Walking With Ponder

Brisk this morning or so it seemed inside. Outside, less so. With Janice as my Sherpa guide I climbed the Himalayas which is a slight incline on the last leg of my eight blocks around the neighborhood. I have changed my itinerary from the shady side of the street to catch the eastern sun, dappled as it is from the eucalyptus trees whose bark strikes me as wise and weary.

I’m shuffling along, wearily, with my walker wondering when wisdom happens to my bark. I’m told by my favorite astrologer that I have moved past my third Saturn return into sage-dom. Sounds like the penultimate stop before senility. Of course, I may be the last to know.

Sagacity is a many-splendored thing. There was a time when it seemed like a simple matter of following the syllogisms. If this, then that. Proof has the allure of elegance. But a gate slams shut with the finality of some crusty absolute.

Questions are better answered by new questions marks. Sentences yearn for exclamation points.

At some point I discovered a dimension that knows of no logic. I would rather poke my lantern into the realm of the inexplicable, that bubbling cauldron of the imagination. The heart that won’t behave beats out of its head. Words and images appear with no return address. I take my cue from the wizened eucalyptus discarding old skin as it reaches for a new season of treeness.

Of all the trees along my path these are naked sculptures caught in the act of their birthing. Like us they are a work-in-progress.

I’m walking slower today shedding exhausted, limp ideas. Dialectics clash and slough away. The sidewalk is a lesson in upheavals. The flowering tree remains nameless to me and that is all right.