sun shimmer,
flashing off the waves,
summer drifts
tall grass,
from green to tawny,
summer’s span
shady creek
between pines and pasture:
sun escape
desolate:
bare soil in clumps and clods;
sun gone mean
far thunder,
rumbling skies and rain scent:
summer storm
There’s an electrical storm in my brain.
You would think it feels of fire and fury,
but it’s cloud flash without thunder or rain.
A winter blizzard of silent flurry.
Taken in December of 2014 in Budapest
shore wash:
chasing, and chased by,
tiny feet
crab sand art
alien beach language
’til high tide
dark clouds.
fishing boats race
churning seas
spiked urchin
wedged amid the rocks,
step wisely
low tide
glass sea stretches to
the breakers
Seeing the world through a window,
feels like from a rooftop.
And I cannot help but wonder,
what if the walls went pop?
Taken at the Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air & Space Museum in July of 2018
Most people turn a spigot to control the flow of the informational self. Opening the valve at will, and adjusting the flow as the pipe diameter allows. I have a hammer and a dam. Slamming the hammer into the dam yeilds nothing the first knock, and only a few droplets seep through over next several frantic smashings. Then spews a deluge of stone and water. Fortunately (or unfortunately,) by the time the flood crests, everybody has found safe ground elsewhere — usually.
“One-track mind” is a pejorative label, a criticism of an obsession. But the best one can aspire to is a two-track mind. Track One is what you are aware of, and Track Two is being aware of what you’re aware of it — metacognition. [Some Buddhas may be able to mirror it out to a third level, but not me.] Sure, one can juggle things in and out of Track One like a spastic circus worker, but it’s still a one-track mind. And dialing in Track Two is like tuning into one of those cross-country super-stations back in the radio days. The ones that only came in clearly in the stillness of the dead of night, and, otherwise, tipped into static with the slightest provocation on this spinning, orbital world.
My point is that I require a track for actions that usually take place down below the waterline, in the engine room — i.e. eye contact, smiling, etc. So when my one-track mind is occupied with information flows, I’m staring off who knows where — looking like the person who peers over your shoulder at a clock or at the prettier person he wishes he was talking to — but without recovery, because I’m oblivious to what my eyes are taking in. Worse, sometimes I remember to juggle “make eye-contact and smile” into Track One, and then I realize after the fact that I stared down an interlocutor with a maniacal grin until he excused himself, worrying I might have been sizing him up to make a coat of his skin.
Lest you think me wallowing in the mire, there’s a sweet upside. Under the right conditions, I gobble up and manage information like one of those giant harvesters that chews through a 200 acre cornfield in a day — separating grain and chaff — and stowing it away neatly. And, putting my body in motion, I can dive a mile inside, losing my Self and becoming blissfully enamored with this electric life.
Then there’s that aspect of me that I used to feel a curse, but have come to embrace: my inability to give two fucks about things that drive “the normals” to frenetic lunacy, such as:
I’ve been thought many things:
As You Like It by William Shakespeare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This play tells the tale of Rosalind, the daughter of an exiled Duke whose dominion was usurped by his brother, Fredrick. Rosalind goes into the woods with her best friend — the daughter of Fredrick, Celia — where her father is living in banishment. For a twist, she adopts the disguise of a man. As it happens the [proper] Duke’s forest attracts several other visitors in addition to its usual country folk, including the three sons of Sir Rowland de Boys, one of whom – Orlando – falls madly in love with Rosalind (who has by that point disappeared into the guise of a young gentleman.)
This play uses several of the common plot devices of Shakespearean comedies, including: mistaken identity, girls dressed as boys, the love triangle, and letting the audience in on a joke about which the play’s characters are kept in the dark. As it’s a comedy, you can correctly assume that all works out for the key characters — in fact, things work out quite neatly for everybody. In fact, Rosalind-in-disguise, conducts a scheme that results in a four-way wedding including not only her and Orlando, but also Orlando’s brother Oliver to Celia, a shepherd to a shepherdess, and a clown to a wench.
Of course it’s good, it’s Shakespeare. As for how it compares to the other comedies, I’d put it in the same ballpark as “Much Ado About Nothing” and slightly better than the middle of the pack. However, I have seen that some consider it the best of the comedies. I didn’t find it to have the tension of “The Merchant of Venice” or the intrigue of “Tempest” or “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” but it’s clever and has some well-known pieces of writing, probably most famously the “All the world’s a stage…” speech. If you haven’t read it, get on it.
