Estimated Time of Departure

The hour at which one departs can vary the experience of the journey immensely. As little as 15 minutes of delay can increase the air temperature by three or 4°.  Additionally the traffic Increases ! exponentially

Although my hearing is diminished I can hear the trilling and chirping of birds everywhere along with the crunch of acorns under my feet. Despite how "modern" our modern age is become newspapers still wait expectantly for their purchasers to retrieve them wearing only a bathrobe.

I have never been a morning person. But my walks to my office over this summer have been taken with my eyes wide open. My steps through the green canopy above these neighborhoods have convinced me that this is a very beautiful time of day.

The Old Man

I posted this yesterday on Facebook.  I dictated it as I walked and took pictures with my smartphone.  It seemed a waste to just leave it on that transient forum.

“My street is quiet and still this morning. We are enveloped in relatively cool air. The light is falling through the trees at a different angle than it took a month ago. Make no doubt about it this is still summer but the onset of fall it's not far off.

My walks over the past couple of months have been joyful. They have been showing me my neighbors little joys. There is something quite affirming in the fact that everyone wants a special little thing to make their space their own.

Some people dream of the pure land. Some people dream of heaven with all its attributes described in their beloved Bible. What I dream of is a little more time to walk the streets and alleyways of this full and beautiful world.”

In response to my post my cousin noted the following:

“This took me back to Ocean City when Mel and I would be sitting in the kitchen nook and your Dad would go walking slowly down the alley way behind Central Ave....every morning.....just walking & smoking, and seemingly in deep thought.....no camera......just made me think how much he must have enjoyed "taking it all in", as well.......”

I responded,

“You are so correct about the correlation between my father’s walks and my own. While I haven’t had a cigarette in 30 + years I think I started taking my walks when I was smoking. 

Back then the alleyways of OCNJ were a different world from the main streets. For my health I quit smoking, Still, the walk has always remained part of my routine. For a time my exercise was obtained riding a bicycle.  I went back to walking because you miss too much. Me I try to shift my walking routes. I try to see all of what is going on but with my myopic vision it doesn’t always work.

I also have my father’s shall we call it approachability. People will see me and just start talking to me. Also I don’t mind striking up a conversation with most any person. I know I lot of special people from the buses in Lansing because of that. I through the years have also met some really wonderful people just through casual conversations.

I offer just a short note from one of my walks. When I travel I usually get up in the morning and leave the hotel seeking some kind of coffee and pastries. I was in I think Lake Louise Alberta and had taken a path down across a little bridge to get to the “best” donut shop per the concierge. 

At the bakery my senses were awash in aromas of cinnamon and chocolate and vanilla. The smell was so good I got a food high as I entered the building. As I looked around there was a tour bus driver was just topping off his coffee. I started joking with him about how it must get boring having to dodge those big horn sheep that wander onto the Icefields Parkway. He laughed. I then asked him a question that was essentially if he wasn’t driving a bus what would he personally go see on the drive.

The man in the grey tour guide’s uniform did not hesitate. He directed me to a waterfall that was off the beaten path. In fact it was so off the beaten path there was a point that you made a turn that was so tight by backing up and twisting your wheels on a landing to accomplish the task. Long story short the waterfall was just amazing. Guess what, if I didn’t take my walks and if I didn’t talk to people I would have missed something special. 

Yeah I owe the old man that. While we had some major differences watching him and mirroring his behaviors made me at least part of what I am today.”

Another day another walk

Life is full of adversity. It's the can't dos and the won't be able tos that trip us up and bring us to a state of being ill at ease.  But life has a fire and a desire to exist and prevail.

There are beautiful trees and the wonderful flowers that I photograph each day. These teach us that with nurturing and care some things can grow into incredibly beautiful specimens

But look down some time today. No matter where you're standing there will be some kind of flora pushing its way through the macadam, the concrete, or the brick pavers. Life has a will to be.

We human beings are cosmic weeds. In the battle between entropy and the weeds I hope we prevail.

From a High Window

Last night I dreamed. My mind's taking of odd little pathways through that nether region, a space that lies between waking and dark slumber, is nothing unusual. Often I travel  expansive journeys in that space. Behind fluttering eyelids before the flooding of morning light I see the what ifs. It is like looking at a world shrouded in fog from a high window.

Often in that land behind the mirrors of my day just passed my mind strings together those issues at the top of my consciousness mixing them with the collective common wisdom stored somewhere in my brain's recesses. Apparently my mind tries to offer me knowledge I have forgotten or hidden away.

Last night I dreamed I was riding a bicycle across a broad university campus. The campus was woven with pathways and several copse of trees. There was a small river that ran through it. I was peddling my bicycle furiously; I must've been late for something like an exam or  meeting someone.

Suddenly in the midst of my path there was a pile of broken up concrete. I could have wound my way through it but it would've taken time, time I did not have.

To avoid the loss of time I took a less travelled path which if it had been opened would've put me at the place I was headed smack dab at the exact minute I was to be there. The path was thin and more wooded. There on the trail as it narrowed I came upon an even greater pile of rocks. This pile was one so massive and so oddly situated that I could not pass aside it or climb over.

I woke.

Seems to be in my mind was telling me to take on the difficulties that may come. I mean it sounds like the perfect metaphor for saying address the small conquerable tasks and don't avoid them.  If you don't what you will come upon next may be insurmountable due to delay.

Dreams are funny like that.

I am so glad I am not on the school board anymore. I  used to have dreams like this all the time.

As Day Ends

Last night we ate dinner out by the fire pit in our back yard.  My belief is that it is the first time we have done it this year.  Up until a few days ago the bugs were just too aggressive.  Wet days in early summer brought hordes of mosquitoes. But that was then, they have faded away now.

Pork finished on the grill, grilled yellow squash and Spanish rice were the major portions of the meal.  The food was pleasing to the eyes and the aromas just a pleasure. Settling down for the meal around the glass patio table the evening was warm but not humid, a nice change. 

My children ate like the raptors they are. Maybe five minutes lapsed. They ate the food that took an hour hurriedly.  Eat and then off back to the electronic media, no other choice for them. My wife took some coals from the Weber grill and dropped them on wood that had accumulated in the fire pit.  Our lot is surrounded by trees and thus we like everyone else I know have a brush pile.  What can you do but burn it?

The branches and leaves caught quickly.  I took the little blue tooth speaker and played instrumental versions of Grateful Dead songs as the flames of the fire licked at the night air.  The smell of the burning wood, the feel of sitting out in a chair in the yard, the sound of a pianist noodling away on her rendition of Eyes of the World, well these are the things of summer delight.  It doesn’t get much better than this.

The rocking chair

Conceptually a rocking chair is a wonderful thing. Moving back and forward while remaining in a fixed place let you and me burn off some nervous energy or exercise nervous ticks, while resting weary-ah so weary, bones and cartilage. But once in America it was more. A chair on the porch used to be the access point to the only social network that counted your neighbors. 

Once the rocking chair on your front porch is where you saw what was going on. On a warm clear evening one neighbor would walk across the street to ask if you knew about Frank. He just had a heart attack you know and is in hospital. Some other neighbor’s child flush with new money from a recently acquired factory job would blow by squealing tires in a tricked out ride. You made a mental note to watch that one.

You could see who passed by and try and sort out why a particular regular did not pass by. You could talk to other neighbors if you had business with them. You got connected.

The thing is that sitting on a chair looking in a passing neighbor’s eye and shaking their hand sort of gave you a measure of the person. You were able to pick up on who they really were as opposed to a digital media image that they nowadays paint of themselves.

In America we have gotten too busy in our race to the bottom of life to sit outside or the corollary to stroll around our neighborhoods on a regular basis anymore. We have Facebook, Twitter and television to suck us indoors and away from the art of conversation and the real connections we used to make face to face. We have become slaves to narrowing margins of time dictated by unrealistic work expectations, program start times on the tube and kid’s soccer, music and hockey schedules.

God I love the image of this chair. Ah but my heart sinks because it does not mean what it used to mean. It is as meaningless as a painted milk can on the front porch. Both of them are old, out of date and merely curiosities.

The questions we really have to ask is why we have allowed thismove indoors away from community to happen and who will lead us back out into a human society.  Technology brings changes in our life and will always bring changes. 

A student of history will tell you about the complete and utter upheaval in society following the start of the industrial revolution.  Shifting work patterns, human as machine components made daily life very negative.  Long hours, low wages and family disruption were the norm. Read some stories of practices in New England textile mills and you will say “Thank God the unions came along.” We are lucky trade unionism rose up to challenge the long hours and intolerable conditions that so quickly became the norm in the late 1800s to early 1900s.  

But what group will arise to help us return to a face to face society?

What has occurred now is pernicious.  We as a people have allowed bread and circuses (panem et circenses) to isolate us and divert us from community and responsibility.  The panem term was supposedly coined by Juvenal. He was trying to describe the cynical formula used by the Roman emperors to keep masses content.  Give us ample food (a pizza is just a couple of mouse clicks away) and entertainment (Lip Sync battle anyone?) and people lose sight of the importance of staying engaged, staying in real contract, staying informed and staying on a handshake level with other humans. Bellies full and minds diverted we become oblivious sheep.

I don’t know I am just ranting but we are the most electronically connected but socially isolated group ever and it can’t go on like this.

 

 

 

Solitary walking.

The bitter and lucid joys of solitude. The real desert is this: to face the real limitations of one’s own existence and knowledge and not try to manipulate them or disguise them. Not to embellish them with possibilities. Simply to set aside all possibilities other than those which are actually present and real, here and now. And then to choose or not, as one wishes, knowing that no choice is a solution to anything, but merely a step further into a slightly changed context of other, very few, very limited, very meaningless concrete possibilities. To realize that one’s whole life, everybody’s life, is really like that. In society the possibilities seem infinitely extended. One is in contact with other people, other liberties, other choices, and who knows what the others may suddenly all choose?

In society, in the middle of other people, one can always imagine one will break through into other liberties and other frames of reference. Other worlds. We have trained ourselves to think that we live at every moment amid unlimited hopes. There is nothing we cannot have if we try hard enough, or look in the right place for it.

But in solitude, when accurate limitations are seen and accepted, they then vanish, and new dimensions open up. The present is in fact, in itself, unlimited. The only way to grasp it in its unlimited-ness is to remove the limitations we place on it by future expectations and hopes and plans, or surmises, or regrets about the past, or attempts to explain something we have experienced (or the revived, warmed-up experience) in order to be able to continue living with it.

Thomas Merton June 19, 1966,VI. 309–10