On this cloudy Saturday morning, I was doing a speed reading of a book I had picked up earlier to give as a gift. It’s called “A Spiritual Life – Selected Writings of Albert Schweitzer”. The section which set me off musing was titled, the search for beauty. I have been on that in various ways for a while I guess. The medium for me has been the written word. And at the same time as Schweitzer says every composer is also a poet as is a poet a composer, so has been music a critical input to this process of exploration.

People whom I describe as personal heroes have often been many things at the same time, driven relentless by a curiosity for life. I remember the sign painted by someone who has passed that way before me, on a dorm room wall which said “Life is wasted on the living”. And I think these heroes have avoided that by falling into a regiment, a specialist frame of mind. Actually I think that most specialists couldn’t have reached the acme of their field without having a rich life which is again propelled by this curiosity to deeply taste the marrow of life.

Richard Feynman comes to my mind right away, especially because I was talking about him last night. While he was a great physicist, he got a Nobel for that, he was first a fanatic about living. This is evidenced by his bongo playing at the Brazilian carnivals, his quite sketches and paintings, his wacky quest to go to Tuva in the middle of Central Asia etc. While his physics may not have required him to do all this, my thinking is that his physics is the best manifestation of this life force (sounding a little like Yoda) within him, while these other quests were the interesting side shows of the carnival. So is the case with say Einstein or other polymaths like Octavio Paz or Tagore.

While I don’t think I have joined/belong this pantheon yet, I have consciously resisted efforts to be limited to just one kind of a groove. So as much as I enjoy Bach this morning, whose fugues Glenn Gould is pounding on the piano, I have enjoyed, yesterday, the poly rhythmic jazz of McLaughlin’s electric guitar jamming with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, in that excellent album, “The Inner Mounting Flame”. The key I think is to soar or fall into that level/state of transcendence where things become luminous. And perhaps then, living with all its attendant suffering and despair, becomes a festival.

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What often bothers me is how opaquely most of us live from the natural world. In his book “A Walk in the Woods”, ------, writes that an average American walks less than 200 yards everyday. I think most of this would be around one’s place of work, usually hermitically sealed buildings, or in and around the local commercial shopping belts. And then the health (or should it be weight?) conscious members of the society attend to their bodies by going to the gym or similar activity. However the soul is rarely attended to, resulting in strong bodies, stronger specialist intellect but a soul of questionable thickness. In my own experience, one big fuel pump for the soul is the natural world, because it’s an open invitation to learn how to closely observe. And it’s in this learning to see that is one useful way to temper the soul. How often do we screw up just because we weren’t observant of ourselves and for others! Consequently, this still to me is a one such easily accessible idea to turn this “Prozac Nation” into a place of saner and less howling souls.

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Yesterday I was very restless and perhaps a little weary with myself. I don’t like myself in that situation and the problem is instead of mitigating the situation I usually tend to worsen it for myself. One of the reasons behind such restlessness is this yearning for a human contact (feeling almost ETish “I want to go home”) at a level that is still not very clear to me. My best guess is that what I yearn to do is to reconcile myself with me. To use that old line, “you are sitting in your driveway and hoping to get to a home”. Anyways writing and having an interesting conversation helped.

Turn right where the Wheeler Road forks, Follow the road that runs along the Pickle Creek You might remember this but I want to be sure. The red oaks we had planted along the road are now twenty years old, the water that flows in the ditch still a couple of hours from its source.

You might see a scarecrow in the fields if the sharecroppers had planted corn and the weathervane of the abandoned Baptist Church in the hollows beyond. The Good Lord has gone on to the city, taking with Him The whole congregation, even that bum, Toby.

Keep going, you have two more rises to climb You can look out of the window now, once in a while, You don’t have to watch the road; there won’t be much traffic. Do you see hay rolls soaking in the rain like drifting cattle, Paddocks empty of horses and rain barreling into red mud?

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You must have come to the house by now; it stands where the creek curves. Is it still shedding bleached rafters? Do you see a doghouse, Spit written above it in cursive? I found Spit down on the road After you left. Later I had to put a bullet through his head after Jim Ran over him. He was like the son you wanted us to have.

Don’t dawdle around too much, it will be sad and you have much work to do. The last time I was there the whole front porch was covered with blue glass, someone had torn open the mesh and broke our empty bottles of Riesling. I might enclose that door key if I find it, I never did change the locks.

It will be dark soon, so you have to quickly walk down the creek bed. Better bring some rubber boots: they quarried the creek, It flows deeper now and I won’t be there to catch you if you slip. Cottonmouths still hunt along the banks, so be careful, You have to walk half a mile, to get to what was the Dogwood Pool.

I had blasted the beaver dam downstream and the pool drained away. The dogwoods still are there though, in the same old arc Around whose circumference we swam. Find the trowel I hid in our tree hollow, into which we shouted our names, To add another ring of marriage to our together sound.

If you don’t find it, use a rusted can or use your hands to dig the ground. But don’t bring a spade; I don’t want anything from where you come, Except you to enter this place. I know it can take long but you have waited too long . Two feet below, at the base of that flute like tree, you will hit a Thelma’s Cookies box . Open it and release your letters.

That is how I buried you.