12 Minor Miracles

The commuter train pulls away from the platform, and before we roll out under what will eventually be winter-leaden skies, we first creep along beneath highway overpass, suspension bridges, massive concrete tunnels-not-tunnels, that form a pragmatic monument to decades of construction.

(They are monument to equally massive amounts of collusion and kickback, of course: major works seem to be twin brother to power grabs and inelegant behavior.)

For miles and miles and miles the southbound highway: stalled. A fog of idling cars’ combustion flogs the air: no progress. Stagnation is repeated in a wide arc to the city’s west and south. Every major and minor artery clogged.

To the east there are no cars: maybe a ferry or two: or a fishing vessel: Here Lies the Atlantic.

Glut is stamped into the morning of a major American city. Stamped on every other, major and minor, from sea to shining sea. “Glut” is the root of “gluttony”, one of seven cardinal sins. Wisdom traditions wisely name destructive behavior “Sin”.

Between the hills and the channel, the crows flew into cornfields as they had two hundred years before; the crows were chased from the nests of sparrows and starlings as they had been a thousand years before; the crows made their raucous calls as they had as long as earth could remember.

"Crows" by chrissymllr @ DeviantArt.com

On the shore, the channel waves pushed and pulled grains of sand as they had under the same sun, time forgotten. The salty water, warmed by the same rays, made little lives from its brine, time undefined. The breeze rose from one direction and flew to another, mixing sun and sea, making fog and rain, until no one and nothing remembered when it began, until the habit of creation was no longer noticed.

The female cat was sleeping next to me on the couch, as I watched a movie. Sleeping, I thought: suddenly she sat bolt upright, stared out the window, and started that guttural growling of hers.

I know better by now than to doubt that growl. I put my head down next to hers and followed her gaze. Nothing.

“So what’s up, Minstrel?” We sat unmoving for half a minute, intermittent low noises of disapproval from my little companion.

The inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent liked the number forty. There are a couple of dozen references to 40, measuring days or years, in those ancient teaching scripts and histories that we’ve collected into the Judeo-Christian Bible. Forty days of rain, forty years in the wilderness, forty days on the mountain; forty years old, forty sons, forty cubits, forty baths, forty days’ fast.

Other than the numeric connotation (and the fact that everything is related to everything else), there was nothing biblical about the “Alpha” trial period for my standing desk. There was a flash of insight in the form of a worrisome news article, and a half-hour’s work shifting my office from the window that overlooked the garden and the apple tree at its center; the rest was riding out the alpha wave, waiting for a sign that would tell me to: a) land my standing desk in a more permanent place, b) take it apart plank by plank, or c) keep on waiting.

- ONE -

An hour ago as the day was leaning west, I was pulling east, bringing the laundry in ahead of the dew. It smelled of light and fresh air and flowers: I can’t wait to sleep on today’s mountain air made linen. Deciding I needed a little music, and finding no other singers around the house – a problem that needs work, yes – I took my guitar in hand, headed back out to the deck, tuned up, and settled into some familiar songs.

There was only one thing made a sound like that, and it was death. This wasn’t a mouse-death, nor a chipmunk-death (with two hunting cats around, there is plenty of that small pleading going on, day in, day out): it was a bigger animal; whatever was going down was doing so just over the lip of the hill, beneath my deck; and only one cat was indoors.

In the time it took you to read the first four words of that paragraph, I was already out the sliding door, leaning over the deck, wondering if my male hunter was no longer predator, but prey. What a terrible shrieking, sound of struggle.

Physically, I feel good getting up to work in the morning. I think it’s because I don’t get up just to sit down again. My body feels energized most of the morning, mind alert, and my frame moves around while I type up the morning’s correspondence. Two weeks in, I remain happy with the switch to a standing desk, and am considering when to build my “Beta” version, levitating my old sitting desk one-half-person into the air on a hand-designed scaffold.

There is a certain volume of accumulated human knowledge — a kind of Encyclopaedia of Safety — that is based on the trial-and-error successes of generations. One entry in that tome might be as quaint as “don’t shit in your bed” (Any argument…?) Our Australian friends have several: “Don’t introduce species into an ecology with no known predators.” (oops), or “Don’t irrigate your desert with a limited aquifer.” (oops)

There are others:

- 1 -

Look at that moon! And over there, Venus is a diamond. While this campfire warms my feet, the breeze nods itself to sleep, and the river (whose unceasing flow is an unremarked inspiration) hushes along on its gentle, downhill slide…

There is much to be said of city life — but the less said, the better.

We can make smaller circles in the trees, just out of sight of those agitated centers. Here where embraces are slower and quieter, where we do more to nourish ourselves and our neighbors, and less to stoke a Machine whose engines carry others to others’ destinations.