What Is Time For?

   Riding my bike today from Nevada City back home to Chester Street on a splendid! end-of-November day, breezy, no, windy, swirling leaves & pine needles down across my cheek how good it feels to be spinning pedals again, cruising backstreets!
   As I'm free-wheeling once more the recognition comes to me I'm that rare bird who abides in a culture that's projected time as an adversary, that at every turn & wherever it can seeks to reduce, compress, or streamline time not only to be more productive but has fallen in love with gadgetry for its own sake, to embrace the latest in ex-pedience, just to marvel at its new potential!
   But- what if you step back from this manic obsession with crunching time & choose instead- Lord Help You- with entering time?  To exit the wizardry of the mind & return to the body, to what you can do for yourself?  To step out under the sky, take a deep breath, and pronounce the word "here"?  To feel the sunshine on your face, to visit with a finch frolicking in the branches, to lean across the back fence & have a friendly word with your neighbor?  To walk to the grocery, playfully carousing with every dog along the way?  Behold! An entire universe opens from you in every direction!

What does the Sky have to say?

   ...because no matter how 'liberated' you are nor how independent you feel, so long as you take your place in a cultural setting you remain subject to hundreds of tips, protocols, associations- all the subliminal queus of group-think.  For me, that is the appeal of the woods, the winds, the mountains & deserts- to push down through the slush of endless opinion, Point of View, punditry, advertisement, etc to some kind of bedrock reality, nothing further, and see what THAT has to offer.

   "...I am finished speaking; what does the sky have to say?"     -Confucius

driving to san luis obispo

We pulled off Highway 46
Into the wide turnout where Hwy 41
Tees into low hills south,
Dan checks the atlas and pronounces it
"Too winding."
Open the truck door,
Amble out for stretch and aire,
A brief shower had just passed
But now the low setting sun
Has lit up the distant hills
And wide grass valleys
With a soft purple light,
Rose-tinting the last low clouds
Drifting slowly east-
I've been around the block
Seen many things
But such sheer ravishment
By light
I can't recall