Maybe when a very angry man puts
his fist through a wall it's because he's feeling so desperately out of control
that he needs the shock and pain to ground him better in the moment, his body,
his home. Maybe when I'm concentrating on something and stick my tongue out,
since the mouth and tongue have many more nerve endings than most parts of the
body, what I'm doing is anchoring my consciousness in the present by feeling
myself with my tongue, trying to keep tabs of who and what I am as the rest of
me become absorbed in the thing I'm concentrating on.
Well, I don't see much harm in
sticking out your tongue when you're concentrating, but I do wish I could show
these self-cutters and wall-punchers the therapeutic value of consciously
seeking out cabbage leaves on foggy days, point out to them the silvery slug
trails, the leaves' pink-crinkly margins, their reticulating venations, the
randomly arrayed, tiny brown-rimmed insect-punctures, the leaves' voluptuous
concavities, the cabbagy odor when you put your nose right there on a leaf...
*****
CICADA NOSTALGIA
Calls of the Annual Cicada always
fill me with a special nostalgia. The sound evokes memories of heat-choked
summer days in Kentucky
during my childhood, and the feeling I had then of being surrounded by wide
fields of soybeans and tobacco framed all around by dark green swamp forests on
the horizon. The heat, the sunlight, the dazed feeling, the rustling of
cottonwood leaves and the lonely sound of cicadas calling...
But, it was more than that. It was
while taking long walks in that environment that I began sensing and longing
for the undefined, unimaginably magnificent and profound SOMETHING that surely
lay just beyond my little world -- or maybe in that world itself -- if I could
just figure out how to find it. The cicada calls became a kind of Ommmmmmmmmmmmmm
for me, the sound of transcendent mediation, and of infinite possibilities.
This week the cicadas reminded me
of this quotation from St. Catherine of Siena
(1347-1380):
"All the way to Heaven is Heaven."
I wonder if anyone else out there
has a touch of cicada nostalgia these days, and is in any way touched by St.
Catherine's insight?