August 2024 – Under The Table

In a way, we are what we do. Or what we’re doing. When I’m chopping kindling and making a functional sculpture, I’m a kindling chopper sculptor.

In another way, we are what we are born as, and depending on what we experience thereafter, and how we respond to what we experience, we become who we turn into.

Then there’s the matter of eating, and the matter we eat. We are eaters. Unless we eat, we die. In this way we are no different than banana slugs or giraffes or each other. And eventually we die even if we keep eating right up until the last moment of our lives.

We decide to do things and wear certain clothes or not wear clothes or to worry about the horrible things humans are doing to each other and to the planet, or not to worry unless something horrible happens to us. Or we’re afraid to make decisions, afraid to change, afraid to take chances. Or we’re not afraid, but indecisive. Or we’re marvels of brave decisiveness.

We believe things. Some of us love politicians others of us hate. Some of us believe anything certain people tell us and never believe anything certain other people tell us. Our beliefs don’t necessarily have anything to do with truth, but come from wanting things to be a certain way even if things aren’t really that way. Most of the biggest problems facing us today are caused by people with power over others wanting things to be how they aren’t.

We are generous or not generous. We can’t be both. When did we become one or the other? Can ungenerousness be reversed?

Why did I want to write these words and share them with you? Because lately I’ve been feeling every living thing on earth, consciously or unconsciously, senses impending disaster, and I think this feeling of impending disaster is the Universe asking us to examine who we are and to see if we can do something, even the smallest thing, to help each other right now.

fin

Really Really You from Todd and Marcia’s album Through the Fire

This is by far the warmest summer I’ve experienced in Mendocino since I moved here eighteen years ago. I’ve now lived here longer than anywhere I’ve ever lived. This amazes me since I moved here in late middle age. The days go by, don’t they?

The beach at the mouth of Big River, our town beach, is the most changeable beach I’ve ever gotten to know. Every year the river finds a new route to the ocean across the sand depending on how much sand has been deposited at the river mouth, how heavy the winter rains, and countless other factors too complex for my little brain to compass.

We like to go to the beach at low tide on mornings when the fog isn’t too daunting. The beach is vast at low tide and we can get to places inaccessible when the tide is high.

We hosted our friend Abigail as we do every summer when she comes to play cello in the music festival orchestra. Abi is British, fifty-nine, the mother of three, and a bright spirit. She’s lived in America for nearly forty years, yet remains British through and through, though she doesn’t drink black tea, which is shocking.

Marion, another Brit and our former neighbor, came from England and stayed with us for a week and will stay with us again for a few days before flying home to jolly olde. Marion is our age, seventy-four, a violist, the mother of three, grandmother of two, and does drink black tea. A chocolate lover and indefatigable walker, she took us on a long trek in the redwoods that took me two days to recover from. Marion and Marcia were barely winded by the trek and went trekking again the next day while I lay in a heap.

Last summer the huckleberry bushes hereabouts were heavily laden with fruit. This summer there are almost no huckleberries but jillions of blackberries. We are halfway to collecting thirty cups of blackberries from which we will make a good batch of blackberry jam. This also seems to be a good year for our prune plum tree and some of our apple trees. As the orchard fruit ripens, we must be on guard against marauding ravens. I have netted one of the apple trees that produces bright red fruit especially attractive to ravens.

Butterflies have been abundant this summer along with bumblebees and hummingbirds. I collected butterflies for a couple years when I was a boy, and to this day whenever I see a butterfly, I regret killing the ones I chased and captured for my collection.

Though I keep saying I only want to write short stories now, I’ve been writing a novel for the last several months. This proves I’m not consciously in charge of what I create. I like the gist of what I’ve written so far, but sense the story is currently outrunning the poetry that wants to be in the lines. What, I ask myself on these warm summer days, is the hurry?

fin

Ruby & Spear piano/cello duet from Todd and Marcia’s latest CD Ahora Entras Tu.