Haibun: Ordering
We’ve reached the part of May where we are hitting 100 degrees a couple of times a week. The mornings still cools off, but that coolness is usually choked out by 10 am.
Sitting on the outskirts of the Phoenix suburbs, something interesting takes place on my long walks. I get to walk from the the paved manicured roads with houses and people who match the orderliness. As I walk off the organized parts of earth, the temperature drops by 10-20 degrees. The breezes arrive as if from March or April and I cool off.
But this, to me, is a lesson about the unintended consequences of everything having to be ordered. In the ordered world, there are no dirt roads, no ugly houses with cars on blocks, so everything is pretty and predictable, and in the place that is best. Yet in our making things so orderly, we made the hot desert even hotter with our pavement and cement and ever churning A/C units. And as the air conditioning pumps out cool air, it creates more heat, justifying itself and the need for more.
I know the ordering of my own world is never enough. As part of the adult world, I order and try for efficiencies, but I find myself seeing more that could be done or done better. The quest for ordering my life feeds the need for more ordering and more ordering. I get too busy to rest and let my mind drift and life becomes the soft drink that only makes me more thirsty as I gulp it down.
So I propose that one of the paths towards a global cool down is to let things fall apart more and let things grow back into a natural order and just watch, watch and be.
Also, we need more cacti and mountains and less ordering.
morning cool suspends, upends,
against spring’s defend
