Paying Ready Attention

Northern Cardinal It probably does no harm to have a plan; to have thought about what you would like to happen, and then, with a plan in place, to do as much as you can to make it happen.   That seems to be a recipe for getting the most out of the bumpy ride that is opportunity, for making sure that what little time you have is well spent.   But too much planning can get in the way of the delightful surprises and shocks that come along to mess up your day in the best and most unpredictable way. Failure to prepare has well known consequences, but over preparation turns you into a clock watching bore and a trip into a timetable. I had not planned to go to Arizona, so I thought it more necessary than usual to prepare. It was an opportunity that dropped into my lap in an otherwise work dull morning.   It was a gift horse and appropriately I have no skill or interest in dentistry. Outside my office window it was early autumn, but in Arizona it would be early sprin...

Awake Finally I may be awake. I step from the bus into another car park.  The landscape around me is red.  Red soil, red stones, red pillars and cliffs.  If it were painted, it would look unreal. The red rocks of Sedona spring from the ground with a rough edged, youthful kind of enthusiasm.  Not for them the well rounded, whale back lines of other, older, landscapes.  Of course, the formation of the red cliffs, pillars and domes has taken a time unconnected to a single life and the rocks themselves are 300 million years old.  Geology relies on numbers with vapour trails of zeros, numbers that drift off towards a failure of understanding.  Numbers that simply stack oldness upon oldness. But the sharp lines of the land show that it is still active and alive, that its geology is not dormant, that process is overcoming permanence.   Sedona sits on a great plateau that is being pushed upwards from below.  As th...

The flight left Australia at 11 am on Wednesday. 20 hours later I had checked in to my hotel at 1 pm on the same day. America.   Arizona.   Scottsdale. Strange. Asleep. Still in the dark of the night before, the alarm on the bedside table sounded trill and annoying.   I had not slept well.   An unfamiliar bed, with too much empty space.   My body was in America, but its clock was still in Australia – somewhere in the future.   The room lacked for nothing that I needed and contained nothing that I wanted.   Dangerously, I closed my eyes for a while to listen; there were none of the familiar noises, no wheel squeal of metal on metal as the first trams move through the early morning, no sounds of approaching footsteps as the kids come down to continue – seamlessly – the conversations of last night.   Words flow from them like falling water, which sleep freezes and morning thaws. The alarm sounds again, and I get up.   The...