Morning!

I wake to the words of Pythagoras: “Astonishing!   Everything is intelligent.”  (Of course, two exceptions come to mind.)

I have been struggling with a zip file that wants to stay zipped and I wonder if we, too, are a creation of compressed archives, and we just need the key of patience and attention to open them up.

Zach and I, at his suggestion, went to Paradise Beach.  We walked out on the pier where fishermen were enjoying the fall light and watching for a taut line that meant dinner.  One man caught a crab that folded up into itself like a turtle with our touch.   I felt again I was in philosophical territory with Zach, but we both just kind of took it in.  Friendly crab we love.  Dinner.   The full moon rose while we were standing there.  I’ve enjoyed seeing three harvest moons this year.  September, October, and November have all been spectacular.  We savored the October full moon in Orvieto as it came up next to the duomo.  This one happened before five and the sky turned pink and we crunched on yellow, heart-shaped leaves on our way back to the car.

I had a doctor visit yesterday so in my usual early way had time to walk to the bay.  A man was there on a bench with his bike and greeted me with this: “They said on the news, it was supposed to clear by 9:00 and look at this.”  I love the wrap of fog so settled happily on my bench.  I could hear him on his cell phone complaining about the fog that was not supposed to be there and about someone he knew who was cheating someone else.  Lucy this and Lucy that.  The listener did not seem to agree. 

It is good I am reading Thich Nhat Hanh so I let him wave in and out, a part of this luscious sea.  Ah!

The doctor was running behind because someone was severely bitten by a dog so I had an hour to read Barry Lopez, About This Life, Journeys on the Threshold of Memory.

Ironically in light of the man who thought because the news said the fog would clear by 9, it must be so, I open to this:

“In forty thousand years of human history, it has only been in the last hundred years or so that a person could afford to ignore their local geographies as completely as we do and still survive.”

I continue reading and pause at this:

“In theme parks, the profound, subtle and protracted experience of running a river is reduced to a loud, quick, safe equivalence, a pleasant distraction. People only able to venture into the countryside on annual vacations, are, increasingly, schooled in the belief that land will, and should, provide thrills and exceptional scenery on a timely basis. If it does not, something is wrong, either with the land itself or possibly with the company outfitting the trip.”

I believe I mentioned we were enjoying a dinner in Rome, when a loud American demanded to pay his bill in American dollars.  They let him do it.  It is an appalling ignorance of not honoring the people, geography or culture of where one is.  Lopez says this country of America is diverse, and:

“Yet Americans are daily presented with, and have become accustomed to talking about, a homogenized national geography, one that seems to operate independently of the land, a collection of objects rather than a continuous bolt of fabric.  It appears in advertisements, as a background in movies, and in patriotic calendars.”

He goes on and then says:

“If a society forgets or no longer cares where it lives, then anyone with the political power and the will to do so can manipulate the landscape to conform to certain social ideals or nostalgic visions.”

I remember flying from Kathmandu to Bangkok next to a man who had come from the World Bank to give the country of Nepal money and they didn’t want it.  They turned it down, didn’t want what it demanded of them, the influx of chain stores and outside control and such.  I asked him if he had been in the mountains.  I said if he had, he would understand.  No, he said, but he had written a poem which he shared with me.

Let life be like that, poetry shared and honoring of the landscape we are in, the landscape of our own body-mind, our spirituality and shared connection and need.   Surely the mouth of the river remembers the source and all that beds between.