porch musings

Wrote a song today.  Goes like this:  

i'm staring out at a floating mountain in a sky of hazy blue, and i don't know where i'm going but i sure know what i'll do.  i'll run away from the next big city.  i'll write a song for you.  i can't believe i'm here at all i can't believe i'm not with you.  dolores.  my sweet dolores.  

if i could be a little cloud, i'd float right next to you.  and we could blow away, blow away, blow away.  i don' know who i'll see but i know what i'll say.  i once loved a woman, but i gave her away.  dolores.  my sweet dolores.

so i played the song while watching the clouds float across the porch. things that strike us as beautiful inspire the desire to represent them.  i suppose maybe that's the human peculiarity.  we appreciate and represent beauty through the most elaborate cultural systems in the known universe.  it could also be called a thirst for permanence... humanity's fundamental delusion.  but how, really how can something in the pursuit of conveying beauty to one's fellows result in one's own dissatisfaction.  dukkha. someone once told me that shame is the most memorable of all the feelings.  it crawls into the guts and turns cold.  so this is how then.  we often mistake the skillful act of conveying beauty for the convenient and cumbersome act of reconveying.  this is the difference with someone who is good at telling jokes or stories or singing songs.  reconstructing the past has to be done as its own constructive act, to be admired not just for its telescoped view of the beauty that was, but for its own dazzling intricacies and momentary dynamism.  

and then there are the real poets.  who don't stop to parse all of this out.  but just write it as it comes.  write to find out what's on the mind.  nabokov.  

i climbed over the fence across the road today.  got over, closer to the water.  once you get out to a little ridge the view opens up down through a rough grassy valley.  like my own tolkein adventure storyground.  the scraggly trees popping up through the viney underbrush and a fence cutting a square out of the continuous meadow.  the invasive vines cover all of the fences, easily washing over them in the course of a relentless crawl.  it is one of our main chores around the farm.  to control this vine.  it was introduced to maui some years ago to help with erosion and nobody foresaw it spreading and taking over the whole island.  luckily the chickens like to eat it and then poop on it, turning it into fantastic mulch.  and also the vine grows over fences, which makes them a lot softer and more friendly.