This particular loneliness

No one understands

this particular loneliness—

The crow

hopping aside

when traffic comes

then hopping back

to what is dead or

A chair

at the window

where one ever

looks out at the many or

Power lines

like single black notes

connected at electric nodes—

everyone is linked but

Are ghosts to each other

in these houses, guests

on a common field

with occasional attempts

at translation

in this air where

every tongue is foreign

about what electrifies the heart

Followup on Ben

My student Ben is clean. I called just now, and his surgery went fine, his tumor was benign, and like a stone it was carefully unearthed and laid in the wall and mortar of his life, which I hope will be very long.

The original post about Ben was from about a month ago: May we cleanse ourselves mindfully.

Opryland, Tennessee

I need GPS just walking out the door of the hotel room to navigate my way to the first conference session, given the complexities of the convention resort with its regions: The Magnolia, the Delta, the Garden Conservatory and the Cascades with color coded carpet, keys, and maps.

One million square feet, 3,000 guest rooms, 16 restaurants with chardonnay and merlot, a river with riverboat, an island, waterfalls, palm trees and orchids under one glass dome (so like The Truman Show). A world for conventions and conferences, and even some people's ideal vacation. Climate controlled “outdoor” cafés. “Nature” in rivers, streams, an island, tropical gardens, waterfalls streaming over Tennessee rock formations harvested and transplanted into this giant terrarium. It doesn’t matter that palm trees don’t grow on these stones in the wild, or that orchids do not hang from their beautiful striated layers. No alumroot, bluestem or loblolly pine anywhere here.

A gardener tidies dirt with a broom around perfectly spaced and blooming echeveria. I see a wheeled cart full of replacement plants for those that have stopped blooming. Standing, mouth open, inside this attempt to sweep and contain an environment to resemble the [disorderly] miracle of nature, I ask, Is it alive? Is it anything but a Hallmark illustration, a facsimile of light and life, like a painting by Thomas Kincade?

Too bad I can't navigate to a hillbilly porch, where the Grand Ole Opry is streaming on a transistor radio, the Smoky Mountains awaking through light slowly burning off the mist. A jug of moonshine. An old woman whistling through her tooth-gap, both of us rocking on our blooming rheumatiz. Now that would be a conference.

Driving country roads

My eyes take snapshots in fast motion, but this is my slow, silent time with farms and seasons. Straight country roads with snug box houses and farms with barns out of which horses step. The greatness of the flat land and its spiky grains, sifted into silos and cribs. Wind chasing tails, tassels and stalks, dry and lisping. Trees standing alone in the corn, trees laced at the arms united as one against the next field. Sky over all hilled with clouds. I drive and ponder what all this represents, and what the paved road changed after the dirt road of 100 years past. How the corn is raised for cows or fuel, and the cows for milk and meat. How even this simple commerce is not simple or easy (many remain hungry, genetically modified seeds cause havoc) but is contentious, complicated and passes like clouds along the sky in various shapes and speeds.

At evening a farmer in a huge, heavy combine cuts soybeans, dust fountained and illuminated. The great earth bends to his will.

Some wind blows and we fall along with it or plow against it. Every inch of terrain is chosen. Progress or regress. We do not stand still. We never stand still. Even in silence, we choose.

But Rumi says,

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, Language, even the phrase each other

doesn’t make any sense.