Nothing Common

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Life is weird; long and brutal; short and bright, vanity and delight, meaningless, aimless, wandering and purposeful, deliberate, designed. Every simple thing is infinite mystery, never plumbed.

A bird flaps overhead as I fly 70 mph heading north on 85. Combustable, earthen liquid firing my tires as I gas, the power of friction, the power of touch as I touch my breaks or gas. Driving in a machine built by machines built by men built by God. And above, lighter than my arm, I see this tiny, living intricacy flapping fins in the sea-sky oven-baked in the orange morning light.

And this we call a common thing, a common moment. But it isn't! There is nothing common here. Nothing. Maybe that is some key to living, to shake a mental fist at the very thought that anything in this life is common.

As light from outer space freckles a green hill diffused through a million leaves of a hundred trees. The green hill-cloth is living and unstoppable, breaking brown flesh the world over. And what other society would we find there, underneath the black and brown soil? What colony of 100 travelers rest or nest among the sun light trees? And what liturgy do they sing on mornings such as this? What civil sounds ring out of their stony beaks?

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