Fallow Land. It’s the run of these I like. Almost a form of wealth--not measured in bank accounts and bills, but more the sense of touch. That plus the fact that everything has been accorded its place--which, over time, can make things very hard to move.
My dear acupuncturist friend, Jay Sordean, sensed this in me (he was expert at all kinds of sometimes crazy advice): Why don’t just take everything and turn it upside down, throw it into the air--and then see how you feel?
A terrorist, no question. Even if a well-intentioned one. For he’d told me to follow an
idea, whereas what we have here is open land--the fields after harvest, just as I saw them in Guilin, in 2003--where each rice plant had been carefully tied to mark it’s place for the next season. Actually, I’m not sure if that was the reason--but the rice plants had been attended to individually--so that the effect was the same as a myriad of living cells. And cells doesn’t get it, either--more like the way that a corn-row hairdo can look so tenderly maintained. Each strand touched...
I used to imagine that the fields in the Sacramento Delta were like this--but on revisiting them later that same autumn (something we always greatly enjoyed), I could now see the marks of industry--the mechanical furrows. The colors beautiful, but no trace of the hand…
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