The True End of Summer;

Trees scream their whispers as canopies and branches sway in golden sunlit winds and everywhere the foliage is set in stark colorful relief against crispy and bright and blue skies, no hint of clouds.

Green leaves against blue; reddening leaves against blue; and soon to be yellow, orange, purple and brown leaves against blue. These contrasts tickle eyes with their colors, colors soon to be replaced by only the bare-thatched and empty braches of late autumn against a graying sky.

When twilight surges and the colors of sky and trees are replaced by black and white of starlit nighttimes, it is then that insect legs shout attention away from the trees – and the warmth of day is replaced by the slap of the chilly, starry, and tranquil night.

Still warm enough to feel the ebbing death of summer, and crisp enough to sense winter’s gestation. The sliding times between solstices are the equinox, vernal, and now, autumnal.

Handswashing

After meditating one day in frustration upon the oneness of all things, two hands washed themselves; the left and the right. Hands holding one another; Each one bathed the other. Apparently separate, each felt itself grasping and cleansing the other, as each touched the other, and each hand felt itself more profoundly than ever they had before. Each felt itself being felt as it felt the other feeling it. And all these sensations merged into one shared and un-separated experience; the illusion of separate hands was broken. In the middle of this a mind felt both the hands feeling each other and merged with them both…and all three were one and the same. Now all three were one. A mental snapping into place replaced the delusion of separation; Now the illusion of objects separate from the self all seem like this; And the other smiling face is smiling at another smiling face smiling back at it – the shared smiles are interconnected into one and the same experience; two linked facets of one interaction. Wisdom: To treat the other as the self is as one washing one’s own hands. Kindness toward another is an interaction of kindness, a system in which one is inseparably linked. To be generous to others is to involve oneself in an interaction of generosity. Compassion towards another is to place oneself into a relation of compassion – ultimately a compassion towards oneself. Contra positively, inflicting violence or harm is to place one’s self inescapably into an violent interaction, a system of harm or violence into which one is inseparably linked. Violence towards another is to violate the self, by placing one’s self into an interaction characterized by violence. In helping/harming another the self is helped/harmed by the participation in help/harm.

Childhood Evening Rain, in Summer

Nothing but the wind and shining moonlight comforts the uncountable molecules of pooled-up water hanging together. Under their building weight they are no longer supported by the air, and so slip out of it, one by one, heading downward and out of the cool summer night sky.

The reaching force of gravity can touch them now, and so they fall towards the center of the earth, passing from heavenly black sky towards the darkened earthy netherworld.

Below, the canopy of a forest is ignorant of the wetness to come; its leaves bluster about in the still warm summer breezes; this late at night, the trees emit only all the shades of shadow. The dry crisp rustling leaves remain baked by some forgotten sun, but not dry for long. Right now they still whisper as they are rubbed against themselves by the movement of humid night-time air. Air so clean and fresh; but still so thick with the heavyness of a muggy day.

All at once, the drop is grown, its infancy gone too quickly to be remembered. It falls now and the experience is building, accelerating and overwhelming. Every other drop it knew is either left behind or whirling uncontrollably about it, tossed by wind and pulled by gravity. Sister drops are blown so far away that they will never meet again, not at least until they are crushed by ground and dissolved back into the oceans – their bodies and individualities all lost in dissolution and obliterated in form; recognizable by nothing.

Now and then, the lightening illuminates each and every one of them up, for but a second. And, although they no longer touch each other as they did once in the cloud, they remain frozen both in time and light, if only for one single instant. And for that moment only, it is as if they are together once again, this time in icy white and fleeting brilliance. All are touched by the same source of electric energy in a unified field of electric photons.

This downward journey is quick and fleeting; their birth and youth now gone, their mature life rushing to an end. Every raindrop, born to die. To fall from heaven to earth.

The sky touching the ground.

.

The Definition of Common Sense definition of common sense.

Common sense is not what the common person THINKS; rather, the term 'common sense' refers to a mode of perception in which the world is commonly perceived. Understand; the tools and instruments that have been developed by our species, so that the species may perceive with more power any real(material) given object of interest, tell us so. When we use instruments and tools that magnify our perception of the universe (cosmologic, quantum-mechanistic), we understand that our human senses are incompletely perceiving and mis-interpreting that which is perceived. Usually we call this science; however, HIGHLY LOGICAL THOUGHT can also be similar as that which I describe. And anyway, as any social statistician can tell you, common sense is about what the average person, who by the way is an idiot, will think-- given his or her lack of understanding of even the question being asked -- let alone the depth of the phenomenon to be considered or the kinds of answers that may or may not be possible. In any case, I can't know if this made sense. But sometimes taking things apart feels pretty; as in explaining common sense. To me, An explanation takes apart a cause and effect relationship.

-Salvatore Labaro