Listen to Jim:
http://redclaydiary.com/mp3/autumnlightoftheoctobercountry.mp3
or read on…
The autumn light of the October country sculpts everything in this sunny room and re-creates it in its own image.
Right now, I am at the Ruffner Mountain Nature Center meeting room, immersed in the tiny vibrant world of poetry and poets.
Those who are present reflect the autumn light with their smiles. We’re all here because we want to be here. We’re all here because They don’t know we’re here, They don’t know we’re having a good time, and what They don’t know won’t allow Them to get at us.
Poet Jerri Beck is reading from her new collection TRIBAL MARKINGS, and we the present-and-accounted-for are sharing her creative outpouring and imagining our own lives contrasted to hers.
It occurs to me that in my innards I am the sum total of just Three Things: the writings of others, my own writings, and the experiences I survive. When you find me not experiencing or reading or writing, you can be sure that I am There, not Here.
Bits and pieces of Wisdom and Warning and Wishing float through the imagination and excitedly raise their hands to get attention. Just now, a quote that has resided within for decades waves at me:
“In the city of the insane, the sane are kept behind bars.”
–Erich Fromm
Being an emotive scholar-observer (perhaps known today as merely a Nerd), it is easy to accept such thoughts as normal. While others are nestled all snug in their beds with visions of smartphones and football and chainsaw films and recreational pharmaceuticals prancing through their heads, my own skull experiences philosophical ponderings and why-nots and what-ifs and how-could-theys and why-is-this’s.
Since it’s the only way to be Me that I know about, I can only hope that it is the Right Way—the Right Way being the way that doesn’t hurt anybody, causes the least amount of collateral damage, makes things easier to endure. On a good day that’s where I am.
So…when I notice that the society around me seems insane at times, those are the times that I search for the sane folks, the folks who aren’t doing crazy or acting crazy or being crazy.
That explains today, the day I get to spend an hour with poets—some of whom don’t know they are poets, others of whom practice poetry and love it. An afternoon like this lends its own comfort to me—the comfort that assures me that, just for a moment, the insane world can have its way without even missing me. If there’s no roll call, I can get away with being peaceful, pleasant, creative, gentle, standing next to other people who just for a moment are also being peaceful, pleasant, creative, gentle.
The autumn light of this October country doesn’t notice us at all. It just is.
And since the insane generally don’t pay much attention to invisible beings like us, we usually get away with being sane. Don’t tell them about us. They’ll try to recruit us with a sales pitch but they’ll be thinking all the time about the bars we could be behind
© 2013 A.D. by Jim Reed
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