November 23, 2000  Ban The Sock!!

I can’t do it! I just can not do it! Never mind that it is Thanksgiving day. Never mind that it is late November. Never mind that it is 15 degrees outside. I still can not bring myself. 

My first flute teacher was really just a flute vendor at a renaissance festival near Charlotte, NC. How can I say ‘just’ when he was so much more?I went back just before the joust to buy a flute quickly for my friendfrom this gray bearded old man. Come to think of it, he looked like Merlin.Maybe he was.  I talked to him briefly about the flutes, but thengot caught up in his explanations. He showed me how to play. “First playone note, with all the holes open. Breath in deep, and play with the beatingof your heart. As you match your heart beat you will feel the energy comeup through your feet and up your legs from the very earth. You will then play notes in beat with the rhythm of the earth and your heart” It allsounded a little crazy to me. But he went on and it made more and more sense. “Now, as you breath in, you create moist air in you lungs like abreeze off the sea. This forms clouds in your lungs, and as you breathout they are compressed and form storms. There are horrible thunder cloudsand lightening, inside your lungs, as you play. The electricity feeds yourplaying, and grounds to the earth. The earth in turn feeds you, givingyou the rhythms, telling your lungs how to make storms.” By this time Iwas enchanted, by this old flute maker. “You can not play the flute wearingshoes. So many people have lost touch with the earth, as they are insulatedfrom it. The rubber in soles keeps you from feeling the pulse, the rhythm,the cycles of the earth.”

For three days my feet have felt trapped. I have been so long insulated from the earth. They were aching to feel something.

Merlin went on to explain one of the cycles of the earth, that you couldfeel if you stood quiet in one place, with your bare feet firm on the ground.“The sun turns the earth with the help of the trees and the wind. It warmsthe trees in the morning and they inhale, and expand.” OK, I don’t rememberthis as well as I had hoped. In short the trees with the help of the suncreate the wind by breathing. “The wind obviously turns the earth, by blowing.One only has to observe that it is always blowing eastward, in the directionwe are spinning. Deforestation will stop the whole process, and eventuallythe earth will stop spinning, and we will all fall of.” I imagine thatI could quite easily walk into the trees to the side of this on ramp, andstand, quietly, with my eyes closed. I could feel the trees breathing aroundme, and the wind pushing us ever and ever around. 

I have been too long away from my cycles. I am reedy to be back with them. It is the longest I have spent in K-land. How is it that somethingso unnatural as radio call letters can seem natural when we are used toone and not the other? It should all seem ridiculous, but I have just crossedthe Mississippi, and I am back in W-land, and I am happy. It feels likehome. I still have not found a radio station called KCUF. That would havebeen cool, but I don’t want to go back to K-land for some time. I willsoon be in my beloved eastern standard time as well. That will be sucha joy. When I wake up at 6 am. I will feel like it is 6 am, and nothingelse. The time anywhere else seems false.

When I tore myself away from Merlin, carrying two small flutes in corduroybags, I had no idea how much time had passed. I found my way back to thejoust, the event ended, and my date disgruntled. I could have said I wasentranced, and had just broke away, but if it was some magic, I still feelit. It was not Merlin. It is the earth that has me. It is the earth that whispers to me still.

And I have kept you in suspense? Have you guessed by now what it is I could not do this morning? I could not put my shoes on. I could not bind them and hide them. As I walked out the door, I have never felt anythingas wonderful as the cold concrete. If it is manmade, it is still the earth.I felt the pulse. And as I stood pumping gas I relished the tingling onthe bottom of me feet. The exchange of energy and information with ourearth, my earth. Then I scraped the ice off of the back window, and I drove.

MiXiM