you have your mind closed, if you are not giving considered attention to your experience, you will see merely shapes and colors blurring into forgetfulness. But even if you fully expose yourself to reality, you will still see only two squirrels scampering in a yard. Or something like that. Maybe their bushy tails twitch.

Or this. One gray afternoon I was walking towards NY Elementary School. I volunteer with the kid’s chess club on Friday afternoons. I was early and since I never seem to tire of looking at the river, I went on past the school for several more blocks. Near the Amtrak station there is a wooded area with trails that wander alongside the river. I walked on to where I could see the river through mostly bare branches. The river was muddy, gray from the reflected light from the overcast sky. No rafts of light. Still, it was something.

I turned back. I had nearly reached 7th street when I saw the tree with the lights. Well, this time it was merely a maple tree, half the leaves fallen, the rest a flaming red. It was barely only a glimmer of the tree that Annie Dillard wrote of – that I have indeed seen at other times. But it was enough for me to be reminded.

This seeing is only to be believed, after all. The sensation that reality is somehow more brightly burning than commonplace appearances, that reality is more real than the bricks on New York Street between 9^th and 10^th, that wonder merely hints at the possible truth that seeing can only be believed -  that is quite something else.

There are kids waiting in the library with chess boards and chess pieces on tables as they sit across from each other. Their faces have become familiar to me. Often the kids are more distracted with each other than attentive to chess. Noise levels rise. Kids climb out of their chairs. And sometimes - sometimes the time is simply about the game of chess.

One day, I was playing a game of chess against a third-grade girl. Her lips were pink and her face was smooth. There were a few freckles scattered across her cheeks. I advanced my Queen and watched her eyes. She couldn’t yet understand what I meant by that move. And when she looked away to one side, I could only guess what she meant by that. I looked over to where her gaze fell. It was only a blank wall. I had nowhere else to be and so I sat there and I waited for her to move. Eventually she turned back and gave me a quizzical smile. “I could take your bishop?” It was a question. I looked into her blue-gray eyes. And I saw the light there, but I went ahead and spoke anyway. “You could, but then what would I do with my Queen,” I asked carefully. And then the girl so very young, with her eyes once again blue-gray, looked away from me and twisted her small mouth sideways. It was only chess. But I had been struck for an instant. I would hold in my mind the afterimage of the light in her eyes for as long as I possibly could, although more than a glancing look and I might well have have been blinded.

It’s like that, a little, but I wish that I could tell it better. But still, it was my vision – and mine alone. I saw the light that I saw. And I don’t know entirely what I mean. But I believe what I have seen.

This is what Annie Dillard concludes: “I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.”

Mine eyes have seen the glory. My advice is the same for you as for myself. Be open and wait.

Lullaby

She snored like a bullfrog.

He loved bullfrogs.

Of course he had never gotten over the way that they plopped into the water in the dark just before you came upon them lolling in the moonlit grass. And he had never seen her at all until it was too late and she splashed him silly.

That was only an expression.

Of course the way she looked at him with one eye, the other drifting off somewhere else, or maybe that wayward eye was searching for another way into his beating heart.

You could have called the expression on her face a smile if you wanted to.

Then one night he saw her sleeping, truly for the first time, and it turned out to be the last good night of sleep that he ever got.

The baby slipped out like a goldfish through two fingers and wailed into the night. And then she slept like an angel and he could only gaze in wonder.

So they called the baby, Gabriella.

They could only hope.

Her grandfather drank –

Icewater.

Cairn 2016

I understand that humans have built cairns to mark the way or as a way to remember something for a long time.

On the Friday after the Tuesday when our country had elected a supremely unqualified man to be President, I had tried not to stumble on my way down to a rocky point near the Kaw River. A couple of years ago, there had been an inukshuk at the edge of the river there below the North Unit of the Bowersock Hydroelectric Power Plant when a good man – these judgments are my opinions, of course – and I had been walking together. I remembered – and I wanted to remember - the good man. I wanted to get the other man out of my mind.

There are of course consequential actions. But consequential for whom? The future appears to be much more uncertain if you are an immigrant or a Muslim in this country, or if you’re gay or a poor single mother – among other people. Many of those folks have been having a harder time living their lives than I have for quite a while. That should not be forgotten.

It’s simply true that one person makes a difference in other people’s lives – sometimes. I don’t wish to try to paint a silver lining on anything here or to digress too far from the where I was when I started these thoughts near the river a few days ago.

But consider the ancient philosopher, Diogenes of Sinope, as our reference point. He was a Greek who was born and had lived and died around 400 BC. He came to believe that virtue was revealed in actions and not theoretical ideas. He possibly looked somewhat like the man I see now and then when I am walking – sometimes sleeping on a bench up along the levee. That man looks homeless to me. He’s short and a little heavy – not very clean. His light-colored hair is a dirty mess, but cleanliness is likely not his primary concern. It was said that Diogenes often slept in a large, empty ceramic jar of the kind that once contained olive oil or grain. Diogenes was the man who supposedly went around the marketplace with a lighted lantern in broad daylight looking for an honest man. It’s the kind of thing people might remember, I suppose.

At about noon on Friday, I wanted to get the swirl of consequences out of my head. There will be time to consider the consequences of one unvirtuous man in a powerful office or the ongoing neglect of other men. Instead, I built a cairn.

Let’s be clear. It took me almost ten minutes of my time. I had to select and pick up rocks that were scattered at my feet with my bare hands. I took some small care to place them and balance them. It became a short stack of stones by the river. A cairn.

And philosophy – at least as far back as Diogenes - is just a questing for meaning. I use words, but it is the meaning that matters – if something is going to matter at all.

So in my mind, it was the absence of an inukshuk that reminded me of a good man and another day some years ago. The present was a beautiful day on a Friday along the Kaw River. Water sparkled as sunlight caught the edges of ripples as the muddy Kaw water flowed over the mud and rocks of the river bed. Pigeons sometimes flew off from their perch on a cable over the dam and they would swoop and swirl, turning in nearly perfect synchronicity. Individual birds flying as a flock, their instincts marking memories in their fleeting patterns in the air. And when they all turn on a wing together, the sunlight catches on an edge and flashes a signal at me.

Have I gone too far? I did not mean to say that the river or the rocks or the pigeons or even the sun had any intent to tell me anything at all. But might I still derive some meaning out of thin air?

I left the cairn behind me. I have a device and so I had taken some photos. I headed for the library to help with the New York Elementary School Chess Club. They were to meet at the there this time because there was no school this Friday. A man, who is a little older than me, has a passion for chess and for kids. I would say that he is a good man.

Now I won’t go on and make too much of this good people thing with a lengthy further listing and definitions of people I know. I have encountered many good men and women – and good kids – along my way. But good people should be remembered amidst the swirl of bad news.

Later that Friday, I ate well at the Basil Leaf Café with my good wife in the evening. We have a good roof, running hot and cold water. It comes from the Kaw and is drinkable, thanks, in some part, to a government of the people. We have electricity, clothes and appliances and luxuries that Diogenes could never have imagined. I slept that night in a comfortable bed.

And still we have our fears.

I woke up on Saturday and walked to meet the sunrise at the river. There was frost on the grass. The air was crisp, but I was warm and well bundled. Diogenes – or someone who looked a lot like he might have looked – was sitting once again on the bench in the still morning air overlooking the river and the rising sun.

I walked passed him and down to the point of rocks where I had built the cairn. I had to watch my step. A large tangled raft of drift logs had jammed months ago in high water against the large limestone boulders of the levee. A rough and partial gravel path went down. Loose gravel and larger rocks sometimes turned under the weight of my foot.

A few stones near the top of the cairn had fallen – maybe a dozen or so. Maybe I hadn’t balanced them well. Maybe a pigeon had tried to land on the top stone. Maybe the earth had shivered.

I rebuilt the cairn. Not the same. No, the cairn was not quite the same as I had constructed it the day before. But perfection was not the point. Permanence is not the point. Remembering is the point.

My friend from some time before is a geographer. He teaches in Wisconsin. Married. Has a son. In the map that is in my mind, I supposed that I could call this place Inukshuk Point. Or Pigeon Point. Or even Diogenes Point. I could name the cairn after my friend, if I wanted too. But the cairn won’t be standing there long enough to hold the name – except in my mind. And then there will just be scattered rocks. But there will be time to remember.

Although even that rocky point just downstream of the dam has already changed significantly in my memory. That is, the river – sometimes moving with great force – had pushed and pulled the mud and the rocks into different places.

You have to give those Greek philosophers some credit. Heraclitus said it well when he said that no one steps into the same river twice. Of course, I think that there’s a small joke there. It’s on us. Not even I am the same man who built a cairn on Friday and then came back and rebuilt it on Saturday at day break. I never even stepped into the river.

It was an incredible morning. Hardly different from other incredible mornings. Me, being there, in that place is one difference, I suppose. I breathed in the cold clear air. The cold air meeting the warmer surface of the river pulled up tendrils of mist. The spirits of the Kaw made their own swirling rituals and recollections, the sun catching the edges of vapors as they turned, rising.

I walked along the rocky edge of the Kaw. Watching my step. Looking out over the water and up as the sunlight caught the edges of leaves not yet fallen. The sky was reflected in the river. A large black bird flew out of the mists towards me, spread her wings, catching air, and settled on a low island of rocks out in the middle of the flowing, ever changing river. It was all the same and not the same. Some memories must go back millions of years in the forgotten channels of my mind.

Seagulls cried. Some flying down river to the east, some flying up river to the west. Some flew north and some, south. And some circled, their white wings catching the morning sun, over the outwash of the Bowersock Hydroelectric Plant on the far bank.

I turned and made my way up the boulders of the levee. One careful step at a time. Part of the way up towards the top, I picked up a smooth pole. It must have drifted in from somewhere upstream. Sometime ago. This time, I used it to help my balance. And when I had nearly reached the top and didn’t need it anymore, I jammed one end of the stick into a hole between the large and irregular rocks. The other end, by accident and necessity, pointed towards the sky.

Sunday, late in the afternoon, I came back down to that rocky point. The river water whispered and burbled around mossy boulders. My cairn was still standing – just the same – although the light was different. And I could see that someone else had been there. They had built another cairn alongside mine. If you used your imagination, you could see a rocky half-moon rising out of solid rock.

I took some more pictures. And then I turned and headed back to my home. The man with the familiar scruffy face was sitting on the bench overlooking the river. On the bridge, I came upon two girls, one tall and slender with blondish hair, the other short, with red hair. Both had their hair tied back in pony tails. They were leaning up against the railing looking out towards were the river took a bend and continued on to the horizon – and eventually the Gulf of Mexico. They turned their heads to glance at me and I saw the late afternoon sunlight catch the edges of their eyes. And then they looked down at the muddy sunlit surface of the Kaw River.

I imagined that if they looked carefully, they could see the shadow of a man walking along the shadow of a bridge on a November Sunday afternoon. And then they looked out with their whole lives ahead of them – perhaps, one day to look back on and remember.

Link to: Inukshuk by the Kaw - Dec. 2014

Count 'em and weep

It was too warm for November. The sun was shining brightly. The sky was reflected in the river – sky blue. A pale half moon was rising over the horizon.

As I crossed the Kaw River Bridge, I was feeling very lucky.

And that’s when I saw the geese.

They were all lined up, one by one, on top of the Bowersock Dam. Now if you’ve been watching the river – and I even watched the Bowersock folk building that dam – and you understand that the river is variable – it will make some sense to you that the Bowersock dam is topped with a series of black rubber inner tubes each about forty or fifty feet long and 6 feet or so in diameter when they are inflated so that they will hold the river back and keep the mill pond at a certain level. Which they were. Tubes inflated.

But it seemed quite odd to me to see the geese all lined up along the top of one of those inflated black rubber inner tubes in the late afternoon sunlight. And then in occurred to me that I could play blackjack with the geese.

I started counting. One goose, two goose,  three goose, four goose … there was some crap on the black rubber inner tube … five goose, six goose, seven goose, eight goose … cars drove over the bridge, their emissions unseen … nine goose, ten goose, eleven goose, twelve goose … an ambulance screamed past me on the bridge … thirteen goose, fourteen goose, fifteen goose, sixteen goose … a firetruck followed, sirens wailing and lights flashing as if it were headed to an emergency or something … seventeen goose, eighteen goose, nineteen goose, twenty goose.

I should have stayed right there. There was another goose swimming in the mill pond just this side of the dam and several more not that far away.

And the then the swimming goose honked up at me on the bridge.

“What are you looking at?”

I was stunned. I had just been idling my life away, playing a little blackjack, counting geese on the Bowersock Dam. But I hadn’t counted on this.

“Who wants to know?” I stammered back. I had insufficient wit for a better rejoinder.

“The name’s ‘Black Jack.’ I’m from Canada.” He paused, looking around. “Sure is warm for this time of year.”

“Yeah,” I managed.

“Don’t you know about the game?”

“What game?” I hesitated.

“The climate game, fool,’ Black Jack honked. He wasn’t apparently trying very hard to be nice.

“Uh, the climate’s not a game, Mr. Jack,” I said.

“The way you humans are playing the climate, it is, fool,” Black Jack answered. “You’re such gamblers – and bad ones at that. One emission over the number and you lose.”

“What’s the number?” I asked.

“No one knows for sure,” he said, “That’s why you’re a fool for thinking you can careen right up to the brink of disaster and then expect to stop just in time.”

“Well, it’s not just me,” I said.

“Right. You drive a car. You have electricity. You get your strawberries shipped in from Chile or someplace. And don’t try to tell me that your cow’s farts don’t stink. Fool.”

“But I’m just one person,” I said.

“Right, and when enough of you ‘one persons’ decide to get their shit together, you can send a human all the way to that moon over there – and back safely. Black Jack honked derisively. “Fool. What’s the point of having a government at all if you don’t use it for important things. Get together.”

“But it’s not that simple,” I said.

“Who said anything about simple,” Black Jack said. “We geese fly south for the winter, back north to have and raise our families. All on our own power. And not one goose at a time. But it’s no walk in the park, let me tell you.”

Black Jack honked. And the whole line of geese behind him joined in. “The word among the intelligent life on this planet is that you humans – individually and collectively – are not smart enough not to fowl your own nest (pardon the pun, (he honked)). You’re fools.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. I knew I when I had been insulted. I walked away.

But I couldn’t help myself. I turned back to the dam. I could at least win at goose-on-a-dam blackjack. I counted again. Damn. Twenty-two gooses. Geese. Collectively. Individually, it was twenty-two gooses and one fool.

I hollered down. Black Jack was sitting on the dam, one goose from the end of the line. “I’ve always wondered something about geese. You know how you fly in a V formation?”

“Of course we know about that. Wind resistance. Efficiency. Conservation of energy. Any goose knows about that.”

“No, I know. I mean... When I see you flying overhead, it always seems as if one leg of the V is longer than the other. Why’s that?”

If you’ve ever seen a goose shake his head slowly from side to side while sitting on the inflated black rubber inner tube of the Bowersock Dam on a warm November afternoon, you’ll believe me when I tell you what that goose said.

“There’s more geese flying in that leg of the V, fool.”

Halloween is about uncertainty

Story on YouTube: Halloween is about uncertainty  

Read by author - 13.5 minutes

Text: Halloween is about uncertainty

Halloween is not about the candy at our house. It’s about fear. Well, not really. Halloween, the way I celebrate the holiday, is about uncertainty. For more than twenty years the theme, with variations, asks this question: is the dummy real?

This year I sat with a dead Furbie and a plastic Jack-O’-Lantern filled with zinnias in front of me on the patio table set away from the sidewalk to the porch. I wore a baggy black suit, tangled gray hair tumbling over my shoulders with a pink bowler hat and a purple flower sticking out of the top. I also had on a slightly creepy mask with sun glasses lenses covering the round eyeholes. But anyone could see my nose and mouth, my mustache and beard – if they looked carefully. But in the weak light of our porch where my wife, Dawn, was waiting behind the door with a bowl full of candy - and dark shadows everywhere - this is the question I overheard all evening long: Is it real? And the frequent response: It’s not real.

No one counted all of the kids last night – plus their parents, trailing along. There was candy left over at the end of the night, so maybe there were a hundred kids or so. But it wasn’t about the candy.

I wish I could tell you all of the stories, but so often, things happen so fast. You can’t even see everything right in front of your face. Kids come and go. You hear voices and many feet kicking through the leaves. I mostly just sat still off to one side. Sometimes kids would walk by me and not even see me at all. I could see them looking up at the rope spider’s web and the inflatable spider closing in on two dangling and caught dolls between the front porch pillars.

I have all night.

And then a kid stops right in front of me. The game of uncertainty begins. I can’t see their eyes. They can’t see mine. We read each other’s body language. All mine says is that maybe something - they don’t know what - is sitting just right over there in the shadows. I can see their uncertainty as they pause.

Fear is a primal instinct. Without it, my ancestors would not have survived to pass along their genes all the way through millions of generations of humans to me – and to these kids. They know in their heads that we are really just playing - mostly. There’s the safety net of their parents. Other kids all around. Ordinary houses, with ordinary people, porch lights on. It’s just Halloween.

One boy – I couldn’t quite figure out what his costume was - remembered when he saw me what he had forgotten. I’d added an occasional twist for just this year. Rather than always just sitting entirely motionless, I slowly, mechanically, twisted my head from side to side. The kid loudly announced to his three friends that I was real and that I had scared him half to death last year. And then his pause announced to me that he suddenly realized that he didn’t know for sure what he was looking at this year.

I listened to the boys reassuring each other that I was real - as I robotically shook my head ‘no.’ 

Uncertainty works on so many levels. Even if they were nearly sure that I was a living, breathing person, the next question was right on its heels waiting for them: Is he safe?

But it’s just Halloween.

Each age of kid that I have played with on Halloween night – from parent to toddler – asks those questions in their own way. Each kid asks within his or her own mind for themselves this existential question: Who is that, and why am I here? Candy? As for me, I just want to play with their uncertainties. I have my own instincts to play with. In the end, I want these kids to like me a hundred times more than I want to scare them and in the end, this is a game that we play with each other for just one night of the year. It’s a simple game, really, but with hopefully just enough uncertainty to make it interesting. A coin flipped sparkles as it spins in the air.

A lot of kids from the neighborhood have played this game before. They know my face and name in the light of day. But uncertainty is well woven into the web of reality – and not just on this one night. In the darkness, rustling leaves all around, kids think that they know what they know – and then I catch the loose thread of their imagination. Human instincts fire faster than our good sense. I just watch and wait.  This is why I came to this house on this night of all nights. To see them. To hear them. To give them something to remember as they will give me something to remember. After our instincts, that is what we are, after all, an accumulation of our memories. We can’t hope to hold onto all of them for long, but a tickling of our instincts is what sometimes makes us feel alive.

The brave young man and his friends made it up onto the porch. I heard them consulting with my wife about my possible reality. And when they came back down to my level, I was still shaking my head back and forth. They began to dare each other to go over and touch me. Soon, one of their parents standing back along the sidewalk double-dog-dared them. Some of the kids began a chant, ‘touch it, touch it.’ I watched and waited. One boy dressed in black did step slowly towards my table. He eventually reached out his hand and touched the flowers – then jumped back. Another came around the back and touched my shoulder as he skipped by. I waited. Reality was wavering. We had nearly fully entered primal territory. All Hallow’s Eve.

Everyone – even me – knew in their heads that this was just a game. Everyone was old enough to see me breathe – but misdirection is how illusion works. And so quickly you forget what you just knew a second ago. And they all had very ancient and nearly forgotten primal minds pulling at corners of their uncertainties.

The boy who knew me when he first saw me was hesitating just a few steps out of my reach. Uncertainty had hovered and gathered for several minutes now. And then I pounced. Only standing up half out of my chair with a sharp growl. Before he could even think, the brave boy turned and yelled, ‘That’s it,’ tossing his full bag of candy high into the air, and hurrying away.

One of his friends came and retrieved the bag and then they all shuffled off through the leaves, telling each other what they thought had just happened. They had been an appreciative audience in the end.

I’ve been doing this for a long time. I prepare some. I’ve learned that when it comes to actions that less is more. And silence is louder than people think. I watch and wait. And then I wait a little longer. And then even I don’t know what is going to happen next. Suddenly I am the one in primal territory. We’re all creatures tumbling and tickling - shuffling. I laugh without thinking. Someone screams high into the night and the next moment a little girl is laughing with me.

I could tell you stories, but it’s not the same as living life.

But here’s one more story.

Later in the evening, a young woman and a little girl approached from across the lawn. The young woman, in the light of day, is my neighbor. The little girl was holding onto her as they walked carefully across the grass – stopping finally still twenty or twenty-five feet away. I called out. The young woman, so apparently from Wonderland, said that she was Alice and the little girl was Cinderella. In the half-darkness none of us could really see each other very well. Uncertainty was in the air. I waited, but not too long this time. Then I raised one gloved hand slowly into the air and waved. In an instant, before she could even think, Cinderella dashed back to the driveway. And then she slowly came back to where Alice still stood. Together, they came nearly to where was sitting, but well out of reach. This time, I took off my mask and Cinderella looked into my eyes. Who did she see? Then Cinderella told me that she lived on the next street over. Alice had explained that Cinderella had come over to help hand out candy. It’s Halloween night.

And then there were more kids coming and I put my mask back on to watch again and wait.

Not every day or every night – but sometimes we live for the unexpected. A little fear reminds us that reality can be scary, but hopefully we also can learn to face our fears and live with our instincts. And sometimes surprise is a gift from the universe. If we can live with uncertainty, life can be joyful – if a little crazy sometimes.

The night had grown quiet. After we finally turned off the porch light, my wife and I walked up the street. I knew our friends had gotten York Peppermint Patties to give out – but it wasn’t about the candy. After David let me and Dawn in the back door, their daughter laughed, home working on a thesis, when she saw me in my gray wig and pink hat. I could clearly see her eyes. And then as I bit into a piece of candy as we sat together on the sofa, she told me that she still could remember being scared to go onto my porch – on a Halloween night roughly twenty years ago. These memories are a little bit of who we are.

And I have already forgotten much of what happened on this Halloween. When I sit out on my lawn, I try to see every kid, knowing that I can’t. Everything happens too fast. I go with my instincts. Every year the kids manage to surprise me. Halloween is, after all, about uncertainty. And the next day there is candy left over for all the saints and the sinners – and more kids being born into daylight every year. Here’s the question: Is love real? And following on its heels, is love worth the risk?

Uncertainty and surprise.

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.

Summer poetry

Chop some freshly picked tomatoes

about four or five.

Add minced garlic cloves,

about six or seven.

Dice fresh mozzarella,

about 8 ounces.

Add handfuls of freshly picked

and roughly chopped sweet basil.

Pour in some extra virgin olive oil,

whatever seems right to you.

Salt and pepper to taste,

as they say.

Mix all in a glass bowl 

and cover with plastic wrap.

Place it all in the sun for much of the afternoon.

I personally like to cook up a mess of linguine

about suppertime,

toss everything together quickly 

and eat the goodness I barely had a hand in.

If the juice trickles down your chin

and splatters on your shirt, 

you’re probably doing

something right.

Fresh crusty bread is a good idea,

if you like sopping juice.

I like real butter, too,

but then I’m living large.

The secret is the ingredients

and who you eat and drink with

and what quenches your thirst

and satisfies your appetite.

Summer starts with the sun.

In a wild universe

Since I was awake, I decided to go get a glass of water from the refrigerator. Then I pulled on a pair of pants and I stepped outside with my cold water. The night was alive with katydids calling. The moon was an egg, tumbling just over the apartment block out across a couple of back fences. The grass under my feet was wet. Droplets too minute to see one by one were spread out over the earth. And all together they were reflecting the reflected light of the moon until the brightness nearly blotted out the stars where I was looking until I could almost count the remaining stars one by one.

Even as I turned to the darker portions of the sky, with some patience I could have almost counted the stars. Humans in these parts have illuminated the night on nearly every corner and then some. Still, sometimes even the view of the universe from my backyard is worth getting out of bed for.

I was in no hurry to be anywhere, but still too restless to stand still on the earth already spinning a thousand miles an hour beneath my feet. I stepped towards my driveway. I suspect that countless humans had grasped some of the dizzying sense of relativity in the universe well before Einstein did the math. The earth spinning and hurling around the sun every year like a bucket on string. The solar system, pulled along at astronomical speeds out along one spiral arm of The Milky Way. And Milky Way galaxy hurtling out to beyond who knows where at a little less than light speed.

And yet, in my neighborhood and with my own gaze, I am the only body not at apparent rest tonight. On my own, I am merely picking my way carefully in my bare feet along my rocky driveway down to New Hampshire Street.

At two o’clock in the morning, the traffic is not a problem. The asphalt still holds the daytime summer heat. The pavement is worn nearly smooth from the passage of countless car tires. When things get to be countless - things like cars and streetlights - the effect becomes measurable. Whether one notices these things or not, is another question. But tonight, one creature barely counts. Still, I move.

The water in my glass is still cold in my hand and the glass is beaded with some of the droplets in the sky coming near to me in the night. The water will quench one thirst. But it turns out that a drink is not why I am not back sleeping in my bed tonight.

Walking slowly up the street, the katydids call - but not to me. They are heard on all sides - but not seen. Tree branches cut black overhead against the brighter sky like a pieces of a serrated knife. Shadows crouch alongside of the houses on either side of the street. Porch lights. Solar lights. An occasional lighted window. And at the corner, a street light shines amber, brighter than the moon. The steel manhole cover in the middle of the intersection rattles a little when I step on it. I could probably read a book on this circle if the book had large print.

The moon hasn’t finished tumbling. A nearly negligible night wind wisps against my chest. I turn to find the pole star. How far beyond Central Middle School, a short earth block ahead of me now, before I would be standing dierectly underneath that north star. And if I could fly through space tonight, how long would it take me at my human pace to reach that single star, a point just barely bright enough for me to see from where I walk along New Hampshire Street. I watch my shadow grow taller and taller as I amble down the amber lighted street. I’m walking due north - by the star and by the street laid down in a grid.

A car’s headlights encourage me back onto the rougher concrete sidewalk. I pass our house. Plenty of deep shadows lurking under the canopy of trees and hiding under bushes.

And then I stop. I saw movement ahead. An animal was over there, just at the curb, twenty or thirty feet ahead of me. And then in a splash of dim light, I saw a white stripe down the center of its back. A skunk in the wild! It roamed in an urban environment, to be sure, but this skunk was as wild in its own mind as it could be.

I smelled nothing. The skunk seemed unaware of me. It skittered along nose to ground, never taking a straight line. I stood still. And then as the skunk moved away from me, I followed along from what I hoped was a safe distance. Mostly I stood watching, wondering about that skunk’s life relative to mine. The skunk gradually took its twisting and turning path farther away from me. When it started to cross 15^th street, I could see the skunk pretty well by the street light there, nose down, bushy black tail up.

Then a car came speeding down the street, just missing the skunk by a few feet or so and the skunk scampered back into the bushes on my side of the street and out of my sight.

I turned and looked for the tumbling moon. If it ever stopped falling, all the king’s horses and all of the king’s men couldn’t put this fairy tale land together again. As I walked toward home, I spied with my eyes the moon in an open space between the houses.

A bright night sky. Shadows below.

I wonder if I might be becoming a little semi-nocturnal, myself. But I won’t follow a wild skunk all night long or too closely. I like to drink my water cold from the refrigerator too much to go that skunk’s way in the universe. But what if we go a little too far with the amber lights and the cars? A little more wildness might be a good thing.