AN AUDIENCE

All the world's a stage ~

Piffle.

On a Carolina coast, with hurricane Florence on the way, the evening news shows surfers riding huge waves. On a wharf, people gathering to see history for real.

Watching the history watchers, I recall reading Simon Winchester's book, A Crack in the Edge of the World, telling about people who brought chairs to sit on a hill overlooking San Francisco after the Great Quake. The fires were quite a sight. It might inspire an International Docudrama: Disasters Made Easy. We might, if it's not too late, learn how water quenches fire. Yin versus Yang, though if I may be permitted a pun, not always a solution, Re: Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

Just next to our driveway is a fire poker plant. People walk by every day. It is the Source. And this virtual circus of key words is going to clog the algorithms, dedicated to Frankie and Twinkie, of Twitch Hunt fame, antidisestablishmentarianism checkers. (What makes sense today might be melba toast tomorrow, then maybe back again. Very thin.)

Climate change is glorious. I have color photos. Sunsets. Last year's wild fires filling the sky with smoke for a fireball on the horizon, framed through leaves of the silver maple for a Special Effect. But not for everyone.

Is this any way to run a world? Pick a shell. Our cats taught me this game. Yesterday Twinkie and I sat in the backyard. The hackberry tree has dropped seeds for generations of birds and squirrels, even a game for our robin who uses his beak like a pool cue to roll the seeds over concrete. Baby squirrel shows up. Paper, scissors, rock. Cat, squirrel. But it is Twinkie who gets chased up the tree. Today we're out here again. She's in my lap on her favorite blanket. This time she listens. Squirrel's my friend, I say.

I didn't say the world is going to hell in a honey bucket. I didn't say it isn't. Either way is a waste of time.

I will say there is a black plastic spider on the lawn chair. What does it mean? It almost looks real. It's an exposure problem because the chair is black. I don't care how it got there. These past few days have been unusually windy, causing light to shift through the leaves. And just as I aim the camera, the light problem solves itself. And scarcely enough time to click the shutter as it changes again.

Oh, to be, or not to be, a bee.

A brief cogitation through a hole in my head, as I pass by the plastic pest. I'm sure it has missed my toe. Philosophy. Poetry. I want to quote something, but it would involve a discussion about the nature of time. Another missing piece best left to others.

Withal, gardening is just raking leaves, pulling weeds. Which doesn't sound like much until you get into it. For zennists, of course, it's zazen in action. And if it seems like the dots are getting farther and farther apart here, rest assured. Physicists who measure the red shift in receding galaxies inform us the physical universe is expanding, at an accelerating rate.

So if you do the classical zen thing, mind in the third chakra, letting thoughts escape without chasing after them, space and time join the plastic spiders. And what about things, hmm? Well, everything is the center of everything.

And when the spiders are gone, as has been said, the mind is like a spotless mirror, offering no distortion to reality.

Piffle!

What mirror?