NOTHING DOING

What has been learned can go into hiding, but it's never truly forgotten. Submarines troll murky depths, lurking in shadows that follow life. Leaves of a tree flutter like roles for a job interview, or perhaps a play. Soon enough, there will be others.

How to be solo clarinetist for your high school? Concentrate. How to blank out noise in an open office? Be a technical writer who can concentrate. Little by little, the water clears.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, I was given the role Electronic Technician at Lockheed Missiles and Space Division, and inducted into a time and motion study.

Since then there have been breathing exercises, meditation, mindfulness, morning birds in the fog, and chopping carrots. Which is when the time and motion study resurfaced, and Aha!

Rat Race chopping deconstructed! And the sweet afterthought, recognizing it was unsought.

As I write, doves dance with shadows on the fence. Words are choreographed. They like to go where they've gone before. A horse knows its way back to the barn, or a self driving car has its own map. Doves are curious when I talk to them, but they don't ask what I'm writing. I am storming past dictionaries, literature, stories that, once upon a time, were sung. Stubborn words want to linger in conversations with friends, familiar in their repetition. And along comes squirrel who darts with sharp eyed rhythm. Maybe in other minds it's an echo. Or it's dove's coo. Lyrics that don't matter in a song where the music wins.

Our earth home is that song of life. But capitalism plugs stuff into its equation and out comes the Change. Lyrics are being written by technologists who, alarmed at their own thermonuclear legacy, call for diaspora. They sing, selling tickets for Noah's Space Ship. For people suffering stress . . . as the Climate gathers steam . . . first paid, first served. And it's a song for profit, leaving earth wasted.

In our yard the wind birds come and go, speaking of Michelangelo. When finches arrive there are no cookie crumbs. Accidentally, a few moment’s ago, their dish had been splashed with tea. Making mush. I sop it with a towel. They bump my elbow. It's like dinner time in the kitchen with Tabitha trying to trip me. Surely food will rain down.

Today's weather is blowing both ways. A Janus Mask has gotten free. Out of chaos are beginnings. Back the other way are endings with no permanent place. It's an immensity of quarks and quasars in which I share the cookie with finch and friends. Everything is the center of everything, as scientists now begin to understand. Inner and outer space are entangled. Even Mad Hatters belong, though few recognize their Mask is empty.

Technical writing was easier, mainly just assembling cookie cutters. But this, of all possible constructions, is more than a puzzle of cross words. It's already filled in. Lockheed in the sixties, with submarines: Polaris missile. A short hop from that to Technical Writer. Then an inconceivable leap: The Gardener.

Mad Hatter and the Clowns, The Change, Thermonuclear Weapons, escape for the favored few into space, what can be done? I think that we've done more than enough already. As I have shown, it's what we can stop doing now that matters.

The poetry is on the wall. An outhouse in space is no different than one at the edge of rising seas. “Here I sit, all broken hearted"  And don't light a match at the wrong time.

When noise is cancelled, forgotten selves lose their grip. Chopping carrots is neither making nuclear weapons nor pledging allegiance to profit for profit's sake. Soon enough there will be another role.