Fault Line

I was asked to write a few words on the occasion of New Years 2011 at a gathering of Walla Walla Indigenous characters, a mild mannered community of easy running fences across the plains of psychological dependence upon beauty and poetry and dance and the palate, a sort of silver lining of friends newly made while shaking the jigaboo on the dance floor of a reputable saloon in these here parts. Ahem.

Lately it has been my observation that the days are longer, the sun hangs in my face slightly warmer, and my heart seems very much lighter, possibly at the grace of additional vitamin D. Methinks the winter of snow and walking in the deeps has left me much healthier than other years of transition from outdoor living to winter fattening. I live just ten blocks from ground zero, the intersection of Main and First Streets, so my travels to and from town include various kinds of gathering, like books, and clothing, recordings, framing, kitchen items, a mocha and pastries, a haircut, money in several forms, beer wine and chocolate, a restaurant breakfast, and a movie.

Along the way to these various destinations are pictures or videos, from the visual reality are those that actually get taken with a camera, and in my mind, from the fantasy or imaginings bank in my head, or leg, or arm, wherever a man actually stores stuff to be conjured for dreams or writing or video. These sometimes get on the web an astonishing publishing concept for the common man. The daily reality gets chewed-up while doing the shopping, getting natural healthy foods, whether I am deceived or not about health, except it must meet the critical standards of what the world thinks is good, and moreover, what feels good to my body upon cooking and consuming. Eating zinc capsule at one meal and copper capsule at the next, seems a bit too abstract and technical (a guide post to believe in?) as I'd rather not eat either, nor think that specific technical measurements are anything but sales stimulation, and obfuscation building on fear of insufficiency to life, -which is the bottom line in a free market economy.

What you are told, and think you believe, can only be true if you intuit it from all experience. Once I met a prophet of doom, forecasting a huge earthquake, and I thought about it because my home was near the fault line. I set out in my car for inland, got lost, and on a winding road I suddenly noted a sign that said, the fault. Was I lost or found? My fault was not to acknowledge that in fact I needed a drive. There I was, here where I am, on the fault line.

So it is, we pick the daisies when we think the field is beautiful with flowers, always testing the ultimate beauty with the immediate need. Noting the beauty, if it can be eaten in a manner of speaking, may test the proof of perception. Beauty is a rolling stone that crushes, as a transformer, making metamorphosis chew of everything in its path. What we think is the way everything should be, is eventually crushed, because true perception lies in time betwixt the stone and the field. Nothing is regrettable except redemption.

As I consider how this might be of use, I'd have to say what? I have no idea what I wrote, except that I'm on the fault line.

1/1/11