TODAY WAS ZEN-TERRIFIC

Usually covered with holy gore and political egg, today’s blog entrée is light as a summer’s day. The first photo is shot down the long sidewalk of Vancouver’s Central Park, along what is called Officer’s Row. The last one is the walk along the Columbia River, taken a month earlier than the one in Central Park—quite a bit less greenery. The one in the middle is just outside the door of one of the credit unions I use here in Vancouver, but the color is so typical of many places here in the wetlands that I just had to snap it to share with all my many few readers.

Today (Tuesday, May 8, 2007) I couldn’t get enough of reading and walking. I started my day at a coffee shop down by the Columbia R. where I worked some math problems—finding roots. Then I hiked for an hour all along the Columbia and under the I-5 bridge and further west until I ran out of places to walk just west of the Red Lion Inn, then back to my Rio, parked outside the coffee shop, after a short detour north to check how I might walk from the river north to Vancouver Central Park. Certain maps tell me I can, and I found that I could when I’m ready for that walk which is a long one. As it was, I walked more than an hour and a half. Then I drove to the Mon Ami on Main Street in the Uptown Village neighborhood and got a cup of drip to go and drove over to Vancouver Central Park and parked and read some more of Dancing Wu Li Masters, but the day was warm and drowsy and wonderful on my shoulders and head so I put aside my Dancing, took up my camera and began to walk some more. I snapped a few photos, then I got off behind the buildings of Officer’s Row and found a tall hedge and walked west along that hedge under tall maples, some elms, and many types of fir trees until I came to a gap and passed through the hedge, finding myself behind the Central Vancouver downtown library. I went in there and read some little snatches of a biography by Kim Stafford of his father William Stafford, the Oregon poet who I have always much admired. Then I retraced my steps to my little Kia Rio and drove home.

You know? I almost think on days such as this that I am as I was as a very young boy when I walked everywhere around the city of Dayton, sometimes walking clear out into farm country. I recall the strongest sort of sense of my own freedom when I walked whole days at a time around that city I grew up in. I was in touch with that boy today. The day was magical.

PS: Must mention today that it took me forever to arrange the photos like I wanted them to be. And they still aren't right. As usual in the world of websites, nothing ever runs smoothly. Probably it's a computer glitch or blogger/google has made some changes without consulting their clients (US). I don't know why or how the American has had his psyche manipulated in order to make him stand still for these continued psychic rapes, but the young American has been somehow compromised. A company like most of these websites and their emphasis on themselves over their customer wouldn't have lasted a year back when the customer came first. I think one can understand how America stood still, bent over, for Bush for 8 years. Now, there, I've dragged in politics on what was supposed to have been a peaceful day.