Musing

[written and published from Calgary]

0C/32F, the cusp of thaw; the sun warms the air which will warm the trees which will arme me which will warm everyone I touch today; Gusta enjoyed a chance to investigate the park to smell that which spent the winter under the snow . . while i stood back looking at all the buds, each will be a leaf soon

some fish are the ‘catch and release’ variety, few are perfect for the frying pan, most keep swimming with occasional leaps out of their languid pond; somewhere between sundown and a new day, somewhere between Maui and Calgary, there is a perfect fish leaping out of a pond to greet me

somewhere between me and these delusions of grandeur there is something to learn; sometimes we learn it right away, sometimes it takes longer; sometimes we learn it from others, sometimes we learn if from history or what someone clever wrote, sometimes we learn it looking in the mirror; sometimes we learn it holding someone far away, sometimes holding them very close

SB and I caught a movie last night . . incredible scenery, great acting, historical and hard to hear at the beginning because of accents . . set in 1920’s Ireland it was one of the best reasons to sit still for 2 hours I’ve seen in a long while; ‘The Wind That Shakes The Barley’ won the Palme D’Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival– little wonder; experiences of people I don’t know in a place I don’t know a long time ago could be today, could be you, could be me – whether love or hate or politics or pain . . issues don’t change; distance permits some learning

I am going to take my new vehicle for its first highway sprint . . north would be good today I think; Red Deer, the place where I grew up . . . 100 miles is really close yet the memory of 9 years (8-17) of adolescence in a place I left nearly 40 years ago seems so far away, so very far away – but there are special things still to be learned there; memories to be sure, of things I did, people I knew, familiar haunts . . . a handful or two of special moments there . . . never to be repeated, never to be the same . . . some to be never understood, some clearer and clearer the further away I get

distance learning is a common phrase these days; it usually involves a textbook, a computer, a course and a student of a course of course

when I was in high school I considered a teaching career, considered it quite seriously but chose a very different path – maybe I knew I could not teach what I had not learned; I considered teaching math or science – I was good at those, but what I wanted to teach was life – what it was and what you could do with it; I knew nothing of life so how could I imagine teaching it? . . fleeting thoughts at 17


by seeing more, of anything, of everything . . . from further away we see more completely, more fully and in a way that gives us more insight even though we are far removed from the little details, from the small things that have so much magic within them

stepping back we get perspective – from a foot, a yard, a mile, a thousand miles; from a minute, an hour, a year, a decade – the further away we get, do we see better?

standing back to see a bud that will be a leaf soon, how far do I need to get before I lose sight of its importance, how close do I get in examining its every detail that I lose sight of everything around it?

this makes me wonder what are we blind to, what are we seeing so deeply that we cannot see it at all?

up close we can see every detail – the closer we get the more exacting our examination of anything – ‘things’, people, experiences seen at close quarters give us every scintilla, every nuance, every microscopic element but up close we sometimes see nothing

I wanted to teach life

I now know something of life and what I know is that I know nothing of life, such a small sliver of a very large cheese but I know I can teach it now

the further I get from some things in my past, the closer I get to understanding them, understanding me, understanding someone else; the further I get on my journey I find myself dazzled less by how far I have come than by how far I have yet to go

I'm tripping back to Red Deer today for some distance learning; I wonder if I'll find anything old; new is easy to find, easy to see - catching fish to release most of them, learning things what matter most . . sometimes they require time and distance learning

Mark Kolke
226,292
203.8