(Spring Repost)

Spring break. Every few years I take a break like this. My yearnings begin by noticing that the Sun is rising closer and closer to the east each morning. Or I realize that it is setting more squarely to the west. We humans tend to do things in straight lines and squarely you know. Our city streets and blocks are sectioned neatly east to west and north to south. Everything gets lined up neatly in a row. Our homes, our parking lots, our crops, flags, soldiers and grave stones. We like this, I think we need this order. Scatter a dozen marbles or pop cans and it won’t be long before someone will come along and line them up in a neat little row. Everything in order, everything neatly aligned, we must have it, this symmetry.

Is there any wonder why we should take notice when the Earth, our Mother Earth , aligns correctly with the Sun? Of course. Equal darkness and light, the Sun perfectly east and west, shining squarely down our streets and casting perfectly aligned shadows from our buildings, trees, and Washington Monuments, everything is in order.

This year I will look at the flocks of geese passing over head and notice their perfect V’s made from the chaos of their many gatherings. I’ll notice the first emerging dandelions and wildflowers and wonder of their perfectly aligned and symmetrical petals and realize they grow randomly through the greening grass but in their randomness they look like they belong. I’ll look for order from this chaos this year.

Order from chaos, everything from our planets, our geese, our flowers and down to our smallest molecules need to be aligned. We’ll think of this the next time we obediently and neatly fall in line to get our movie tickets or checking out at the grocery store. When we come together, we form lines. First day of Spring, our ultimate alignment event of them all. We should notice it.

Today is the change of seasons. Spring! I’m taking a couple days off just to celebrate it this year. It has been an unusual winter, this 2014. I need to take a breath and settle a bit. I am going to be as a child and just notice what’s going on around us. I need to notice the returning flocks of birds, the emerging flowers and unwinding buds. I will fill my two days with music, art and observance of the beauty of things and the wonder. I need this. I will notice.

DSS.

Midnight Swim

Ever have a fly land in your bowl of cereal?
The damn thing floats
Paddles his little feet around
scrubbing his back
flippin’ his wings, actin’ a fool
having a hell of a good time
No idea that he may sink
He doesn’t care that he’s drowning
he is in the land of milk and honey nuts
The little bastard would be cute if he wasn’t ruining my mid-night knack
Here! get yourself out of there!
Hop on this spoon.
You little widget!

DSS

I Saw a Girl

I saw a girl
She sat relaxed in her chair
with a cup in her hand
reading
Tanned arms and ankles
blue jeans
ripped knee, tanned knee
short shirt, low waist,
bare goose-bumped skin
peach fuss skin
surely the texture of moonlight
blue eyes
ice blue eyes
A glance
just a look-away smile
I saw a girl

DSS

Never the list of favored people
never chosen festival king
invisible to the magnanimous people
Never given the cities’ keys
Thought to be the least outgoing
not one to shake a stranger’s hand
all consumed in life’s own toils
The unknown renaissance man

Man of books of untapped knowledge
Grand ideas never sought or asked
Verses dreamed, rhymed and written
words never spoken or quietly read
He paints his image in oil on canvas
Molds his face in sculptor’s clay
Hopes some day to be remembered
And his ashes cast some day.

DSS.

Face the new morning sun and nod a farewell to the waning moon
Push aside the thin wire gates and smoldering coals
Tighten and double knot your leather laces and trudge through the thick ankle mud
Raise your knees high and step steadily through the tall grasses
that wipe the boots cleaner with each heavy stride
Wade ahead in the loose knee deep footing to the end of this day
build a warm fire, dry your boots and worn green socks
and mind your sore wrinkled feet
Dream of new beginnings and abandon the year long grieves

DSS

As the street lights hum to life
roads reflect with orange flavored sheen
car lights bright of red and white
leave trails behind the wiper blades
Mercury vapor parking lots,
piled high with snows remains,
white hot stains of rocker salt
are washed away by the winter rain

many nights of snow and skidding ice
with no hope of warmer days
we bundled up in down feather coats
and followed the orange plowers sand and blade.
we slowly walked in our winter boots
our minds wandered to nicer days
when winds would change from north to south
and blow in the warm winter rain.

DSS

Today, Dec. 21, winter solstice, first day of winter, the least amount of daylight, is called the shortest day of the year. Winter, the season that gets better from the very moment that it begins. Yes, although the temperatures may be more extreme, we will have more sunshine by a minute or two each day from now until summer begins on June 21 next year. We can start to enjoy winter because the days will now only get better. No wonder this day caught the eye of even the most ancient men. Every afternoon sitting in their cave watching the sun set farther and farther south causing less and less time during the day and more and more time in the darkness of night. More time spent guarding against the predators of the night and less time during the day spent hunting for food and shelter. They seriously wondered if the sun would return.

When did they realize that the sun could be depended on to finally ebb at its furthest reach and slowly begin travel of the reverse bringing with it needed daylight and warmth. I’m sure they celebrated this day as they watched the sun set and rise on the two landmarks they may have physically or mentally erected on the horizon. As should we. They could measure their stored food reserve and know that they would either have enough to last the remaining half of their most sparse days or not enough. They would know that their lean days and confinement would indeed end. Although the remaining days of the season may be hard, they would at least be measurable.

When I notice the sun shining through our south windows and reflecting from the glass doors on our old book-case, without looking at the calendar I know that we are approaching this season. Not as elaborate as Stonehenge but just as effective. And deep down in the core of me, I still feel a sense of relief that the growing darkness is contained and the sunshine will remain just a little longer each day. Although, my food supply is as close as our neighborhood grocery store and the fuel for my fire is delivered to me effortlessly, I have this innate feeling of relief on this day each year. A core feeling that is as surely as much the evidence of the remains of our ancient ancestors as the huge heavy stone pillars of Wiltshire or the small stone circles and charcoal of their ancient fires. The core feelings from the remains of their DNA memory. Their feelings of survival, relief and wonder are in me even though my life is now much easier.

The changing of the seasons are powerful events for man, events that their survival depended on. They mark celebrations, the beginning of tasks and the beginnings and endings of hot and cold climate and the abundance of food. Man is finely tuned to them. We are finely tuned to them because of the feelings and behaviors that were engraved into our DNA from early ancient man as they observed, learned and adapted to those predictable seasonal times.

I wonder what feelings and behaviors we are engraving into the DNA memory of future man from the powerful events of our days. We are not just leaving the ruins of our buildings, pottery, weapons and bones. We are leaving behind either the good knowledge or the ruins of our minds in our inherited DNA. Which of these, the knowledge or the ruins, from today’s events of our civilization will be engrained and become innate behavior or feelings of our future man? What ingrained seasons will we pass on for them to celebrate?

Such is the life of John

What’s that feeling you get
hearing that voice or song or music
remembering
who you were with, the thing you were doing
the time, the song,
the black and white picture in your mind
the favorite shirt, the wild hair.
What is that feeling
The down deep feeling
sort of good but empty, sort of sad,
how many years and how many are gone
Getting what we need,
But so many left behind
Listening under the near full moon
The words, the notes,
with that dusty woman.
The hair scent and the feel of goose bumped skin.
Feeling summer in December

DSS

Awakened from deep but restless sleep
found wrapped in twisted, sweat soaked sheets
With blinking eyes we sweep away cluttered thoughts
Trying to reckon the night’s pale fading dreams
We tell ourselves they are only dreams,
unreal and needing no remembrance
Another life within that we are not allowed to know
a life within our soul as real as the life we can touch during waking hours
Another life always just beyond our arm’s reach
faintly there and sensed only in our mind’s eye.
A place of steep roofs, high bridges and wide canyons
with clear views of the vast spread horizon
but all with weak grasps and unsure footing
Startled awake by effortless wingless soaring flight with sudden falls
Radiant sunshine, cloudless sky but unknown purpose
An alternate life that is kept from us
A life only in our lingering but forgotten dreams.

DSS

What music, what drum beat
does this man walk to
What music, what drum beat
is in his head when he wins
What strum of the strings
inspires him to try
to take the chance
to win or lose
to stand up to an other’s tune
What’s inside his head
what ringing in the ears
drives this man
whose voice, whose tin notes
inspires him to not pause
but to win the fight.
What is inside this man
not muscle or bone or blood
but what is it he hears
in his head
this man’s mass of mind.
What music, what drum beat
does this man walk to?

DSS