Au contraire

For this old fogey a busy day means going to the grocery store or having an early morning medical appointment in the city. Beyond that it’s weighing one’s worth, recollecting the past and pondering the future. Not exactly an ambitious enterprise. Indeed these idle conventions are more attuned to what to ignore than to what one wishes to capture or to be captured by. A succinct though by no means differential acknowledgement. In brief, I have given up convincing others or myself about what to think or do. The mere utility of doing otherwise is questionable for innumerable reasons. No longer have I the devoted self-interest of the tiny sparrow announcing itself from atop a springtime fence with its familiar melody.

Meanwhile I am content to wither decently at the golf club, awaiting the substantial repast while staring blankly at the rolling greens and undisturbed mower lines seen reflected afar from the first tee. Listening indefensibly to the mutterings of the old stallions gathered at the trough nearby for their Friday morning conciliation and exchange of calculated reminiscences, reflections and equally predictable comedy. A collective polite chuckle ensues. Then an immediate fade from the open stage, awaiting another vital performance to stimulate the energy. What does one say?

And then when motoring home, descending and ascending the hills through the endless acreage and farms, the dandelions. The yellow blanket of hysteria upon the fields of the countryside! Confirmation that Nature knows how to throw a party! Or the efficiency of numbers! So many hues and shades mixed together once again, beginning with the fractious blue sky with white and grey clouds above the lemon tint betwixt the green assemblies of trees and bushes which have overnight been brushed upon the landscape by an invisible hand.

Practicalities are overtaken by the romance of the season. The functions of agenda and habit defer instead to the conscription of beauty and the ineffable flow of the river which mirrors one’s repeated platitudes in demonstrable shades of augmented blue and grey. My complicated view upon the emerging truths of Nature is a clarifying and digestible absorption. Were I to see the magnificence of towering buildings upon the horizon, infiltrated by unimaginable weaving roadways or tracks, it would constitute but an incongruous prediction. Time now for abbreviation and concentration, evaporation and distillation. Taking the best, leaving the rest. And why not? Where otherwise is the intelligence, the induction, the clarity of thought? The central passage of the unseen turmoil below the surface is paradoxically hinted by the gleaming smoothness of the superficial regard. Depth with hidden meaning; the unstoppable transgression of time and energy.