HALF-EATEN PEACH
This small backyard, a speck in the universe, is a vast planet for ants. We're living between extremes, a matter of consciousness not usually associated with them, whom we observe maintaining colonies. Our civilization, we note, has better engineers, superior equipment, more knowledge and usable power. We produce art, music, literature and drama, and we visit other planets.
We have lots to say to each other. The cord of civilization: a cable wire stretched between power poles. On it a couple of squirrels are playing together. The leader runs along top of the wire while the follower, clinging on upside down, scampers along underneath. It looks like fun.
So who needs television? Though we've become inured to high drama, strife, endless war, mass murders that seem as unavoidable as the weather – here are these squirrels outdoing Olympic gymnasts. With no ads. Here is this peacefulness, a calmness of natural places. There are so many dimensions.
It was many years ago, recalled by dead reckoning from now, that he said, “You've got to watch out for people with charisma.” He'd spoken amidst spiritual seekers. Said calmly, it was a criticism. Aside from dealing with the spiritual noise, I could feel something else of a hunch, but what? It wasn't the first time I'd acted without specifics, or knowing why or exactly how to act. Or not act. No comment was best.
It's clear now that hunch was a prompt from the “present.”
That was “then.” This is a backhoe loading quicksilver, a metaphor not to cause traffic jams, start arguments, or make much money. It rolls off the tongue, though verging on a malapropism, and vaguely unsettling. Out of its own terms, this elaborate introduction from the head office, perhaps for the fun of it. It could be a pun ~
Think of an email with a blank From: field. And it got by the Mailer Daemon without getting flagged. I want to hug it! But it laughs.
Is charisma a scheme? Can it be deliberate, borrowed, cultivated? It is mysterious, like enlightenment, while both are spontaneous.
In some other dimension the game gets set up. It's a ping pong table that won't stay put. A trophy on the shelf that loses its luster. The rules were made, monitored and refereed, and it all boils down to who made it all, who made the award. It's wind in the willows, and like the black smith's anvil, his lightning strikes, dampening echoes before rain.
It evolves quicker than I can write it down. I am a wood carver who has been given air to chisel. The afterthought of that precognitive Orion crash returns in a flash. Right now is the future, not following a prescribed order. It might be traced through reasonable sequences in a logical progression of cause and effect, through common sense rules that, for a brief moment, weren't. What I was thinking could be changed, and was, by what I'm thinking now, in itself influenced by what I haven't thought yet. The notion of infinite regress is turned on its head – a double whammy!
A sequence inferred from the normal progress of events is close enough for gardening. My job for over thirty-five years included complete disappearances no one would notice. I didn't go anywhere, wasn't lost in thought, but rather in just the opposite. Just an ordinary gardener pulling weeds, or maybe you.
There is a calmness about natural places, scarcely remarked until an ant finds something edible, exuding an irresistible scent. Immediately the news travels, reaching down to roots, informing the Queen; everything is the center of everything and – plop!
Whatever. My subject has been replaced. This sound from where? But I don't see anything has changed.
Then quicker than puzzlement, it's forgotten. But Twinkie, who wasn't writing anything, has seen it. She's on the run, trotting past my feet.
What'cha got?
She's not looking at me, her nose pointing straight ahead. I had asked something too obvious.
But she wouldn’t know. The misfit plop! shipped out for subconscious oblivion, had just been reinstated, proving the value of doing nothing – even lightning quick suppression of dissonant experience gets noticed.
I had to go see.
There it was, on the lawn. A half-eaten peach, and unmistakably scored with squirrel tooth marks. Falling on the roof just above where I had been sitting, it had then bounced off. I picked it up, about four or five walnuts in weight. Had it been dropped accidentally?
As often the case with nothing in mind, sitting down to write, wondering what, and then everything took care of itself.
