Today in the northern hemisphere we have leaned about as far away from the sun as we are able, and the amount of light and warmth received is at its nadir; the moon races round us in a white-lit lunar descant, and we ourselves whirl on this earth’s surface at the speed of sleep to watch and make sense of it all. From a simple Amen of planetary mechanics, the poetic and spiritual voice of every race and probably every species composes its narrative of life and (so dark, so cold, so silent) death.

I woke this morning and watched as the world spun me in the direction of the sun once again, there it shines over the rooftops a few blocks from the Mediterranean Sea. The rays reached for me, or me for them, in a seamless warm wave, and as I closed my eyes and took that in, there was the echo (like in the cavern of a dream) of some original clock, whose measuring hand is released, and then caught with a click in intervals we call seconds, Spanish segundos, Catalan segons, to be released, then caught, released, then caught. Humanity’s attempt to hold a measuring tape to the these rays of light.

Of course, between one click and the next is an infinity; between each speck in that infinity another infinity. The feeling I experience is a gentle smile at our probably brilliant, possibly brazen, craftsmanship: this complexity of gears (which has more recently become the simplicity of the spinning atomic structure of a crystal!) is not so far advanced from a spearhead made of chipped flint. The gentle smile in my heart contains both wonder at the cleverness of this particular, ephemeral bloom that is humankind, along with a recognition of its childish striving. Humans, you are a five-petal rose, and the beach winds will some day pluck you.

♥

I find it comforts the soul, and therefore eases the mind, when I give the expansive contents of the second more attention than the superimposed punctuation. The man-made clicks want to take center stage, when they are in fact the smallest part of the smallest part of anything. I can hear the demagoguery and spittle of the politicians in my mind’s ear, I can see their contorted faces in my mind’s eye, as all the while the ocean-sound of a mother’s chest rises and falls, and God’s Voice constantly, gently, teaches without teaching.

Although there is a certain anguish inherent in that thought, it also contains its own balm: as soon as the demagogue stops to take a breath — and he must — the ocean and the Voice engulf him. When the clock is unwound, and the ticking stops, time is not undone, just the little toy we’ve made to meter it. When the lights of the city go out, the stars are bright and are forever.

♥

I’ve been wanting to write about a few mundane things. About carrying hundredweights of compost on the back of my bicycle; of ways I have found to repair crappy plastic things that were manufactured in a very polluted corner of the planet (in a culture which honors multi-millennial culture but is as short-sighted as the West), and how fixing crappy plastic is uniquely satisfying; about how sharing a meditative dance with my partner who is 38 weeks pregnant creates a physical harmony that rises above and embraces what is below understanding.

But the mundane is small as a click today; we’ve turned toward the sun again, and that, my friends, has filled my morning window, my thoughts, and this digital pen.

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