HERESAY THREE

Sunset. Cirrus clouds are suffused in layers, stretching out over Arizona's Red Mesa Rock. The flush lingers in a wisp of mind out of time. I think of fish nets laid out to dry.

This mind that seems familiar most of the time has a mind of it's own? Let's do the puzzle.

There was a voyage. In lofted layers messengers traveled the seas, casting about for sustenance, tracing the infinite extent of their imagination. And a return. The net was flung over a fence, caught in a painter's ebb and flow, shown with the grid of its daily work warped in folds, and its catch – glass ball floats, green as sea weed. The painter's scene is carefully arranged, almost casual, cultured like the whorls of a chambered nautilus.

But the puzzle doesn't end. Is it a labyrinth?

Civilized technology increases the haul of fish. Now there is more food for more people, who will need the harvest to increase because they have made more people. The haul increases, which now supports more mouths to feed. The haul – now large ships trawl, using nets thousands of feet in length that must be raised up from the sea with cranes that will fill the hold in one giant swoop.

Some fishing grounds have been over-fished to depletion. At the same time, the sea has become a dumping ground for discarded plastic. In the middle of the ocean is a great floating garbage patch. Some of it ends up in the stomachs of birds; some disintegrates into fine particles dispersed throughout the waters, ingested by denizens of the deep.

There is much that slips through the net, escaping laws of logic that depend upon ends and beginnings, the setting off of tomorrow from today. Here is the net catching itself. It tumbles into a domain called hara, the third chakra, a passing point. Where all that will be, or is or was, is forgotten. All that was in the way makes way for the way. Arrivals and departures do not establish anything. The node itself is forgotten.

Past sundown in the fading dusk, as I sit doing nothing, friend hummingbird flies in. Not to visit the feeder, but to hover right before my eyes. It's our moment of saying good night. The sound of mini-helicopter wings and my voice are blending in a duet no one else hears.