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GOING FOR THE GOLD

This won't follow rules of thought. Your dream of a walk through the park stumbles over a detour to a tree house, its phone being used by a chattering robin. Oh so solid once, the walls dematerialize. If only this could be arranged on schedule, perhaps an educational grant, or laid on the window sill where it might receive lectures. Be watered. And the orderliness of usual life, if such be your lot, leads up swept stairs, sunny, needing no guard rails. Jiu Jitsu calculations assure an advantage that would otherwise be carried off in a wind storm. Which is why robin perches in your tree house, dreams waiting in a jar, and through my pages upstart mushrooms nudge up through the cracks.

The bones of spontaneous action lack systematic discovery. An oxymoron? Then study a rabbit on a rock. No keen eyed falcon, hovering, would pass it by. The bird's mind descends to another below where blooms prosper on their own. It can be compared to an area that hosted an old log once, or to a bit of ground visited during an urgent need to answer the call of nature. At that place, the weeds are greener.

Hikers don't keep track of which rock they visited last, a good sense of smell being the best guide. But as we've seen, national parks are getting crowded. Historical markers deemed necessary. Signs – Don't feed the bears.

Random rocks are becoming the subject of statutory definitions. Nature, in due course, is prompted to ignore the rules. How much study can it take?

Greta Thunberg calls out her legacy, and there's more than meets the eye. Evidently we are about to destroy our only home.

The weather was once a benign conversational gambit. Nice day, eh? But now it's likely to start an argument. Soon there will be a sort of consensus.

What to do? Try some easy things. Do you eat meat? Use less water. Other things will come to mind. Greta might agree that earth has become a gas chamber, silent CO2. We are now threatened with not just the corona virus, perhaps a pandemic, in addition to panocide.

Ladies and gentlemen, and all who lie between, as we emerge from the tunnel of denial, let us not blink. Parapets and water falls and the white water of yore will come to rest in a sea of calm. More helpful than explanations will be just appreciation. Look deeply into a flower. Or perhaps goldfish in their watery realm.

They are ballerinas dancing on gossamer wings. Fins, as we call them, seeming incapable of buoying an entire fish. Being mostly of that which surrounds them, however, they ply a universe they can scarcely conceive. Do they dream of flowers?

Ours hang out beside the water circulation pump. They come when called. They splash and make a ruckus. As their dinner floats towards the other end of the tank, where I am sitting, we all end up together having a sort of conversation, and I find their company charming.

Visitors bringing dragon's gold have arrived.