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| You Walk to Watch You take walks to move old joints stiff from not moving and you walk to make the heart glad. You walk to get from place to place and you walk to run errands on the quiet, creating no pollution; but really you walk to watch the movement of the mind so to notice its velocity and direction and the various habits of storage and recollection in the brain. Your walk soon becomes a trial in the courtroom of nature, for you seek truth, nothing but, and you swear this oath, if to the self alone. Still, your walk is ritual, sacrament, spiritual practice of a contemplative order so you need not walk nature only but as often your feet glide along asphalt or some suitably paved substitute and the mind notices truthful things in the town too when you care to look at human nature. When the business of the mind has run its course and the mind comes still and hushed and bare of own self-being so it has nothing more to defend or to prove or to recall, you stand a chance to look without judging: no greed, no grasping, and to notice the fragile sliver of order running through life's blooming, buzzing confusion. The song you heard last night, or precisely at four a.m. this very morning, as you gave up the ghost in efforts to sleep, could have been, and you wanted it to be, that of the Nightingale with its varied melodic trills of inscrutable tranquility that would shelter you from the early morning distractions of too much protein the night previous. The song could as well have been the Common Nighthawk's peent or the mocker mocking. For as you walk the town to watch, you listen to the silence alone and notice only the bare empty buildings, various towers of commerce and communication to transact business and to feed hungers of various sorts and to provide shade for sitting and talking to a friend as you know you will talk soon this very day about books and poets and Santa Fe. Throughout the silence, keeping its balance, the mind remembers Babel. |
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