Thought, observation

A Bug’s Life

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With all the rainy weather, the ants have come inside. They are all over my kitchen counter. Even when I have nothing that they can possibly eat on the counter, they are running around looking for food. If I do spy a bit of even avocado, covered with ants, I take the plate outside, get rid of the avocado and before you know it, those guys are clean gone.

I once had a spiritual teacher who said that if it was only himself and an ant after the nuclear holocaust he would do everything in his power to make friends with that ant. The statement made an impression upon me. Now almost a decade after that teacher has left his body, I look at an ant and I wonder how can I make us friends.

Ants are not the only evidence of insects in my house. My high school senior son has been doing a report on insects. He has a shoebox with a styrofoam square on the bottom. In neat rows, there is a grid of dead insects with pins poking through them. They hover over the Styrofoam, still as can be: dry, beautiful and intricate.

He has another shoe box of butterflies. I was looking at the butterflies today, and I said out loud to myself, “They are so beautiful, it’s too bad they’re dead.“ In my mind, I heard a voice say, “But I am not dead.” 

I knew I hadn’t been getting enough sleep but still this kind of hallucination was unusual. I’ve never heard voices in my head before. I looked at the box more closely and saw that one of the blue butterflies wings was maybe slightly moving. Then I thought I saw an antenna jerk. I looked around for some kind of validation of what I was seeing but there was no one else in the room. I wanted to ask my son but he was gone at a friend’s house. I looked more closely at the box. For sure the wings were moving.

There was no wind I was inside with no heat and no air-conditioning, no open window or door open. No breeze. I heard the voice again, “I am not dead. You just think I am.” The voice was coming from the box. I looked a third time. The blue butterfly’s wings were definitely moving. I pulled out her pin, and she flew away.

Graffiti

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Risking one’s life to express ones self

Here I am trying to drive to San Francisco with thousands of other people.

It’s a very very foggy day. Not foggy in San Francisco foggy in Oakland… 

I mean in a way it’s probably good. We’re not going quickly.

 I have driven this road thousands of times, tens of thousands of times, maybe hundreds of thousands of times 

and I know the buildings that should be there but instead of them being there it’s just a light soft gray large space of nothingness. 

I am in a freeway parking lot. I’m sure you know what I mean.

So I have time to look at the graffiti on the side of the freeway in a way that I’ve never had before. I’m stopped in front of the tags.

I’ve always held a lot of admiration for graffiti artists. 

Sometimes you see graffiti in places that are inexplicably difficult to get to.

 Almost makes you wonder if aliens put them there… Or angels… Or are there people that can somehow hover in the sky with battery packs or I don’t know.

Anyhow, these guys painting on the side of the freeway have easy access. 

There’s a teeny tiny little space where they can put their young bodies and write something on the side wall. 

One person wrote a word, which I’m guessing is a name, in a newly invented calligraphy with fantastic ability… The person could be designing fonts, the visual is compelling

Anyhow, next to the word/name the street artist wrote “art meets crime”.

I Love that. 

What is the 6 million dollar banana sold recently at Sotherby’s as art, if not a crime against all people working hard for an hourly wage?

Used to be

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Used to be I could go and did go down several times a year for over 30 years to Salamander Camp in the Santa Cruz Mountains . But no more. This past Monday, the owner, after an entire lifetime on this land, has signed the papers and given it away. Life is life that. Everything changes and eventually goes. It’s not even a bad thing. It just is.

Hourglass

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If life is to be measured like sands of time, running from the upper hourglass to the bottom, I think it only fair the sands possess different colors for different periods. Not all of one’s life is the same color.

Once the sands of time have fallen through to a beautiful mountain at the bottom, the hourglass being flipped over to do it’s thing again resembles reincarnation. Even if I were to buy into the idea of reincarnation, (or purgatory for that matter) does it not seem ridiculous that one would have the same amount of time in the next life?

Perhaps the sand measures something else… Love, for instance…. However, if one hopefully were to progress as in evolve, would not there be more love in the next life? Looking at history of human beings on the planet, one wonders. Perhaps it’s the opposite.

Where the alchemical meets the mundane in etchings of hourglasses, they have wings. These wings signify that time flies. But it doesn’t always. We all know that. Sometimes it drags.

Then there’s those shattered hourglasses. Those tragically smashed all over the pavement in sharp shards. Like so many young black guys killed by ignorant policeman. A mad man with a gun in a school or a shopping mall throws that hourglass full of sand in the upper half against a brick wall. Sands released too soon.

Let’s forget about time altogether and consider the hourglass as a female form, in ephemeral youth, temporarily full of wonder.

Yet, maybe there’s something outside the physical realm. It’s like that sometimes. Sometimes things get lucky. Perhaps even magic exists and there is something that is not bound by time.