"A Fool in the Rain"

I went for my morning walk, as I always do, at 5:30 this morning. In a post some time ago, I referenced my determination to do this, whatever the weather.

This morning, it was raining heavily. People think I am crazy for walking in a downpour. I know this because, as I passed a guy who was getting into his car, he said, "What are you, crazy?"

So, I'm crazy. But, in the wider scope, is walking in the rain really that crazy? I mean, there are people out there who jump out of planes and who swim with sharks off of the Great Barrier Reef. Getting wet is not exactly "extreme" behavior. But...it is a slight defiance of reason, isn't it?

There's even the old expression meant to criticize a person for having no common sense: "He doesn't have the sense to come in out of the rain."

Maybe, though, we need small-and-often defiances of reason more than we need the occasional mad romp.

When Sting released his album of lute songs by John Dowland ("the Renaissance Paul McCartney," I once heard him called) he named it Songs from the Labyrinth. It seems that on one of Sting's estates, he has an old labyrinth. I mentioned it in a similar capacity, here. I also mentioned that Sting said that he sometimes walks the labyrinth by following the winding pathways and he sometimes crosses over them -- deliberately "breaking the rules." He mentioned how mentally freeing it feels to do so...

The Subconscious Veil

Maybe adaptability is a curse for humankind. We tend to adjust to everything, but, most of all, to our surroundings.

Every day, I drive the same route into work and I leave a nice suburban neighborhood to drive into a kind of rural/suburban one. I drive past farms and past open fields dotted with grazing horses. I also see rows of corn and vines that grow like tonal phrases over music staff fences. I see them, but from an asphalt road and from behind a dead grey guardrail.

Phone and power lines don't ruin the sky, exactly, but they divide it in ways that it shouldn't be divided; they remind me that Man is constantly trying to own Nature and to parse Her into understandable bits when he should be sitting back to enjoy being overwhelmed by Her enormity, comfortably obscure and lost in the vastness of Everything.