Understand Hunger

How tempting as always to see problems as separate and in need of separate solutions. Thought is a process, a system, and not a series of distinct temporal events. What is measurable is measurable and no more. Meaning as use, indeed. Many birds at the feeder making me happy, or holding my interest anyway, as the moon finally appears to fall beyond the western horizon (rolling coniferous hills) into whatever west holds, being for me the least traveled of the four cardinal directions. One wakes up and in the middle of a long walk deep into the forest realizes they are walking in the forest and longs to write "the moon sat on my shoulder like a cat" but refuses, and for damn good reasons. What crashes in the underbrush and causes the dog to freeze rather than give chase gives me pause. Choiceless awareness presently held as a spiritual ideal, which is to say I've learned nothing at all. It is nice when grace attends but learning does not follow accordingly, and it is that form of undoing to which our attention is now directed. Trout undulating in currents just shy of freezing. Understand hunger and you understand the idea of Heaven. The big dipper tilts its black ladle and I laugh in the field heading home because the old cravings - for tea, for kisses, for words - go on without abatement, and because I'm still a little boy taking delight in his relationship with stars. Roosters give welcome and at the fire pond beavers whack the water with slick tails to warn me away. After all these years the only real kinship I know is with those who swim for all or part of their lives. I mean one who routinely indulges their proclivity for bullshit. The first thing you think when you wake up is "this is it!" and the second thing you think is, "seriously, this is it?" We discussed Michelangelo's David as being unnecessary, and agreed it was only because you can't eat it in an emergency. One pauses by the river just before dawn, which is in motion (the river and the dawn, of course, as well as the one watching), and whose parts - broadly speaking - are so minute and fluctional as to be - broadly speaking - one, and thus learns - or intuits in the direction of learning - that life is simply relationship (and movement, motion), and so understands - again intuitively (mostly) - why living is, for them, this way and at this time, so apparently complex and difficult. On the other hand, chickadees.