the dharma blog

"All that's left of the rain," by Unhindered by Talent

The sky came out today. Two patches of blue breaking through the omnipresent clouds of the past week, seen through my window. It’s enough to make me blink and squint and wonder what I’m doing typing inside.

I have long been fascinated by how quickly a sustained and intense experience can be lost in the face of abrupt change. Already the heaviness of the recent gray spell is drifting away in my memory, and it hasn’t even yet fully released its grasp.

A favorite band of mine, called the Black Eyed Snakes, has a very challenging way of playing music sometimes in their concerts. It involves single note guitar solos for upwards of five minutes. Relentless high notes, not painful but overwhelming. It’s an interesting experience live, as you go through various stages of response, as does everyone else in the audience. Without provocation, there will be an occasional cheer or whoop, people will settle in and just watch peacefully, then start to move again when they anticipate it must be drawing to a close, then find that it is not yet over and restlessness comes, and then, only after you give up and just start to think about what you’re witnessing and why, does the song’s melody come crashing back in and the whole crowd starts to move as one and there is a tremendous release and the entire period of time is a distant memory only a few seconds old.

So it is with the change of the seasons. I can not recall the experience of winter in any way that makes it real right now, and in the depths of it, I can not remember what it is like to be a human in the summer. Certainly, I know at this moment that winter is cold and the trees are bare and there is snow on the ground and it gets dark early. But what that is like to feel and be a part of is an abstraction, as if I was born in the Yukon but grew up in the tropics.

I anticipate that next week when the temperatures are supposed to be close to the average 80s and the sun is out, this strange spell of unseasonable days will be more intensely felt just by reading these words than if I was to recall any of it from my memory.

Constantly changing
    The mystery of the seasons
Be here now, it says

I’m thinking about snapping the bottoms off stalks of asparagus, a regular ritual the past couple months. Standing over the sink, the radio on, other cooking activity behind me, the quick task of two servings of asparagus in my hands. The season is probably tapering off now, but new harvests are just beginning.

And I’m thinking of walking to my car at lunchtime to check the tires for chalk. I can be a cheap son-of-a-gun and have manipulated the nearby free four-hour parking since I started the job more than a year ago. So around noon I walk out and see if the meter cop has been by. If they have, it’s a quick drive around the block and a different parking spot. Before the recent snap of autumnal weather, when the temperatures at mid-day were in the low 70s and the skies were blue, the walk was a moment to notice and remark on the wondrousness of summer (and how we really needed some rain).

And I’m thinking of the St. Paul Farmer’s Market. Of rising on a Saturday and heading straight down there because the coffee and bagels at the coffee and bagel place are so good. So we beeline right there and sit at a picnic table in the sun, sandwiched between our neighbors, and then wander the aisles. Some days it’s about cheese and meats, others about fruit and vegetables, toward the end of the season bushels of basil for pesto. This time of year it’s the flower sellers with their plastic flats of fragile flora, delicate petals that look up toward the shopper, asking to be taken home like a puppy from the pound.

Tip-toe down aisles
    of candy-colored flowers
Crouch to see just one

The waters of the creek were warm and slippery. You had to walk carefully on the slimy rocks but after a day in the stream you were a sure-footed water child.

I wasn’t much for slimy creatures like the leeches which were the creek’s one significant drawback but yet I didn’t let them get in the way. I would find one on me, stifle a gag, yank it off, and go on with the chaos of youth.

There wasn’t anything to the creek beyond the corner where we swam. You came down to it at a grassy spot where some parents would be set up in aluminum and nylon lawn chairs and a cooler. With little ceremony, a t-shirt and shoes dropped careless on the bank,  it was into the water.

Fifty feet upstream there was a natural waterslide where the activity centered. Big slanted slabs of limestone with a couple inches of water running over it. I swear I went down that rock more times than there were pebbles on the creekbed.

The creek turned above the slide and then straightened out. That was the upper reaches of the known waterway. Seeking adventure one time, my cousin and I hiked upstream another 30 yards, fighting our way up the bank, swarmed by mosquitoes in the bushes, dragging a little two-man rubber raft that was my introduction to watercraft. Bit to shit, we pushed through the brambles finally and launched the raft.

Our arrival at the slide, and then our descent of it, was some small victory, but we did not see the point in repeating the journey.

The days in the creek were limitless and fleeting. The warm afternoon seemed infinite, and gladly so, but with little fanfare I’d find myself wrinkled and chilled and only then notice the sun dipping behind the tall trees with their thick mid-summer foliage.

    We are born of water
dissolve someday like the clouds
      The sun will outlast you and me

      (With apologies to Cloud Cult)