HERESAY SIXTEEN

It might as well begin with Twinkie's dream. A cement mixer? She takes a deep breath and . . . I wonder. This morning as I awoke she came to the door and meowed to be let in. Contrariwise, often I know when she has come to the patio door to be let in at night.

I am a chartreuse swan. Call me civilization. Like it or not, I can't ignore or hide the stuff that comes through. That's the deal.

On my own I had been thinking about history. The universe. Where scientists get to imagine the Big Bang by running their equations in reverse. The BB is something of a convenience because without it how could we get a time line for significant events?

Jumping the groove, I ask how does a lotus blossom relate to the background radiation still reverberating? Perhaps that's not a fair question. OK-- (straw dog) – is the lotus conscious? Fair game for scientists, this question, like shooting frogs in a barrel.

Recent scientific research using electromagnetic sensors has shown plants are sentient and do respond to thoughts, angry or friendly, directed at them. I and other gardeners know weeds that forcibly eject seeds when their pods are touched. But consciousness, even though no one knows what it is, normally is associated with flesh and blood beings like humans who invented the term.

My experience with the order of time makes history a conventional understanding, convenient but not fundamental. Though perhaps describable, subjective experience is not directly transferable. If shared verbally or in writing, you might get the idea and create a similar experience, but we cannot know whether or not our experiences are the same since verbal communication is not instantaneous. What we all are, however, and can directly experience, does not need to be transferred. The history of the universe is a mathematical necessity that has its origin in consciousness, the same as that which forms a lotus blossom, or a chartreuse swan.

Themes sidle in like second hand smoke, wafting in over balconies and barriers, until gradually dissipating. Civilization is full of itself, an artifact of the imagination. A hydrogen bomb brings together what humans have learned from nature, concentrating knowledge, the genii of the mind. The general haze needs collaboration, welcoming minds to test it. As in music, a melody can drift across related keys.

Beneath San Francisquito Creek in Menlo Park, in the heat of summer when the stones are covered in dust, it is possible to sense a subterranean flow. This may not actually be so, but the idea is a covered bridge. I can lean over the edge and hear new a tune just beneath the surface, a stoned experience for sure, but not portable. As a writer or musician, serendipity makes it so, where words and music share the pool of in-between, an inexact place where dreams and wakefulness interplay. Imagine no goal posts. The ball is a bird flying through the twilight zone, and once gone there is no limit. Whether clouds are real or not or tunes flow below dusty stones is not a decision made over latte at Starbucks. Nothing happens out on the creek bed. Cast your line, catch a tune. Flipping back a familiar phrase: It's indistinguishable from magic.

So there you have it. This cup of water I scooped out of a river running beneath San Francisquito Creek.