Get out of town

155 years ago today Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal:

"The poet must keep himself unstained and aloof. Let him perambulate the bounds of Imagination's provinces, the realm of faery, and not the insignificant boundaries of towns. The excursions of the imagination are so boundless, the limits of the town so petty."

Years ago in some journal I myself observed that some of the best places in the world that you can go to you can only reach via gravel roads. I would add that greater still are those places yet beyond, that can only be reached on foot.

So it is with journeys of the imagination. The truly remarkable destinations can only be reached by undertaking the journey on your own two feet, "Hoofing it" as I have conditioned my son to refer to it. Mental prostheses such as TV, Movies and Video Games cheapen the value of the excursion and convert the remarkable to mundane as the landscape is paved over for these vehicles of the imagination. The landmarks become familar and are blown past thoughtlessly.

There is a lake that I drive past every morning on my way to work. I would not notice it all except that I sit at a red light across the street from it every morning. That same view of the lake every single day has become like the face of a friend to me, one that reflects the mood of the day's weather. Some days the lake gives me nothing but a blank stare, with overcast grey eyes. Other days a Davinci-like smirk, as though the sunfish are swimming in the shallows and their dorsal fins are tickling her cheekbones.

Today is sunny and brisk, the changing of the leaves showing up just in the tops of the trees, like the inevitable grey that appears in the hair. All of this was reflected in the face of the lake, which stares at me every morning from across the street like a lunatic, unable to recollect that we passed each other by in this same fashion yesterday and the day before that.

I quietly post this from behind my monitor at lunchtime and do not discuss it with my colleagues. They would not understand. As the landscape of the imagination is paved over and only universally-recognized landmarks are allowed to remain, the odd little nooks and crannies are shunned by the herd.

An imaginary relationship with a lake is nothing to brag about around the water cooler, unless you would prefer to be left alone. And even though I blend into the crowd, I still harbor my imagination and my private thoughts like contraband. Because after all, even a secret relationship with a lake is better than no relationship at all.

Such is the case with all forbidden loves of the mind; they come streaming through the mire of every day life in technicolor, mottling the forest floor of your thoughts like a rays of sunlight. So delicate that even the slightest cloud in the sky can iterdict them and leave you in the gloom, waiting impatiently for that next sunbeam to break through so that you may bolt down the trail in pursuit.

River Hypnosis

The dharma bum posted a nice fly-fishing piece on his blog today. Just reading it left me with river hypnosis, that mild vertigo-like feeling that you get after you've stared at running water for too long. I first experienced it on the rum river in the 90's, skipping spinnerbaits under overhanging trees for smallies from a jonboat. More recently experienced these past two summers an streams in southern MN doing a lot of what the dharma bum described (Especially the part where he 'Indiana-Jonesed' an overhanging branch on a back cast).

His ending point, where he was at the end of his excursion, at the end of his fly fishing for the summer - that we cannot take it with us - Is a universal experience that I think all lovers of the outdoors can personally relate with. In the end, we are just visitors and eventually we have to go home. But the feeling is not unique to fishing - Everyone goes through the same thing at some level whenever they awaken from a particularly nice dream or a meaningful song comes to an end. Fisherman (& their partners) come and go with the seasons, but the land and the stream remain, and the fish that was released or spooked today will be back at his rock tomorrow and life will go on.

I choose to be encouraged by that thought rather than disappointed by it. Allthough that was not always the case.

In my younger years I foolishly considered any time spent on the water (or out in nature in general) to be my own personal experiences, with a beginning to be anticipated and an end to be dreaded. I never realized that my time was just a brief interval in a much larger experience, one that started eons before I was born and will end long after I am dead.

In the end, an "experience" may be the only way that we can rationally describe our finite interactions with things timeless and vast. It's no easy task to shift one's perspective of thinking of an experience as being anything more a minute unit of measurement, describing something that is still going on even now, minutes, days or years later. It's no easy task but it does make for interesting writing.

Music and dreams - Along with any other inspiration to the human spirit - flow like streams in our minds, just as surely as nature goes on around us with or without our participation. The rocks, the silt, the weeds and the fish are all still there, even when our lives take us elsewhere. That's what staring at moving water for hours at a time has taught me.

Bring on ice hole hypnosis!

Perfection

A great quote from Henry David Thoreau,
over at The Blog of Henry David Thoreau:

"Is not disease the rule of existence? There is not a lily pad floating on the river but has been riddled by insects. Almost every shrub and tree has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament and hardly to be distinguished from the fruit. If misery loves company, misery has company enough. Now, at midsummer, find me a perfect leaf or fruit."

This quote led me to think of our society's opulence, how we have become perfectionists who dig through the fruit bins looking for the unblemished specimens while spotted fruit gets moved to the side and ultimately is thrown out. All this goes on in our nation on a daily basis while a part of the larger world starves. To meet our demand and to get our dollars the food growers have responded by increasing the use of pesticides, preservatives and artificial fertilizers (Insert Joni Mitchell lyrics here).

I'm part of that system and most likely you are too. I only bring this up because I have been wracking my brain around finding my own way out of the system, to get my family to the point where we can choose what level we will participate in the economy. We are doing quite well for ourselves but I continue to have the uncomfortable awareness that if prices were to skyrocket without a signifigant change in our income or God forbid there was a downturn in our income due to layoff or illness, we would fold up. Not right away, not even in six months (at current market rates), but savings can only last for a finite period and even that is uncertain if you introduce a scenario where the dollar plummets in value.

The gold standard is worthless if nobody is interested in buying any gold. What carries intrinsic value that would survive a market crash? Corn on the stalk, potatoes in the ground and animals in the field.

There are plenty of blogs out there with a lot of people trying to find their own paths away from dependence on the market based economy. This one, my blog, isn't really one of them. It's pretty much an over glorified cat blog. But nevertheless I will continue to document this attempt of mine to shift my paradigm (In between posting pictures of flowers).

inconsistent, obscure and hebephrenic.
That's my promise to you.


PS - That's a really nice service that some poor soul is doing, over at that Thoreau blog. You should really go check it out. I wish that blogging existed back in the days of the founding fathers up through civil war time. I bet Franklin would have cranked out 3-5 posts a day.