Exile From the Present
Today I went to The Book House and bought a copy of Goat Song, by Brad Kessler, so that I could finish reading it after the BN ebook failed on me. I’ve been flagging more passages. There is something satisfying in folding over the corner of a page than an ebook does not provide.
July 30
Today again this lovely wind; the meadows plunge like waves. Trees toss their heads, the pasture turns to swells. This wind that comes midsummer, I don’t know where it rises from or where it goes. We don’t have enough words in English for our winds. Boreas, zephyr, Santa Ana, Squamish, Chinook. We need one here in New England. A local wind god. He comes this time of year, an ocean-faring breeze that brings hammered blue skies, clear mornings, fringed gentians, yellow hollyhocks, a constant seething in the dark. He makes these days seem so impermanent. A rock we cling to for a little while before we’re scraped into the deep.
The milkings continue to pleasure. Nobody leaps the line. Before it was a chore but now a meditation, the Hebrew Ameeda. Silence the most important part. During my morning milkings no one talks. The animals like their routine. The won’t tolerate noise or visitors or novelty. The only sounds a song or breath and the squirts of milk and the clank of the gate being closed. The calmer and more focused I become the calmer grow the goats. “What is important,” wrote Basho, “is to keep mind high in the world of true understanding, then, returning to daily experience, seek therein the true and the beautiful.”
We live in exile, not from Paradise but from the present. How often do we dwell there? How often does a wind bring us back?