So much of the experience of this world, we’ve now farmed out to others. We are mostly voyeurs, watchers, peeping Toms.
I just got back from a long 8 hour bike ride. Wow! Start in the morning, keep making those circles and keep riding. Look at the glory of life, all around. Everything blooming, reaching for the sun, alive and full of splendor.
It was a great ride. Even my old guy’s legs were sparking with the renewal of life that springs, brings, gives, gifts.
As I rode along, of course I sang, basically all my long rides are one song, I meditate and sing - words come and go and disappear. I’m “in” the world, feeling so there and alive. It’s the proper disposition of a poet, words go through you. They die in some kind of way, when you write them down, stuff them in a book.
During my ride up the mighty Yeongsan River, perhaps Korea’s version of the Mississippi - I thought about how much we are so passive in and with our lives. We don’t live our lives, we aren’t “there” - rather we farm our life and experiences out to Netflix, YouTube, the stream of bytes and bites of the internet. We are voyeurs and like our kids never playing in the playground, we too, experience a slow, unreal death for we don’t live, we watch others live.
I’m serious.
It’s a dis-ease of our modern world, this voyeurism. We are spectators, living vicariously through our football team, our favorite series, the artists we listen to. What about getting dirty, being alive, springing eternally and making your own film, singing your own songs, playing soccer out there with real peeps? Or do we really want a world of AI and false, illusory life? I ask.
I’m dead serious.
Think of your life. How far removed you are from reality. Watching nature in its glory and being filled with wonder. Have you ever slowed down enough, have you ever sat down out in the real world and just let yourself be smacked across the face by nature’s procreant urge?
My ride today was great. Sharing the video above, a poem I wrote when I was about 15 year old, carrying Whitman’s Leaves of Grass everywhere and aching to be in touch with reality like Walt was. An everyman, so alive with life, with vitality.
Hark! How is it that I am the meat I eat? - Walt Whitman
I still got that in me. Wonder. Wonder that I am here. Wonder that things get created, become alive out of nothing. And yes, wonder that we die. It comes out each spring, on its occasion. I’m still searching for the way to keep this spring eternal in my soul. So should you, us all.
Grass, O Little Blade Of Grass
Grass, O little blade of grass
How is it that you sit so still
Through summer’s heat,
Through winter’s fury?
To I, it is quite a feat
That you are never in a hurry.
Often I have wondered
How you came to be – right there.
Often I have wondered
Why it is you are anywhere,
So silent do you pass through life.
I don’t need to know
The categorical imperative
Nor understand completely
The holy trinity.
I need not know the reason why
It all began
Nor how come with firy splash
It will end.
I only long to know
Of your sweet solitude,
You little blade of grass.
Then,
Contented I will be
To sleep with questions
In this house of broken glass.
Spring, Life, Wonder ...