| today was white, then purple and then sideways |
[Apr. 14th, 2009|12:20 am] |
Well, upon leaving this morning I noticed a particular jasmine bush had literally pop-corned itself with blossoms over night. I was so shocked as this transformation was startling and knocked me right out of my familiarity zone. I love those little surprises. They let me know that I'm not a total drone and that I may have some life left in me yet. I immediately made a mental note of the date, April 13th, so I can put that in my phenologic memory bank. I went back through my files recalling the day I first saw azaleas this year (March 20th) and made a point to hold both items in mind. Just making a point of such things might trigger new thought paths and also help me to focus on specific detailed bits of information, a skill I always need to practice. Continuing on to work I held those items in my head while noting all the jasmine patches I could find along the way and instead of the typical green I was greeted by huge popcorn balls. It was hard to photograph these since most of these occured well into private yards where my lens seldom travels. Still, I was thrilled to note that almost simultaneously, overnight all those separate bushes rose up and decided to sing together for the morning. It made me wonder where the locus of their agreement was. Is it in the earth, or singing in the sap, or floating in the air about them? Is it electrical, meteorological of elfin? All I know is sometime in the pre-sun early morning hours, like an event without an e-invite or a glossy postcard sized flier, all the jasmine in Westshore Palms and North Bon Air shot forth in white blazes releasing their sweetness to ride on the air for whosoever-would-see-smell-taste-behold-chronicle. And chronicle I would. But not a second after filing away my azaleas and jasmine shrubs and vines I stumbled onto this purple staccato on cement. Blossoms I have yet to identify rained down in my path like punctuations on some great conversation into which I seemed to be stumbling. I called their presence grace.
When I got to work it seemed like a normal day except that I ended up having to help a woman locate a seller of matroyshka dolls and that was quite fun. It involved me coming home after work and doing some online research and then getting back with her and her husband by phone. I found at least two locations in the Tampa Bay Area, but found it slightly difficult keeping Saint Petersburg, Florida separate from Saint Petersburg, Russia, in my searches for something that really was both Floridian and Russian, and something which was mysterious, these little wooden entities who nestle inside of each other. Sort of like the layers of an onion, and it seemed somehow to go with mysticism and communication, which seemed to fast be pronouncing themselves as themes of my day. I noted this, along with the phenological factoids and threw in the fact that Rumi was listed along with some other books that I had to select for a Mother's Day display.
O.K. So, I'm on the way home and the whole everything seems to be communicative. I passed some pink blossomed bushes that normally appear as dry monstrosities but they were lucid and bending and full. Then I was stopped by a homeless man and we talked briefly about the economy and exchanged sincere good will and parted ways. Soon, after passing the bowling ball house and the killer whale and getting to the top of the wine glass I noted a dead and faded piece of a bougainvilla rolling and scratching the tarmac under me, sharing the dance. Just before I got to the stem of the wine glass I beheld something of note in a yard to my right, just in the crook where the glass meets the stem. The hammock which normally hangs between two large trees had been roused by the wind and was being suspended sideways. What normally was familiar and something I interacted with passively had suddenly become trapped between the force of alternate or multiple breaths and was transformed into a banner, an ensign. The feeling that rose up in me upon seeing it was similar, I imagine, to the feeling one would get after looking across an ocean for some time and suddenly seeing a giant sail where they are used to seeing nothing. Suddenly there was a presence. Behold. Chronicle. So, I took it in. I continued on my way.
Next I passed the now fading purple blossoms, the house of the hanging head & bulldog and the original jasmine bush which had initiated my senses into this day. There, one house next to the jasmine bush stood a man I had seen in my store today. We recognized each other and I went to greet him. His name was Ben. We shook hands, spoke frankly and freely and then I was upon my way. Before I got home I stopped for a bit and talked to Russ, a nearby neighbor, who I had not spoken to before this day. He sees me walk past his house each day and today we finally spoke, about the weather. I used to despair over people who defaulted to talks about the weather. I guess I still do get a sour taste when such talk is used to close down instead of open up the flow of communication. Well, I stayed a few minutes and finally said goodbye to Russ and moved on. I actually only live caddy-corner from him across the street.
So, I did my research on the matroyshka dolls and called the woman and her husband and helped them and taught her husband how to use streetview in Googlemaps, thanks to Krispy, who showed me. After this I watched a Carl Sagan video on the 4th dimension which John had pointed out. His brief yet helpful recap of Abbott's Flatland really illuminated the concepts in the story for me, but what was interesting to me was the way he explained all the residents in a flat world beholding a three dimensional object intersecting with their 2-D paradigm. His object was an apple. We could imagine that apple exisiting in the same space as their flat world and of course to flat entities such an encounter would be limited at best. They might encounter and even interact with the apple, but never see it or fully behold it for what it is in a 3-D world. Likewise, he proposed the adventure of a 2-D object, in this case a wafer thin shape, signifying something truly flat, which might somehow venture into 3-D space. Apparently, on returning home to Flatland, it would seem that the object just materialized out of nowhere, since it's entire journey and all it's coordinates could not be seen or known to any Flatlander. O.K. So, I'm not trying to rehash Abbott, or Sagan really, but to point to a kind of thought that was rising up in me as I watched the video, and that was this, the idea of the possibility of an encounter with something in a different dimension. I'm not necessarily talking about meeting aliens or black holes or the Bermuda Triangle here as much as I'm dealing with paradigms and what seems real to us. Could it be that there is a shadowy overlap where an object or space in one world behaves quite differently in another? Could the hammock of this world be the flag of the next? What energy does it take to travel from passive to aware? How can we get our lives purple or sideways? By phrasing these as questions I'm trying to avoid some nasty orthodoxy, or some violet cult of skew lines or skewed brains. For me it's not about getting the mystery into the mind, but more about getting the mind in sync with the mystery. On the one hand is madness, on the other, samba.
So, I'm halfway down B, heading to dinner. I know, I know, I need to stay at home more. It saves money. I've passed the black and white mailboxes that are actually the exact same mold. I love the fact that this street starts and ends with the same box, but in totally different colors. It's kind of my yin/yang journey to Chipotle. So, I get to this place where there are little purple (well magenta) flags in the grass and lines of the same color spray paint on the grass itself, little lines about one to two feet in length. The grass was purple and green, complimentary colors. That always sends up fireworks for me. That color combination I mean. Anyway, it hadn't hit me yet that the purple flags were like a tesseract back to the purple flowers of this morning. But, what happened next was just as odd and quite striking. I looked in the road and I saw the leaf of a newspaper standing lengthwise on the bottom edge of it's page. Apparently, just like the hammock, it had been caught in the wind and turned sideways and suspended long enough to be recognized as almost an entity having force and presence. This suspension lasted more than several seconds, and just like the smooth ending of the Centraal Station Antwerpen phenom it collapsed into what appears to be the randomness of things blowing around, but it wasn't random at all. It rolled with a kind of sexy swagger, not unlike the bougainvilla that met up with me on the walk home. It was almost intentional. I wondered if the page was locomoting by itself or if it was offering its services as a kind of cosmic puppet? And it's stasis. Well, was there a different headline I was supposed to notice?
Let me take an aside here. I have no problems believing in things I have not seen. It seems like a comfortable contradiction to assert that there are no spirits about, or even little people living under rocks or in hidden wormholes or even in our attics, just because we've not yet met them. I'm not one to assert the existence of Bigfoot, but I do defend the right of the mind to go to the possibility of Bigfoot's existence and even the right of will and delight to celebrate that possibility. And although I will not here attempt to define the episodes that seemed to keep happening upon me today, I also will not rule out the possibility that there might be some level of communication involved. Synchronicity is not a joke to me. I'm not a fan of coincidence and chance. I believe in cause and effect and interdependence. Such beliefs cause me to champion possibility even when those who claim reason apart from the unexplained seem to want to pin their moths down and cover them in glass. For me there is just as much room for a chimaera as there is for chimarae, just as much room for scientific inquiry and mythic possibility. There is just as much reason for the kobold behind the veil as there is for complex methane ecosystems miles below the sea, miles below what we see, even if the evidence is of a different kind.
So, what does all that have to do with today? It seems that if I were to take myself too seriously, I could go off and create some system out of all this, but I don't really see how that would be much more than making myself the locus of meaning for others and imposing some static form onto life. Instead I'd like to take a more whimsical approach and attempt to do some paper folding. It's a kind of lengthwise rorschach game I imagine. If we were to take the day as I experienced and remembered it, looking back, and if we were to take my home, for symmetry's sake, as a kind of beginning, middle and ending point for the journey, things could get interesting. So let's fold the day in half. Would it not be odd if we happened to noticed a kind of pattern, not so much absolute perfection, but a kind of broken perfection, a kind of weird shadow of something that cannot be fully grasped from our vantage point? I wonder as the two sides of the paper come together if we can smell the jasmine scent running across both sides of the paper and see a spot of purple on each side, like markings on butterfly wings or the carefully cut decorative patterns in a snowflake? And what about the hammock and the newspaper? Each object normally laying more or less parallel to the trick of the earth's surface, but each standing erect yet sideways in the wind, each speaking of something more than randomness, even if for a moment. This is just my way of letting my thoughts out. I'm not drawing conclusions though I may draw pictures. I'm not buying billions of dollars worth of communication equipment, but my ears are perked. Oh yes, and my eyes are open and I see all these elements nesting within each other like a multidimensional matroyshka doll.
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