The World is Round

When I place my hands
on the ground, side-by-side
(here, like so)
and if I sit very quietly
and hush all the music in
my head I begin to feel
the earth in its bulk.
Below this grass is soil.
below that rock, and water,
and magma, tectonic plates,
a giant, shifting world moving
in its own idea of forever.
And below that is china,
or India where there are people
walking and loving and touching
the ground with two hands,
like-so.
And all of us--the
spider crawling on my leg,
the jack pine and its shy seeds,
the Chinese lovers and me
are turning constantly
away from the light and then
towards it, like a dance.
like so.

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I'm leaving for India on Saturday. Wow.

Spring

I love that it is warm enough now to be outside. to talk, to eat, to read, to walk leisurely to class, to take a nap on the lawn... I am so thoroughly fulfilled by real things like grass and sunshine and little flowers poking up everywhere.

I met someone this week who told me that they "used to camp, but decided it was too much work." This is a bizarre concept for me. For one thing, the hard work is part of what makes living in the wilderness worthwhile for me--I like to earn my pesto-pasta. and for another thing, I feel at my most real when I'm outside. I just can't get that buzzing feeling in my veins from anything I can do in a building. How could it be that you can prefer watching a movie to paddling a canoe?

Of course, I know that such people exist and are in no way less 'right' about life than me. Something I'm trying to come to terms with: it is possible to live a fulfilled and generous life with an approach entirely different from my own!

When I think about it, that's really beautiful. The only limits to the good that can exist in this world are the limits that we put there.

What if we don't?