Salt

I really have to wonder about this thing.

Someone has spent so much time and effort and innovative compulsion to create a spoon that monitors the salt content of soup, and when I think about it, well, it sort of makes sense, but not really for me, because I pretty much stopped using salt a few years ago, and if I want to check my soup I tend to make the effort to raise the spoon to my mouth.  But I guess there are those who have lost their sense of salt-taste because they use too much of it and some might say that if that's the case maybe it would do them well to stop using such a dangerous substance.

A spoon for tasting soup might be slender so that it could be held with two fingers, index finger and thumb, held suspended until the weight of the soup would tip the spoon downwards and build pressure on the thumb.  A fine balance to be effected.

There are many such balances within our lives as we reach out with hands, spoons, minds and words to contain...

Perfection

I would guess that we all have some concept of perfection.  For some maybe it's a view of a physical form, like a spoon, its sense of being just right, feeling just right, looking just right.  Maybe it's the functional value of that object - it gets the job done. Perfect and there you have it.  For some it might be a perception of one's action, or that action within the context of a response, like doing something, the feeling of doing it or the sense of having someone else acknowledge what you're doing.  For some there might be some moral aspect, perfection in the overall goodness of an action or the outcome of an action.  For some it might be something about naturalness, a feeling that something is just as it should be.  For some it might just be a feeling of relief, that you can finally rest, breathe in and relax knowing that you've done the best you can, have gotten as realistically close to perfection as you can ever possibly get, so that's that, enjoy. 

A hand moves along a surface.  An eye moves along a surface.  Breath moves along a surface.  Maybe the surface itself is moving, seeing, breathing back.

Sleepwalking

The surface of the earth has these trees like stubble of a two-day growth of a beard on a face of a man who just wants to let things be for a bit.  Sometimes he shaves. 

These days, a lot of days I walk through areas where there used to be forest.  Most times I don't wonder why or why not there are or are not trees.  And I don't feel any sense of sadness that they're gone.  I can already see the new-growth emerging.  It's a different landscape that necessitates a different way of seeing and moving.

Back when there had been forest, there had been days when I would try to feel lost even as I pretty much new that I would be able to suss out every slant of every incline that carried itself into the next all too well-known space, every group of trees with their indicative postures and alignments of bends and twists and branch-cast configurations; nevertheless, for lack of any better way to bring some disorientation into my life, because at the time it was a pretty straightforward sort of existence back in the days when there were trees, I would try to confuse myself, try to feel like I didn't know where I was going, but I always knew where I was going, until the day I didn't.

It was a cloudy late autumn day, so the sun was up there in a pasty sort of vagueness and I went up a hill blind-stepping, sleepwalking, not worrying, not facilitating any sense of awareness beyond the acknowledgement of placing my feet one footfall at a time upon what I would have told myself were well-worn spaces.  I was looking at trees that I had looked at hundreds of times but still trying to see something there that I may not have seen any other time, like believing that trees could change, and maybe they do, and I would look at the branches and wonder if there was something there to see beyond what I had already seen, and many times I saw something different but not usually what I thought I wanted to see.

And then I went over a ridge, down and around and looked at the sky that was slowly darkening and had a sinking feeling that if I ever did in fact get lost in a moment like that the sun wouldn't be any help at all because it was everywhere and nowhere and offered no clue at all about direction.

And I took a step and looked up at a tree that seemed to be a tree that I had never seen before.  Ever.  I walked around it and wondered at its magnificent strangeness, and then felt a sinking feeling of thinking that maybe this was a tree that I had never seen, but how could that be, I thought, this forest was not so big, I had been walking within it for years...

And then I saw myself standing there as if from a mile above myself, and placed a landscape around me, with paths and roads that were paths and roads that I knew were somewhere near, and I assured myself that I could walk in any direction and find my way back to somewhere if I could in fact keep myself walking in a straight line.

I started walking in a straight line.  It was not long before I got back to familiar space.  But I have never found that tree again.

The one for the time-being

I have all of these goofy spoons lying around the place like some lazy slobs of last lingerers of some forgotten party.  They're looking relaxed, easeful in their lack of any seeming need to do anything even close anything that would have some hint of that reek of practicality that most of the "other" spoons tend to effuse... 

And there's this one particular one that's doing more "just being" than the others, just being what it is, there to be seen, gazed upon, left to be where it rests in all of its purposeless glory.  It's the one my eyes catch most of the time.  Or is it the other way around, this curved carved solidity catching my eyes like my eyes are intrigued with this sense of just being, like some allegory of some exemplary case of what Plato pinned as the imitators of imitators, the artists who mimic what has been created by the craftsmen who have themselves imitated what, essentially, God had already crafted... 

So is it that I want to say that I created something that imitates what God created as an "essence of artist"?  Which would be the first imitation, which would make me a craftsman?  Or am I already into the realm of the second sort of imitation, taking up the spoon that has been created from God's idea of spoon-ness that has nevertheless been somehow tossed to the winds of reason and landed as something other-than-practical-tending-spoon? 

It's just there.  It would be so different if it looked like it was waiting to do something more than just be there.  And I had to try - I took it up to see if I could actually use it as a spoon.  I could.

Shadow and Truth

Someone might suggest that truth is a representation of things as they are.  Sure, someone else might say, that statement might very well hold some element of truth.  Someone else might ask where then, do shadows begin and end - some trick of light, a play of sight, a toying of thought, ways that we carry our understandings across stretches of our many questions of what is what, wondering if truth is within the holding of so many varieties and flavors of the day's offerings of senses of solidity as we sense our passing upon things of what we like to call a physical sort of reality, even as we feel that whisper of shadow within a breath's moment of being so close as to become part of that breath, but don't let it fool you, don't let it take you too far away if what keeps your mind quiet is the moment, not the shadow?

Snow

It's Christmas morning.  I went out onto my back porch and saw that the wind had blown around about a foot's worth of snow to encircle and embrace all of the stray objects lying around here and there arbitrarily forming their own shapes that were now held within the drifts of whiteness that were more grey than white because the sun had not yet risen.  I knew that there were a few pieces of wood that were underneath all of that snow and wondered if I could remember their shape, but it was not to be - all I remembered was that I had placed a few pieces of wood there with the thought that one day I would get around to carving them to take up the spoons that their shapes had me anticipating.  I watched the snow shrouds emerge within the morning's light as my eyes adjusted, as I felt the cold seeping in around my neck, up the sleeves of my coat, around my boots to take some first tentative toying touches with my toes...  It was a beautiful morning.  I breathed the crisp air, heard the peacefulness of the morning's quietude, smelled a freshness that is only possible with newly fallen snow...  I tasted a tentative wafting hint of spruce from the nearby trees.  I saw crystals in the snow, and some slight hints of the wood within.

So much of what we envision is held within surfaces that encapsulate more beauty than we will ever be able to imagine.  But the present moment is the real beauty - the shape of beauty will always change, but here we are. 

Waking up

I'm trying hard to wake up, and sometimes it's not easy, it's like those days when you slip from your dreams to what you just know is a beautiful sunny day outside but you feel the nip of cold already before you even move the bed sheet and know that there are those moments waiting for you when you finally get the energy and focus and determination mustered to jump out or ease out or "whatever your style" out of bed and take on the reality of a superbly cold day, yes, superb, wonderful, perfect in all of its colditude... and you know you have to do it sometime anyways, I mean it's the way of the world and there you go, but on this day you full well know there are those moments to move along like along a hard edge of  a realization that you have to ease along to place yourself past so much of what you are anticipating as cold that in itself is beautiful, like the hard harshness of a solid line that has such wondrous curves that it becomes fluid and maintains its fluidity as your sight and mind and sense of life itself glides along it; this is the reality of some sorts of beauty, and what seems like a vital aspect of waking up...  And usually it's not as cold as you imagine it, especially if you accept it with open arms and open heart as one of the many privileges of being alive...