Outside tonight it smelled like some treasured old cheese mixed with a wave of cabbage breathe. I think the smell came from the rain that devastated Birmingham and other southern US cities overnight. The smell of cabbage and cheese it left here in Shreveport was like the passing of the evil spirit in the night.
Luckily all we got here was a lot of rain and thunder and wind a few days ago. I walked to Henry's house before it hit. We listened to the sound of the thunder and rain and watched the weather channel. We suited up in rain gear and stood in the driveway during the height of it all wondering if it was advisable or even safe to walk down the street to McDonalds for coffee. In the end, when my shoes began to let the rain water seep in and dampen my socks, I decided that it was neither of these things and went back inside my friend's house to wait for all this maddening downpouring of water and thunder to stop.
Now according to my mother, "Everything seems greener." And it smells a little bit like rotting cheese and or moldy cabbage outside around the bayous and sewers especially. Rotting vegetable matter and higher water levels in all the houses that back up against the slow meanderign waterways so lush and green and ultimately smelly. That's about all that is left of what turned so evil and destructive when it reached our neighboring states. The awesomeness of nature's power always strikes the anvil will of americans desire to remain in the driver's seat of this corvette running up hill on fumes and trying to shift gears to save us all.
That's is all. The struggle to be free and at once return to nature's bliss. Insulate and imitate the call of the wild. Keep the cycle spinning like a Ferris wheel turning for the song of the organ grinder the blind man with the monkey an the tin cup all the philosophers try to bargain over as they grinders songs ebb and flow erudite logic crumbles to the sound of mere coins rattling the tin cup. It plays on. And the haggling continues to approximate lessons we described a war ago and still fail to heed. Trying to decide if we are monkey, or grinder, or the philosopher's coin in the tin cup. Trying to decide if the philosopher exists at all. Maybe it is really all just the coin of a realm long vanished. Maybe the realm is our own shadow stretching out long before us like at the first sunrise, big shoes to fill.
Nature is like that to me. So big and yet so near and accessible. The moon in a dew drop say some Zen koans. The moon in a dew drop.... now imagine a genuine dew drop on the moon and nature has thought of that too. We are a finger pointing at Zen. We are the philosopher's coin and nature is the blind organ grinder. The monkey is technology and we must bargain with it whether or not the blind grinder overhears our worldly dealings.
There is a way to look at things that brings to bear the fruit of the last century on the weight of history. Move the fulcrum and the lever can move great mountains of BS. Great mountains. And time itself will cleave open someday giving way to a path beyond the stars. Then all this will begin again from the dewdrop to the mountain to the tornado stricken cities because the monkey will never be able to cure the blindness of his master. And the philosopher has a pocket full of monkey coins like us. I can only understand nature insofar as I am not a part of it, being nothing yields satori and then it can burst forth again in the form of the only class of koan that is not a paradox.
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