JOY

This morning's shower turns the lichen yellow, filaments holding fast, and the sweet pea, palms together, is adorned with silver beads. Soon it will open a lilac wing.

Summer's birds visit our leafless trees, where winter hasn't really happened yet. But there are seeds in the feeder by the fence. And as Susan notes, with no guns here it's sort of a city park. Mr. Finch is on a twig overhead, squirrels are stopping on the fence. Doves perch in a row. And here comes robin, who's been making a game out of dive bombing the blue marble apex of my sculpture. He swoops past my hat to celebrate his latest success. Summer was for conversations with finches.

They are all part of the family.

My three legged table and its small seed dish are both in the house now. The chair cushions are stored. The metal frame is stacked on the patio. And today its back rest and arms have muddy bird claw prints. We miss each other.

Such friends bring melancholy joy.

Tomatoes in the planter box are red and juicy, in December? It marks a radical departure, a transition, an interface.

So, reading on?

Very well. My bucolic afterburner has a different fuel.

The accepted arrow of time, in my mind, is a joke that flies only on belief. If this arrow is to be a useful metaphor, then it will have to be bidirectional. To wit:

In my experience, precognition is real. What is going to happen now I have on occasion known ahead of time, directly. Likewise, what has happened before is directly knowable now.

As Dogen Zenji once said, being-time is forty elbows.

And what happened before, not already known or remembered but experienced now, is sometimes called reincarnation.

So, perhaps you have a hunch that what I'm saying might just make sense? Precognition sometimes is written off or misdirected. And deliberately. That I can attest.

On this side of the interface, slits in the fence admit slivers of light. The world a few blocks away from our park is being devoured by bulldozers. The afterburner fires up. Snow peas at Butcher's Corner got scraped away. The forest trees and homes of Northern California became fire. The produce of climate change is ripe tomatoes for my salad. My hunch is that “normal” is not going to be reborn any time soon.

The world according to me will have an apple for breakfast, but the clock is out of order. It won't be restarted. Sparrows well nested might argue with this, or with Mr. Finch if they are smarter.

Beneath trees is a chattering talk show -- I/we know what? Will we become Kings and Queens of Eden, parsing oranges? Out through slits in the interface, space yawns without end, glowing past photosynthesis, photography, cryptography, slipping through the electromagnetic web.

The world according to me will have an apple for breakfast, with Quaker Oats, cranberries, and a spoon of peanut butter. Joy is real. It's more than just harmonics in a perfect music of the spheres. It is empathy. Wanting a knot hole per squirrel family per tree. It's as real as thirty two feet per second per second.

My world will not have too many of me, trampling trees, quashing things for the fun of it. I try to imagine robin driving a coal loader at a strip mine.

In the far reaches of my morning hunch are fields that stream dawn's early light, smelling of fresh mint. I am bird songs where there are no suitable temples. I dream cabbages and cashiers at the supermarket. I am a walrus. I was Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I clip toe nails and, without setting fire to the earth, manage money.

I was that philosopher breaking stones for roads and walls, rubbing tiles together, laughing, grey hair crackling epistemology, sociology – what system?

I proclaim: Any system dedicated to serving all creatures and caring for the planet all the time will work. But it will have to be for that because look at what not having that has gotten us. It will definitely require dedication, best efforts, learning from mistakes but most of all, wanting it.

And what we don't need: Thermonuclear weapons. Climate change. So far we've got what we wanted. That can change. And do we need more machines that propagate stupidity, greed, avarice? (Will they learn to imitate us no matter what we say later?)

I never imagined what we've got now. I'm the philosopher who likes to climb trees.

I say the climate is our teacher. Mr. Finch will not weigh in with more than his usual cheep. But why does he return when there is no three legged table with seeds, and my visits to the park are brief?

All of us without exception might learn how quickly this biosphere, of which we are a vital part, can end. We will learn. We'd better. We're being warned right here and now how fragile is this melancholy joy.

Robin is having fun.