&

This journey is constantly unfolding.  Ports of consciousness open and close, laughably speaking through the mouths of our goldfish. At dinner time they both come over to my end of the tank to share ancient memories. Frankie has come to accept them. He used to sit on the glass cover of the tank at dinner time, which was not reassuring.

The world flows on, shaping banks in accordance with changes. Of all things to be said, why these?

In the ebb and flow, some lights shine briefly. To describe the whole of it, molecule by molecule, would track a wasteland of boredom. The extent of a river is lost upon the view of a scuba diver. Fuels grown and accumulated over millions of years, oxidized in the blink of a geological eye, leave the goldfish in their own forever. Their journey never ends, for now.

&                    &                    &                     &                      &

The flamboyance of steel mushrooms, shimmering in a cup of coffee. The rest of the story is a cross word puzzle in a newspaper limp with fog. But read on. Possibly hobbits with improved breakfast cereal have strengthened their grip on the watering can making a gentle shower for our bonsai juniper. In a miniature zen stairwell garden, bringing nothing but a moment of meditation, strangely out of place in the parking garage.

Gravel crunches underfoot. Remember when crop circles were simple mysteries? And gradually they got more and more complex, leading to induced seizures of speculation, and the bonsai, looking peaked, seems to ask for compost broth. Unbroken mysteries are getting scarcer than hen's teeth. How many people do you know, now, that look up their chimney? The wave of the future is a tsunami.

Out in the Egyptian desert, buried in the sand where no one was looking for mummies, several have been found. Beautiful – they are well preserved, the lids undeteriorated, still blazing the bright colors of their festive entombment. There are no termites in desert sand. Out in the middle of nowhere where tomb raiders don't go.

&                     &                     &                     &                     &

A satellite shows earth strung with lights, the twinkling web at night. We have entered the New Age of Darkness. It shines with an intensity of fireflies. Anyone below, not blinded in the glow of city lamps, will see countless stars that seem like pin pricks. Who would see our sun like this? It energizes every mind and imagination. Who will see the present at this remove from our possible future? Which from the evidence presented by nuclear weapons might be annihilation. Or that it could be an appreciation of the insufficiency of your kitchen stove. Somehow within that limited space is the availability of enough energy to create a new stove, on demand, out of “thin air.” The universe is not just filled with energy it IS energy. Is this more than the imagination can bear? Wonderful, but so far we're stuck in admiration over the invention of safety matches.

Of course if I say this, I am sitting on the wrong end of a limb that I am sawing off. I should stick to watching an apple fall, and to making safe observations. OK. I say it will bounce. The limb falls. End of story. Everyone is happy. Me, too.

&                     &                     &                     &                     &

There is nothing very startling about a still pond. A falling leaf would relish it. Though the pond ripples, the mind remains undisturbed.

It's a cloudless day after everything has settled. The universe cannot find me. I have become empty sky. Crows fly through me and come to land in the hackberry tree, our meeting place of summers past. Those years when my best crow friend kept up with the truck, perching in favorite spots on the route. A certain tree. A TV antenna, from which to swoop down onto a feast of disturbed insects, hopping just ahead, just out of reach of the mower. An excellent game. Up to that day that startled Rosie on the front porch, when the entire crow nation descended in a flapping crowd onto Wood Duck Court, and crowding into our tree as well. And when the tribe lifted off suddenly, all together at once, how did they manage that? and just the two that were left in a branch over my head, and the sound of almost a crow lullaby, muted deep in the throat, unmistakably a song reserved for family.

Today they returned. In these years after I have surrendered my truck to the Bay Area Air Quality District, and now in the midst of a Spare the Air Day due to smoke from fires not prevented by the Public Safety Power Shutoff. I am so glad they remembered.

Another conversation. And when they depart, the blue sky is empty again.

&                     &                     &                     &                     &

The main problem in writing is trying to put into words what they cannot contain. Some writers bolt to fantasy, relying on readers who will not notice. The backyard of a butterfly, for instance, is a truly wonderful realm. Depending on the severity, I might make it speak words of ethereal beauty or tireless wisdom, going so far as to package them in quotation marks. All the while, here in the backyard is an escape hatch to reality that looks just like the backyard. It would seem insulting to trap an innocent flight of beauty in that way, a rush to preservation in timeless amber, as though buried years ago and preserved for just this moment. It can't fly.

So that's words, the death of reality. No doubt I'm not the only one who sailed away on Grimm's Fairy Tales, only to land with a thud. It's not a matter of preference. Anyone who really watches a caterpillar knows this. There's a backdoor in every labyrinth that opens when presented with enough concentration. The beauty of it is that on first sight, as when out the corner of one eye, accidentally, the butterfly looks at YOU.

It doesn't all seem to hang together. But if you fly along with it, there are things Macbeth never dreamt.

I have to admit that, upon hearing of Humpty's great fall, I took to playing boogie woogie on the piano. There is a mechanism to it that completely extinguishes Henry Ford's production line. Some others I ran into in high school took it out on, in one case, a trumpet. In another, a trombone. There was one very quiet musician who took to growing tulips.

Words, for all their fragility, are frogs. They chop wood and leave it in piles, sturdy stores of heat for winter, trudging their gossamer wings in preparation for Spring. Heeling in psychological insights and nonsensicals for the bloom to come. No one, surely not me, gives them the credit they deserve. They are our pioneer log cabin heritage, having barely peeled off accumulations of bark grown over centuries, until finally, like lemmings over a cliff, they meet their first Gutenberg and are crushed into journalistic jelly, spread over breakfast with a dab of butter.

In retrospect, I don't know what to say.