All the Reasons One Kneels

Catbirds use the bath we set up, while the chickadees are God-knows-where. This intimacy has become just bearable. An afternoon studying the behavior of cardinals, and the tendency to play favorites, with birds and everything else. Husserl presses you to look closer at what's right there, and to ask - yes, this is the question - upon what is the subject/object division contingent? You are that, and everything else, too. The road turns and we come upon a pair of does in the road, which somehow makes the past feel like an oil painting from which I am only just now emerging. Let's go for another ride! But we are always right here, aren't we, and thank Christ, thank Buddha, thank Chrisoula. There is a place for every tool, and a use for it, and one who knows both place and use, and how lucky are we to find her, or him, and thus I kneel gratefully, for all the reasons one kneels. The pheasants of childhood are gone though as recently as four years ago I was out there with a shotgun hunting them. A blunt spade is a bad spade we agree, where "bad" means "unfit for what you need it to do," a qualification that would become problematic quickly if extended beyond this garden. Morning turns to afternoon, where "afternoon" means remembering the moon from a few days earlier. The trillium blooms are gone, and now we are tracking goldenrod through the meadow, where "meadow" means . . . Oh never mind. "Those are not the hands of an English professor," she said in a way that left me confused, then later aroused, then ashamed of my arousal, and at last amused by the whole thing, which we might call the four stages of insight. Oh of all the uses to which a tongue can be put, to be so fixated on just the one! We work without talking, each to our own thoughts, and when was it not that way, and when it will it be otherwise, and so on and so forth and all.