#I love you mourning doves in the mornings and sandhill cranes in the evenings

[leapdayowo]

As a kid who’s only traveled concrete paths next to houses no older than two centuries, I send my love to Lisboa

How I loved your cobbled streets, even with the cigarette buds between the cracks. Their edges worn smooth by ghost of faces I will never hope to meet

How giddy I felt to discover new designs of stone below my feet (I was Dorothy following my own magic road)

In my dreams, both day and night, I still see your carvings and mosaics adorning every nook and cranny. Winding through your streets by memories of a left at the restaurant of gods, straight past the theatre, and just past the blue tiled apartments. I trace these paths and feel the gentle breeze from the river below.

Your doors are green! And each store and home is nestled tightly in the city’s burrow of buildings (how lost I felt on where to look, only knowing neon signs and fields of asphalt parking lots telling me where to go)

[tumblewords]

April 16, 2017

 I went outside, because as John Muir said long ago, “going out is going in” and even that was purpose-less, trying to figure out how to spend my time. I stood on the deck for a timeless while, still as a statue and unaware as a statue, listening. Much of the world is in sound, and most of the time we’re unaware of it. Movies know this and amp up sound to add to the images, and put you in surround sound as well. Some movies could as well be on the radio.

In the back yard, birds were chirping. A breeze was drifting, branches sighing. I tried to list for Terry yesterday a dozen birds I could identify by sound alone. Ornithologists depend on calls. I said chickens, she laughed, owls, grosbeaks, ospreys, quail, crows, having to think about each one before I said it. Flickers, and their much bigger cousins Pileated woodpeckers. That’s 8. Oh, robins. They chatter from 4 in the morning until late night, 9-ish. Robins burn daylight. Nine. Mourning doves. Ten. Sandhill Cranes. Eleven.

I was working pretty hard by then, trying to figure out local birds. Toucans and flamingoes and penguins and parrots don’t count.

Standing in late morning’s weak daylight, the chatter of birds and many calls, as if everyone was talking at once, in different languages, I couldn’t sort them out. I didn’t want to. It was a bird sonata, a symphony composed by birds that runs through the centuries, which I listened to in a timeless moment. Lovely.

I decided to rake the aspen grove. It’s a small grove in a corner of the yard. The grass grows long here, but now it just needs attention. I’m seldom inside this aspen grove, because of the tall grass, but today I was. It has a voice, which I’m pretty sure I heard, but not with my ears.

There are dozens of aspens, most of them tiny spindly up-shoots. They are all one-tree, in the sense they share DNA, all of them coming from an underground root system. The famous aspen grove in Colorado is called Pardo, and is 80,000 years old, estimated, thousands of trees spread over acres, one tree, a single being who is very old.

I think about that inside this being, raking away. Raking is a Zen thing, paying attention to your breathing, the world around you, the clouds, where you are, and tending to the simple work at hand. Is this work simple? That’s a question. Where does meaning lie? On the other hand, where does meaning (lie)? That’s a Zen question, since meaning has two meanings here.

It’s coming here tonight to pay attention to this that I work out my thoughts, or think them anew. Paying attention to the day, and writing helps me to sort that out.  

Going out is going in.