Sometimes nothing flows. Right now the sink in my kitchen and the sink in the shop where I work are both clogged. Water does flow through them, but very slowly. One extraneous egg-shell or a spot of grout, and I'm down on my knees with a drill and a $25 Home Depot pipe snake for the next several hours. Cursing will ensue.
But I can't help think these clogged sinks are symptoms of a clogged spirit. Tension and tedium have combined to create a particularly sticky stasis. I just can't seem to get moving very quickly, smoothly, or even in the right direction sometimes. I still produce, but it is only through tremendous effort; and the results are not always satisfying.
A long time ago I figured out that there was an ebb and flow to things. Some cycles are so easy to pick out. Tonight the moon is almost full, and I feel like I can almost breathe. There are those surface-level, easy to identify cycles. The sun, the moon, the stars. But there are other cycles, less obvious. There are cycles nested within cycles, or spinning off of them. The whole thing acts like a pinball machine sometimes. Hundred year cycles, thousand year cycles; and, conversely, cycles that take seconds, or milliseconds, to complete.
Well I suppose we trudge onward. It's either that or just sit still and wait for this thing to pass. I prefer movement to inactivity, for the most part, even if that movement is only around and around in ever-expending circles.
I read once about a people who inhabited what is now the Northern Nevada desert. They survived in this desolate and inhospitable environment for tens of thousands of years. These people lived in caves during the night. When day broke, they would leave the caves together and walk in circles around their dwellings. With each pass around the location of their cave, the circle along which the people traveled would grow slightly larger. They foraged whatever berries and small game they could. In this way, they covered a tremendous amount of ground, without ever straying too far away from the safety and security provided by the cave. As the sun began to set, they headed in a straight line back to their cave. There, the rested and waited for the next day to break, when they would begin their circular travels again.
Most of us don't live all that differently from the Northern Nevada cave dwellers. We have a home we leave in the morning, and we spend most of our day traveling here and there, covering a lot of ground, but never getting so far away from our homes that we can't get back as the sun sets, sleep in a comfortable bed, and return to our circular travels the next morning.
Traveling along longer, straighter lines is more difficult, or rather, it requires greater courage. There are so many more uncertainties. You don't know where you are going to spend the night, or where you might awaken the next day. Everything is memorable though, because so many things are new, or in a different context, or unfamiliar. Moments are seared into the brain.
Don't be fooled though, even when we think we are traveling in straight lines, we spin. There's no avoiding it, we're on a ball. The itinerant traveler is sure to eventually acquire island fever. The Earth spins in a circle around the Sun, the Sun around some black hole, or dark matter, or who knows what? Maybe we're all being sucked into God's great anus.
I have a fondness for comets. A comet probably moves in as straight a line as any other body in this Universe. The fact that these comets return and visit us ever decade or every fifty years, or every a thousand years, reveals the circles they travel. They are longer, and stranger. What does a comet get to see? Is the comet nostalgic when it finally sees the Earth again?
People are crazy for fame these days. It strikes me as the ultimate tread-mill. I'm sure fame is an amazing high for awhile, but where do you go from there? Now you've got the monkey on your back.
Anyway – tonight is French fries, coleslaw, and leftover Thanksgiving lasagna. These are the days. The moon is nearly full, the fire is warm, I'm almost there. Now if only I had a two month supply of egg nog and rum, things would be lubricated. At least they would seem lubricated, and if they weren't, I'm sure I wouldn't care.
madbob@madbob.com
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