Nice to listen as if living in a sack

SEPTEMBER 04 03

Sitting in the garden in the sun accompanied by intermittent sound of dry sweetpea seedpods cracking open, sides splitting and peeling back in opposite directions like some marvellous invention and evidence of design, firing off their large grey seeds like cannonballs blasting holes in huge spiders' webs hung from every bush stretched like invisible tympanums, dried taut in the sun from the dew-strung sagging necklaces of the dawn. For how long, I wonder, is a freshly spun web still perfect and not starting to get ruined by the wear and tear of smallscale nature. Sitting on a cushion on a cracked plastic chair thinking the short warmth of the sun on the skin is enough to blot out feelings of peripheral vague unease sitting in the hurricane's jaw, suspicion of moving with the eye without direction, protected but as a result directionless myself, allied to the direction of nature alone, taking me somewhere I don't know, Mars still dominating the night sky, and the sound of old roofing tiles thrown all day into a skip in the road, and a breeze now through the living room. Sound of autumn leaves gambolling along the pavement to the backdrop of a distant police siren moaning no-one is listening to it no-one cares.

Hunger retching stomach every plate and item of cutlery dirty piled up can't yet face anything too strenuous. No need to go out potatoes and peas will do. Want to fall into non-complicated safety net off this tightrope of ununderstood burden, bounce in the breeze like spider, too trusting to retreat from the centre on touch of curious finger, not chasing ghosts of movement triggers in the web a fool to bind a seed up in silk or dash to a tiny feather floating stickily stuck.

Not much there in the head permits infusion like tea of randomness with purpose unknown but tangible, unseen but invincible.

Make sense by not. Fishing lazily by hole cut in ice of forgotten beginnings, keeping off the onrush of images by weak hand held out to stampede of inconsequence held at bay but momentarily but that's long enough to disconnect and rearrange in crawl-space of synaptic indulgence.

Flurry of autumn leaves before washing machine spin cycle kicks in. Nice to listen as if living in a sack.

Remember sermon by Bankei on the unborn mind, listening to no-mind, never understood it better than by listening, sight too garish to take in but listening the natural sequence charms and becomes one thing after another thing just listen like following the breath like moon breathing like calm since even sound spells out the future second spin cycle will draw me now to garden to peg out clothes who knows what may happen then perhaps watch spiders more and sit in sun contemplating a minor hunger. When in doubt simply become more attentive to everything cocoon yourself in silence and sound, moving little and slowly. Don't rush to find, discard wanting to know, and attend to the moment ever more until the crescendo reaches nothing at all and does not even peter out but is just carried on the sound of a car starting up and whatever happens to come next. Then you know your world better than when you were trying to know it.

Effort brings the breeze that blows away the feather that might otherwise settle on the fan. Catching a feather on a fan is harder than juggling, and yet not so hard. How much of our world is a drone, an external tinnitus, true silence has no shape, to find it you need to get between atoms between electrons yet even there the magnetic forces of the universe will follow you, there is no hiding from the latticework of the hydrogen bond in water, nothing would dissolve without an ionic soup of charges the foot-tapping rhythm of physics. Yet we sit as if we are not a part of it, as if we exist independently of everything around us. We should learn to skid on ice before they spread grit sand and salt over the runways to oblivion.