What you can't understand
Beauty. It enraptures. It captures. It takes a snap shot of such vivid colour that the processors of our mind have no choice but to pixelate it and make it black and white just to understand it.
We are fools in the face of a higher intelligence.
Most of the time, when honest-to-goodness beauty and truth and overwhelming exuberance-based epiphany comes, our minds cannot handle it.
The speed is just too quick. We try to speak when something truly awe-inspiring and majestic sweeps across the treetops within the forests of our minds, but we cannot. Words come out like a foreign language from a distant alien planet that spins thousands of light years away.
When we are presented with the real, we can't handle it.
We don't know what to do with it.
'Figure out what you don't understand - a billion leaves fly when the wind blows your mind'.
We try to tell others and even document the experience with the use of a pen and a yellow legal pad, in a sweaty Hoboken apartment of the consciousness, but the cat on the fire escape distracts us.
We are victims to the sway of the breeze.
When your mind is truly blown, and when the trumpets have allegedly struck their triumphant vibration of shrill sound, we are dumbstruck.
We try to move, but we are in mud. We try to make sense of it, but our brains are soup.
When beauty truly shows up in a real and unexplainable format, we are helpless - like we are in a dream when you try to talk and only gibberish comes out or no sound at all.
Don't fight it. Let it work. Let it root.
Let it grow. Let the wind get knocked out of you.
Look at the stars after you fall on your ass.
You will breathe again, very shortly.
You might even like the way you are when beauty hits you in the gut.
The Bright Bay Moon
Soon enough, the winter will be here.
These charms of summer, though bright and tantalizing, will fade in the haze of a dying heatwave.
Rivers will dry up. Lakes will freeze.
Seasons pass. Moments fade. Chances die.
For the first time since I've lived in Barry's Bay, I had the chance to drive up at night. All of my other drives, to date, have involved hard, calculating daylight and a race against the clock on an early monday morning.
Tonight, though, I took my time. I swam through the Canadian shield and tall pines. I felt the wind pull me. I evaded dead raccoons.
I thought about a lot of things.
Sometimes, even though a moment may be captivating, it passes. We see a portrait and it strikes the eye and it stirs up something within us. Our soul lights up. We dance and sing with inspiration.
Down the road, however, we may see that same portrait and feel no connection. Experiences have accrued. Winds have changed their timbre. Thoughts become more focused and sobering.
We dig for that connection but it is gone, as fast as the seasons change. The once lush soil becomes a frozen wasteland.
I long for Reason. I long to make the right decision and to weigh everything before taking a step. And although the angels may come to earth for a moment and remind us of the ethereal plane, we are still here - we are still mortal.
The moon is shining into my window, tonight. It is pure and unadulterated. It is cascading from another dimension.
It's helping me to know that it will all work out exactly the way it needs to.
The Wind in my soul
When do we get the time?
When can we finally breathe deep, and look out on the lake?
When does that perfect sunset come?
When are we truly one, and connected to our inner selves?
Like the Cat Stevens song, there is a true rustling in the leaves of our lives. There are perpetually so many things to think about and wrestle with in this jagged storm front, and all the while, the breeze continues. It gives us shivers. It blows away sand from the stone. It separates the wheat from the chaff.
We can look into the distance all we want, and surmise that a magical path will unfold, but in reality, there is no magic path.
On routes that sweep across the rocky crags of this country, and through the dead-straight squared fields of yellow, I've done some thinking.
I've heard a lot of songs.
We move with the song. We let the notes careen around in our cortexes and we take a step. It gives us courage and it keeps us centered. We hear a powerful lyric and we get urged forward.
We don't know why - we just step.
We move with the feel-flows.
I've met windy individuals in my life - figures who seem to show up at the height of a majestic moment and then disappear into the shadows when the rubber hits the road.
I've experienced some deeply spiritual moments that can't be explained away.
They are what they are.
But still, we press on without the perfect, picturesque. We hide it in our mind's eye and we let the effervescent spring-mist guide us.
That wind. That cold, cold wind of truth and change.
It is there.
It comes for all.
