Shiny Hi!
It's a Wonder Full Spring!

Driving out to the fitness center at dawn a few days ago - the early morning sky was strikingly beautiful.

It often IS gorgeous that early in the morning and I'm never sorry I forced myself outa bed and down the road (once I get going - there is sometimes the tiniest resistance - to stay in that last cozy, often very detailed dream).

I resisted the resistance and got down the road. Cruising along the 4 lane, it sometimes amazes me to be floating a few inches over the ground at high speeds in my motorized chair platform (car). What a world.

No "rosy fingered dawn", no empirical crepuscular rays fanning out on this particular morning. The sun was a big round soft orangey-gold and had an even amber haze stretching way out about it like a renaissance painting halo.

Looking up and out the windshield, the sky felt vast in all directions and the colors were a long East-West gradient. Sunrise soft baby blue on the east end and then ranging to a darker azul - indigo on the west with the purple previous night just disappearing over the horizon.

Starting on my end of the scene (actually, I guess I'm always in the middle sight-wise), that huge gradient blueness was filled with little puffy white clouds - varying in size from about 1 to 4 Volkswagens and evenly spaced like a flotilla of cotton balls drifting in on the morning air tide.


These were not the high ceilinged ranging arrays of icy clouds that I love, and they often call a "Mackerel Sky" (I guess because they look fish scaly).

No, my clouds on this morning were chubby jolly looking individuals, gently floating down river in invisible inner tubes. Uniformly white tops, amber on the sun side and gray bottoms - just barely moving west en mass.

They were also pretty close to the ground & me.

You can tell sometimes, living in these mountains, how very close the clouds get. Often you'll see a small isolated local cloud and its shadow on the green slopes ahead together.


The triangulation routine your eyes automatically do give a good perception of the actual scale and makes them seem almost touchable.

That morning I let escape an involuntary whoop as I rounded that first eastern turn off 441 and got the sunrise spectacle full in the face. Wowsers!

I have often been whooped in total amazement/joy. It doesn't take much to impress me. I'm probably the guy they stare at in museums.

In Florence, Botticelli's "Venus" brought me to a loud sob w/ tears (I squelched as soon as I heard myself).

Have you ever noticed that the main action character in the painting is invisible? It's the wind (breath). It blows Her hair and billows the approaching cloth.


And in Paris, Rodin's "The Kiss" actually knocked me to my knees when I rounded the corner and was surprised by the scale and literally breath taking beauty of the sculpture.

Never before. (click the photo)


Now, Back to that whoopy sunrise drive on the way to swim my morning laps.... It made me a little contemplative.

I was humming absent mindedly while driving - some generic country sounding cadence loop when part of me noticed that most cadences are made up of spaces.

That is, they are all based on a steady repetition of a basic beat and what makes them unique and individual are the spaces or stops.

When you get into the beat you notice that it is definitely the stops, the holes that propel the "riddem" figure - give it power - make it alively different from the steady hypnotic repetition of 4s.

The music, the beat, comes out of the "spaces".
I like to think it hides - lurks, waiting for opportunity and brief solidification.

Then I looked up at the cotton clouds and noticed the even spaces between those puffy little floaters and recognized they too were defined by the spaces, the "not stuff" between them.

Suddenly I'm thinking kind of hard about spaces. We had a speaker at Chapel last week who was talking about meditation and the often ironic occurrence that happens when you "notice" you are in a more meditative space. (wow, I'm there! oops!)

aaaarrrrghhh! The act of noticing pops you right out. The descriptive narrator voice in our heads ain’t meditation.

I recalled a swami tale someone once told me about a meditation student who asked her teacher "What IS meditation? How do I?" The answer started with a question -

"You know the spaces between your thoughts?"
"Yes"
"Make them bigger".

Again the spaces define.

Nothingness is possibly a pretty slippery kind of something.

One of my favorites is the space between numbers.
Tantalizingly infinite are the different sets of numbers, each member with a space between it and the next.

We can extrapolate & calculate on these spaces using the cleverest of inventions - the decimal point.

But the mysteriously holy gap cannot be defined. There isn’t enough places to the right of the dot.

It never stops. The number sets are infinite in two dimensions! Both long and fat! Makes me dizzy.

While swimming laps, I notice the rest period between strokes, the momentary silence out of which comes the next movement - I don't even think about it.
It just happens. We all do that.

I think maybe that "it" is possibly, just maybe all the same silence-space.
It feels like the silences are all the same stuff.
I mean it feels all continuous, all one entity like mist and water and the ocean - filling everywhere.
The aether? (apologies to Ben's science Teacher).

Perhaps our dreams are the spaces out of which we and the other critters emerge.
So it just might be possible that we really are all one.

Big Love to All