Saturday, July 16, 2011

green and sated

I slept for about 12 hours last night, waking to the rain, falling back asleep to the rain. Deeply satisfying, dream-filled sleep. I dreamt of encountering a very tall benevolent creature (a bird?) and a sweet little girl on a path in a clearing outside a wood. I trusted them right away - our meeting was joyful - and went with them into the forest. The path led to a lake, and the tall creature cheerfully told us all to roll up our socks. They were just thin trouser socks, and as I pulled mine up to my knees, I felt excited expectation. I knew the water was very cold, but there was some kind of magic in the air - and it seemed obvious that once we waded out into the water, the socks would keep us warm and we would walk across the lake quite easily.
Many such colourful and lovely dreams...
The rain is still making its hurried way from sky to earth. It's just beautiful outside - greens full and varied. I think I've resigned myself to summer's fleeting visit this year. It seems distracted. And if It can't commit to sunshine, then I prefer a rainy day to a day of dull cloudy do-nothing skies by a long stretch. Sun feeds us all and opens fruit and flower, and rain nourishes the earth. But cloudy days seem to accomplish nothing.
Trying to put sunshine out of my mind and embrace this determined deluge. As long as I am warm enough, then being out in the rain is delicious and vivid. Elemental. It makes the outdoors an open, uncrowded place, private almost.
Memories from childhood of walking home from school:
There was a steep hill on the last leg of the road home, and it was beside a park. In autumn, rain poured off the sidewalks and coursed down the road under the lip of the curb. A canyon river in miniature scale, with leaf dams every dozen yards or so. I liked to clear those dams so the tiny river was unimpeded, and then choose a single leaf well-shaped for boating. I'd set the leaf boat on the water, let it go, and follow it down its course, feeling like a giant or a demi-God helping a little craft down a turbulent river... nobody watching me, the streets deserted, the soft mists like a cloak and the sounds and smells of rainfall sheltering somehow.
Summer rain is not flat. It does not feel suppressed like a thin layer of apathetic clouds. It's not like a vapid depression, but a full-hearted expression of feeling. Like melancholy or longing or vulnerability. Sometimes there is no sadness to it at all, and it's more like tenderness, nostalgia, introspection, solitude, or freedom and play. It brings memories of stomping and hallooing, streaming-wet abandonment, tents collapsing under weights of water, mud seeping into everything, hot coffee drunk from tin cups, gratitude for even the tiny warmth of a kerosene lamp, and fun had in spite of (and perhaps due to) the absurd irony of our human attempts to control nature, and it confounding us at every turn.
I just paused to look through my photo library for a nice picture of rain to add to this.
I don't have a single one.
It would seem that I only take pictures of beautiful sunny days - no matter the season.
People tell me that I'm full of contradictions. Can you believe that?

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Monday, July 11, 2011

full blanks

My number one blogging challenge these days is voluntarily committing to more computer time. I'm deliberately looking away from the screen right now, trying to pretend that I'm doing something else, and just thinking thoughts. It's not really working.
The serpent eats its own tail. Want to express all of everything that's going on in my mind these days, but my thoughts are renewing and shifting too quickly to solidify. Trying to grab a fistful and force them into sentences feels laborious.
Okay, that's all I'm going to write. I don't have any trivialities to report, and everything else seems determined to just float as vapor for a while longer.

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Sunday, July 3, 2011

open


I came home in the early afternoon, just in time for the skies to clear. Nobody was around. I laid outside on the grass. All was silent. I ate fruit. I read. I drank cold drinks. I read some more. I drifted. I watched hawks in the sky. I wandered inside to cool down, and I played my piano and wrote some music - easily, effortlessly. I went back outside. I walked, I rode my bike, I watched birds in the sky and boats in the ocean. I swung in the hammock and scribbled ideas in a notebook....
Amigos,
Today, I lived!
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Friday, July 1, 2011

Bleat, carp, cavil

Spent too much time inside today, shunning the vapid sky, the insipid clouds. I read a lot, and researched travel destinations, but it was not satisfactory. A day of lazing around inside turns me into boiled cabbage. Limp. Bland. Watery. Dull. I tried to do some writing but all I could hear was the sound of my own listless brain. Finally, about 4pm, my restlessness peaked and I broke away from the house. I headed out on my bike, ditched it at a trailhead and walked under the trees. My wits slowly came back to me.
Mossy rocks... deep cool silence... tangled ferns... root-rippled earth...
Irritation and crankiness fell off me in clumps. Guess I was caked in the stuff.
And then.... it came! The Sun. Like a laser beam - vvvrrrap! - that cut through all the soggy remnants of my boggy mood and gave me an hour of pure happiness in the forest.
Shouldn't I have found a cure for this weakness by now? I'm turning 30 in under a month. I've got 27 days to figure out how to be a happy creature without regular sunshine. Honestly! I'm about to enter my 4th decade of life, and where is my equanimity? Where is the stoic maturity of heart?
I wonder why humans were given this spirit of discontent. It is such a powerful thing - just a tiny seed that spawns infinite varieties of both good and evil. It plagues us with unrest. Without it we would never have evolved into the beings we are. Is discontentment the same as desire? Can there be discontent without wanting... wanting something else? Doesn't prolonged discontent dig the hole into which desire pours?
I want more sunshine. I want to spend more time feeling connected to the earth. I want to feel more alive more of the time. My whole being longs for bright, glowing, golden sunlight. But I also want my music, want to feel inspired and to feel the drive of ambition and the reward of producing work. Want to write, want to create, want to collaborate, want to contribute, want want want!
..If I had all the sunshine I want, would I still feel motivated to work? Would I be too content to keep my ambitions and goals alive? Or would I just wake up one day with a horrible realization that I'd let my dreams go? But isn't my dream just to be content? Hrr, hmm, hrr.

I try to stay connected to these waves of disgruntled restlessness and work with them, watch them, learn from them. I know they're not going to just go away. Do they go away for anyone? It's a bizarre and ironic human trait, this Discontent. It's the biggest source of suffering in the world, but it's also what keeps us moving forward. Our curse and our blessing.
Who, when, what, why and where did it come from??

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