Experiences in the Transparent Eyeball

I succumbed to that most pleasant of poor decisions (see: drinking three cups of black tea post-dinner. in my defense...I don't have one! I gave in to the lure of new tea! guilty. guiltea...harhar) and so it's 1:15 in the morning but i'm wired. And yarned, I guess, since I've been knitting. It's oddly meditative and feels like a monkish activity that serves the same purpose as prayer beads. Once upon a time I read an article or heard something about how someone (or some sect of someones) found divinity by pouring grains of rice from their hand, scooping them up, and repeating, over and over. Something about repetition provokes the divine or at least the transcendent, perhaps. But checkers or factory workers probably beg to differ--one man's divinity is another's dull purgatory.

Sometime tonight, maybe around now, the snowstorm is supposed to hit and we'll wake up to a world completely changed. Maybe living in the north induces some quality in the people, some belief in the impermanence of things, with each transformation of our surroundings. But since it was such a beautiful day, I went on an amble through Owen Woods. Here is some of the wealth I took away, through sight or touch:

1. A stump, hollow underneath, open on the sides, and arched from the ground like a woody cathedral (It's no Cheeseburger in Paradise but) Something small could worship there.

2. Another stump, rooted solidly and traditionally in the ground but with the inside rotten away into crumbly bark, one step from humus, so there was a hole in the stump that extended down past where it grew into the ground on the outside. Imagine a pot buried up past its base in the dirt, hollow to its base. There was ice inside.

3. I gathered some of the tall golden prairie grass that had been cut down in the fall sometime and peeled away the outer thin layer. The golden grass stalks were thin like straws, but hard and very smooth. They have joints, like bamboo, and I like breaking them into their natural segments. I collected these when I was little, from when I made nests in the prairie grass where I'd play recorder like some out of tune loon. Loony tune. 

5. A piece of tree bark, rough wood on the outside but cut sheer on the inside as if done so by a very small chainsaw. 

6. A black feather. Have you ever stroked a feather and noticed how your fingers preen the individual fibers (?) together by spreading oil from the feather or your hand? You can make different groups but the feather remains smooth and sleek. This feather had fuzzies at the bottom which I think is the down underneath. How cool would it be to molt, instead of shedding hairs. 

7. An aspen sapling, with very smooth white bark. Surrounded by brown trees, straight and alone. 

*Apparently I like smoothness.

8. The whirling chirp of a red-headed woodpecker and his frantic tree hops.

Moving away from the list...there were so many people in the park today. Many of them were older folks. I said hi to an elderly couple--the man hobbling down the slope with a cane--and another old woman who emerged from the prairie with a camera in hand. I feel like older people tend to appreciate/go out into nature more than their younger counterparts. Except for the very young (fig. Overgeneralization Chart ---->) 
Children love nature innocently and selfishly, for what it provides them in the immediate sense: immediate tools (ex: bark to make fairy houses), or fodder for grander imaginations (meltwater rivers and leaf boats). As you get older, you connect with nature in a different way; you love it for what it means, the things it stands for, the emotions it brings. I can imagine being an old man in a park walking through not just grass but memories. 

In fact, there were so many people in the park that I felt like I couldn't escape them to be in the nature. You could hear strident voices carrying: women talking about their exercise habits, a child shrieking, men saying something I didn't catch. This brings me to another thing I was thinking about, and often think about: do you experience nature best in solitude? For me, its kind of a catch-22. In nature, I feel the most of everything when I'm alone (freedom! wide open skies! human silence! beauty!) but like Pandora's Box with one thing that doesn't belong, I also feel like I want to share this cacophony of feelings with people I love, the person I love. Or people I care deeply about and whom I know would find something of worth in the experience too. But if they were there, I couldn't feel the very emotions I'd want to share. Thus, nature is lonely and reaches its full splendor alone. I think I understand Thoreau and his Walden. Or Walden and its Thoreau, if you think we belong to places as much as they belong to us. Did John Muir and Emerson wander alone too? Not that I'm comparing myself to them, merely wondering if this is a universal experience. 

The closest thing to religion for me is being outside. In fact, something interesting happened recently. I was running and my heart was beating too strongly but I was looking up at the dark purple sky and the bright round moon and I quite literally thought "I could die right now and it would be okay, if this were my last sight." Disclaimer: NOT DEPRESSED. It's morbid, I know; but it's also freeing to know there's something not attached to humans or the vagaries of human actions that can be so powerful. 
Anyway, I walked up and down the paths in Owen Woods, breathing in the damp earthy smell you often get in the spring, with all that light pouring from all that sky. Then I thought about the storm forecast for the next day and thought, oh fuck, winter and got sad momentarily. But the thing is, it will be like that again. It will be spring and there will be days when new things are growing, when the air smells damp, when the sky is clear (for some reason, I'm picturing John Nolan Dr. in my mind, along the lakeshore path there and looking out over the lake water towards Monona Terrace). That's a constant, like nothing else in life is constant. There will be beautiful days. Given. Fact. Truth. There will be beautiful days until the end of days, and that may be the most certain guarantor of happiness I know. 

I sat on a bench overlooking the upper grounds of the park for awhile and semi took a nap. It was warm. After a bit, I opened my eyes and waited for something to happen. It really felt like something would--a deer would step out of somewhere, or a turkey, or a dinosaur. But I was still shocked when it did: there was a huge flash of wings in the distance, white wings, and something that looked like an enormous owl burst up into a tree. Not an owl, since it was daytime, but maybe a particularly large cooper's hawk. Then I got up and walked away with a stupid grin on my face.