Too Much Talking

 

maybe it’s the age

or the stage

i’m in

but it seems strange

with so many words

our messages remain muddled.

 

much said,

volumes read,

little solved.

consensus cowers,

dangles like limp laundry

suspended on a back-yard clothesline.

 

constant chatter  

signifying nothing.

everything,

talked to death.

 

even Lazarus opts out,

been here,

heard enough

prefers the silence

of a quiet space.

 

today I had a thought,

a fresh inspiration,

a flash of pure insight.

it needed a body.

 

words show up for the job,

laboring to define

the Nova,

my twinkling

streak of revelation.

 

sadly, the vision becomes indentured,

a slave to words

necessary for clarity.

 

soon, having been seduced

by too much talking,

the inspiration is shorn

of its power and

sliced into shreds

by the scissors of words.

 

one night last week

a mute lightening show

lit up the universe

over the Atlantic.

 

nature’s pure light

spoke

without sound.

  

can we tame our tongues,

rest our thumbs,

suppress the superfluous?

 

after all, how many words

are needed

for the Spirit to say,

“I love you anyway?”

 

Satis verborum—enough said.

 

 

Bud Hearn

October 29, 2021

Talkin' to a Weed

 

Nature is full of surprises. Without trickery or manipulative devices, it can make a mockery of seeming impossibilities. 

* * *

The ability to communicate is written in the genetic code of the universe.  Who are we to say that weeds can’t talk? 

Ok, maybe it is a reach to say that all nature can communicate. Some may say the thesis is thinner than soup boiled from the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death. But there’s a point here, so stay with me. 

People talk, dogs bark, birds sing, crickets chirp, cats meow, cows moo, ducks quack and pigs squeal, just to name a few. What is being said? It takes special linguists to discern the communication, but it’s possible. 

People talk, that’s certain. Tongues, eyes, fingers, body language and facial expressions. Around our house simple guttural grunts say a lot…uh., oh, hmmm, ah and the like. Sometimes silence speaks louder than words. I have been known to talk to my grocery list and regularly to our dog. 

My friend Bernie and his horse once spent a month camping in the Grand Teton mountains.  I asked him about it. He said he talked a lot with his horse, but he knew it was time to return home when the horse talked back. Take that for what it’s worth. 

Anyway, I’m walking to the beach with the dog the other morning and pass one of those large orange construction cones you see along the roadway. It’s sitting in the grass beside the road. Something odd about it arrests my attention so I stop to investigate. 

Growing out of the top of the cone is a weed. I edge closer for a look. Out of the inch or so diameter in the top of the cone, the weed has found a way to emerge from the darkness below. A miracle of life.

Touched by its urge to live, I ask, “Weed, how did you find a way out of the dungeon below?” Silence. I wait and listen. Nothing stirs but the breeze.

 I taunt it a little. “Hey, you’re no burning bush, what gives?”

“And you’re no Moses, buster. That asphalt you’re standing on is not holy ground either.” An insult for an insult. I figure we are square. 

 I venture on. “How did you manage to escape from the horror of the great darkness below?”

“Same as you, brother. It’s called the will to live. I was once a seed, and with a spark of light I germinated. And now here I am, basking in the glorious sunlight, happy as the other clovers below, just in a more lofty place.” Judging from its perch and its urge to talk, I assume it’s a female clover.

“Look, Weed, how did enough sunlight get down that narrow shaft long enough to sustain you?”

“Are you stupid? I’m a weed. Weeds are tough. We grow in the most inhospitable places. Personally, I prefer manicured lawns, but I’m equally comfortable in this left-over construction cone. Look, there’s my cousin growing on the road you’re standing on. Left alone, in a couple of years weeds would obliterate this road. Take my advice, better not stand in one place too long with weeds around.”

What do you know, a weed with wisdom? Nature is full of surprises.  I move on to the beach where I catch up with my walking companions, Matt and Molly, and their dogs.

I show them the photo of the miracle weed growing from the tip of the cone. They are as incredulous as I am. I recite the conversation I had with the weed. They roll their eyes but probably assume dementia is setting in, so they give me space in respect of age.

I like to name my photos, so I ask what name they’d apply to this one. Didn’t take Matt long for a comeback: ‘Perseverance,’ he says. I am affirmed since his appellation aligned with mine: ‘Determination.’  

“Ok, Molly, what’s your title?”

 Without hesitation she says, ‘Misplaced.’  I ask her the rationale for such a name.

“Oh, I was naming the cone, not the weed. It’s in the wrong place. The weed’s name is ‘Light,’ the secret of life.” Such is the insightful mindset of women.  

 * * *

Returning, I tell the weed its name. I think it’s pleased.

A few steps farther I think I hear, “…and the light shineth in darkness and the darkness overcame it not.” I look back, the weed winks.

  

Bud Hearn

October 18, 2021     

Sands of Time

 

The wisdom of the hourglass: Time is short, Opportunity is limited. Get to it. 

* * *

An hourglass stands next to my morning coffee. Its redeeming function is to clear the mental cobwebs from my morning fog. It speaks without sound, far superior to the morning news of politicians spewing vitriolic voodoo on the polarized and gullible public.

Today I hear words from the past, words from MacDonald Carey: “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the Days of our Life.” These words are the prologue of the once addictive TV episodes, Days of our Lives, which ran from 1966 until it ran out of sand in 1994. Like political promises, only the reruns are now aired on TV. If you remember it, then your hourglass is running low on sand too.

My mother never missed an episode of this soap opera. She’d sit with her cup of coffee and allow herself to be subsumed into the lives of the actors. If you lived in a small South Georgia nowhere town, you’d find your own escape hatch from the insipid boredom of the place.  Soaps are better addictions than alcohol, except at night.

We’re having our own current real-life episodes of such Days. Seems everyone is looking to create a Legacy of their life’s work. One groveling transitional wannabe is desperately attempting to cloak himself in the moth-eaten mantle of men whose sand ran out long ago and who exist by acronyms: FDR, JFK and LBJ. Even the sand in Shelly’s Ozymandias blew in:

 “…I am Ozymandias, King of Kings: look on my works ye mighty and despair! Nothing besides remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bear, the lone and level sands stretch far away.”

My hourglass was a gift. It promised to provide a better meditative process than the yogic Om’s. Plus, it wouldn’t disturb the household while sitting on the floor in lotus, clothed in a white Indian loincloth and making a fool of myself.

For portending the future, the hourglass is inferior to tarot cards, horoscopes or even fortune cookies. It offers no promise of the future beyond the small grains of sand measuring a few vagrant minutes at best. At least the See Rock City fortune cookie offers some direction for the day.  

Today, the hourglass seems like a bad omen. I watch as sands of time slip silently into the bowels of the hourglass. The sand leaves no trail but slides seamlessly through the narrow neck, settling itself into the bosom of silent nothingness. Like time itself, it leaves no trail in its passing. Omar Khayyam offered these words:

“The worldly hope men set their hearts upon turns ashes—or it prospers; and anon, like snow upon the deserts dusty face, lighting a little hour or two—is gone.”

Unlike Sullivan’s theorem, ‘form follows function,’ it’s hard to say just what function an hourglass performs. It’s useless as a sand clock, unless one subscribes to the notion that it’s one of Plato’s Perfect Patterns.

The peripatetic philosopher’s hypothesis suggests that in the heavenly spheres there’s a perfect pattern of all things, of which on earth everything’s an imperfect replica. It’s hard to get a grip on esoterica. Plato obviously never observed NFL cheer leaders, or he would have seen the flaws in his speculation. Perfection is clearly in the eye of the beholder.

There are some trivial uses of the hourglass. I once had a small pocket-sized one, a three-minute timer. The glass was encased in brass. It substituted for a stopwatch for timing long-winded, charge-by-the-word lawyers and lectures on the wages of sin.

Some swear the hourglass is helpful for redeeming the time, an unproven and half-baked concept. Whistling Dixie does a better job. And if you think resurrection is possible in this body, remember, Cryonics is still a work in progress. I doubt we’ll see Stalin or Mao rise from their glass encasements any time soon.

I feel some remorse for the hourglass. It’s become mostly irrelevant in this technological age. It’s still good for timing 3-minute eggs. It was formerly good for describing the bodily shapes of people. But alas, even this use has run its course. American physiques are now best described by the shape of fruit, particularly pears.

In the cosmic scheme of things, Time, if it exists at all, is measured by eons and not by grains of sand. As for us, well, it’s still dust unto dust…and it’s always later than we think.

 * * *

 As for Legacy, Building Back Better Beyond is a better bet.

 

Bud Hearn

October 8, 2021

Just Plain Luck

 

“Hey if it wasn’t for bad luck y’all, Oh, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.”  Ray Charles 

* * * 

I’ve been thinking about luck while sitting around listening to Ray Charles and icing an ancient knee inflamed from too much weed pulling. I’m having a conference with myself, the kind that leads nowhere but to muddled confusion.   

In my misery of immobility I’m left with only philosophic analytics to arrive at some standard of comparison that distinguishes good luck from bad luck. I purposely avoid interjecting the Providential aspect into the discussion. But I’m leery. The sign on that door says, “Knock gently.” 

So far, I’ve concluded that luck can go either way, a cosmic tossup between the two extremes. Here’s my logic: 

For example, my condition could be seen as a byproduct of luck, not work, either good and bad. Good in that I won’t need amputation of the leg to alleviate the pain, but bad because I will miss a beach walk. So, who can say which adjective best describes this situation? The conundrum baffles the mind. 

There are all sorts of luck. Some swirls in the air we breathe, others in the things we do. Luck’s everywhere.  What would it look like if we could see it? We wouldn’t recognize it, I’m sure. It comes dressed in disguise. It slips in silently, does its work and leaves. Most of us would mistake it for something it’s not. Like opportunity, which often comes dressed in overalls. 

We use other adjectives to describe what’s indescribable. Like ‘dumb’ luck. What does this mean? Is luck so random we call it stupid? Or is it simply silent and mute? You have to look closely to find luck. 

And what’s ‘blind’ luck all about?  If Ray Charles were still around we could ask his opinion. He wrote and sang: 

     Tell ya a slow horse and a fast woman

     Hey, hey, hey lord they sure did let me fall

     That’s why I say, ah…

     Hey if it wasn’t for bad luck y’all

     Oh! I wouldn’t have no luck at all.

But now folks, to lose your sight at age 7, what would that look like: good luck or bad? But what happened?  He learned piano by the braille system, one hand at a time, got famous and left a legacy. One might conclude that luck and hard work are inseparable. Luck always needs the long view, not the short one.

I had a wonderful mother, lucky me. But was the obverse true? She shoved me out of the door for piano lessons early in life. No boy at 10 wants to spend afternoons running scales on a piano when they could be bike riding or shooting marbles. What seemed like bad luck then has been good luck for 69 years. I wish I could tell her that now.

Now I don’t admit to being a musical prodigy like Ray, a fact that was obvious when I picked up the violin at age 72. My audience was the dog who howled every time the bow stroked the strings; and the outside flowers wilted in bitter protest. Luck didn’t follow me here.

We use the term, ‘lady luck’ as if women were the personification of fortune. Which, in staying with my thesis, could be classified as either good or bad luck. A lot of life is a matter of perspective. But most men have seen both sides of luck where women are concerned.  Such experiences are private matters, unless you are nominated for the Supreme Court.

Is it possible to recognize luck?  Perhaps.  But typically not at the moment. It usually smiles or frowns on us down the road when we look back. How lucky are we to have married well, or to have chosen the perfect business, amiable friends and good health?

Is there such a thing as ‘average’ luck? Probably yes, simply because it’s taken for granted. I think breathing might be one of these under-valued benefits, not to mention children and certainly cinnamon toast in the morning. The list is long.

We’re all going to get lucky today. But the signposts on the road out of Eden remind us that luck, like roads, can go both ways. Which will it be today? We’ll find out soon enough.   

 * * *

Just plain luck? You decide. But maybe a better description for being lucky is being blessed.

 

Bud Hearn

October 1, 2021