From my porch, I’m looking out over a field of very tall grass; windblown uncut that is roiling green. At the edge, the farmer cut a wide path. He will return and cut the rest at some point, but now the path lies flat and golden in the sun, like a beach at the edge of a sea of green. The blustering wind in the leaves overhead sound like waves, and my vision of a green sea seems to cause an internal shift, and I’m a young man again, sitting on the porch steps of a beach house in Cape May, sipping morning coffee, smelling salt air, seeing/hearing the ocean waves crashing on the beach a hundred yards away – the sun and coffee warm, the moment vast.

This is a description of a moment that I jotted down after the fact. As a description its meaning moves through time. There is more I could have included in the telling, such as how I felt, what was seen while looking at my sun tanned arms and muscular legs, the feel of the coffee mug, the seagulls calling, the dominance of blue – so much more. All the senses were in play in the present as they were with the memory. The interesting thing was the relatedness of the two porches, the two seas, the two warm and vast experiences, the present and a memory overlapping, like receding surf on shifting sand.

A day has passed, the view changed, the world turns and moves on. I’ve returned to looking out over the field, but the farmer has cut and bailed the hay. The field is different yet the same. The ‘knowing aspect‘ during the practice seemed to allow boundaries between past and present to shift and merge, identities became transparent, two moments separated by decades united in a sense of intimacy.
David

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