In The Meantime

The ball went over the fence of the schoolyard and there was no way for the little boy to retrieve it — the gates were locked for safety just for such as that — cars were passing by on the street beyond the fence and gates.
A man stopped and got out of his car to fetch the ball and toss it back just as she got to her own gate with her keys to try to do the same for the young boy looking, grieving, hoping someone would come along and send it back.
She yelled across her fence to praise the man for stopping. The man lit up with a giant smile and got back in his car and rode away.
The bigger scheme of things.
Human blips and blobs that last for fractions of seconds thinking that we matter some. We do. We matter for fetching balls and holding someone crying’s hand and for the help we give to make a smile.
Oh, the teacher may have gone to get the ball in the long run, but why not one of us on the other side? If we can. If we see. While we can.
She just so happened to have been sitting near the window when the ball met her peripheral vision and she bounced, not unlike the ball, to try to rescue it since she could — since she was still able to stand up and walk and move in a little bit of a hurry. It might not be for long. It feels good to do good. It seems to make a day count as more.
They’re going by so quickly.
No one will remember that a bouncing ball was captured by a stranger.
Minute by minute. Second by second.
In billions of years what do they matter?
It would seem less lonely if something took us all out at the same exact time — we could all go away together — a meteor maybe.
As much as we seem to be trying to kill ourselves, it may not come in time for someone’s lonely exit.
It helps to do a good thing in the meantime.

Image credit: Fly Anakin

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Whatever They Think

Even cutting down living trees for building primitive, tiny structures seems violent to me now — something a survivalist might build in the woods. Picking up riffraff isn’t quite as bad but is there enough for everyone?
Considering that there are billions of people on the planet and the billions upon billions of trees that’ll need to be chopped down for their not-always-tiny homes, seems like considering war.
Can’t we just build everything with hemp?
It seems that hemp might have made itself available for this kind of abuse because it responds so well to it — cycling in almost no time while a tree needs so much time to become a tree with plans to be the air we breathe and home to other living everything-the-world-needs-kind-of leaves and barks and seeds and critters crawling and climbing to their tallest heights and down around their feet and in and out everywhere.
Bamboo could be used as it grows fast too — and rocks except that lots of things live under rocks and moving them means moving someone’s home.
It’s just a violent world we live in.
Violence everywhere that seems impossible to steer clear of.
The Jains take nonviolence to extremes and even mask their mouths to keep from killing things in the air they breathe.
When did humans become so nonchalant about killing whatever they think deserves killing?
I guess I should have been a butterfly or Princess Pollyanna.

In The Margins

Pink flowers, yellow ones too. Blue surrounding the edges with markers no eye can see to separate the space where the colors change.

Blown up to scale the knowing of which only God can, there in the other worlds, do those who dwell fit or flounder such as we?

Does this mean anything to anyone?

If it can’t be known is it real?

If it isn’t seen is it there?

Making things up is no better than quantum thinking — except for those who speak that language — who doesn’t, don’t we all? Isn’t it just a matter of tapping with psilocybin help or meditation.

She remembers reading a poem that her teacher told her was great but she couldn’t figure a word of it unless it be dissected by the class to see the meaning of. “Gnarly feet.”

She thought then that if something had to be explained it could be explained in countless ways. Context was the only true measure of meaning  — so, to understand, one had to know all the elements that had had any influence there — the time, the place, the people, words in history — meaning something altogether different in the flux, as margins shift.

“Of all the billions of people, we ‘met’!” But it’s always the case when two connect, it’s always out of billions.

He picked a bug up to take outside, “One of those bugs that look like a giant mosquito” he said “because it will die of starvation if it stays in the house.” And while he shifted getting coffee, freeing the bug and staying near his phone laid on the counter, his white shirt got spotted coffee. He wasn’t worried because he had been trained how to get coffee out or any stain for that matter — he was pro at it and had the charge of doing all their laundry.

It was fun for a minute pretending, to be coupling thoughts and searching in the margins where it can be told — that is exactly where the colors change and things or people fit or flounder.