Here in Arcata in late Sep,an Indian summer has layed softly in upon us, it is the only summer we get. These lush green and chill northernlands are tinted now with soft amber hued sun, the flacid blue dome of sky looks so high now when revealed in its entirety without the customary quilt of low clouds or high fog. The sky echoes with a simultaneously soft and sharp cleanness that recalls to me memories I've never had of Himalayan skys in autumn, memories that have resided in the sweetly sentimental spaces of childhood fantasies. They will not remain fantasies for long. I fly into Bombay in about ten days, and at some point during the next six months in India, I will surely find myself in the austere expanses of the great Himalaya. Tremmors of excitement course through me now. My awareness and appreciation for the uncomprendible ordering of chaotic minutia which has somehow become this life this 'me', is piqued. Everything is cast again into flux, and the transience of this time seems to stimulate faculties of deeper appreciation, the habitual is broken, the contemptuous and languid fog that we are so often overcome with while walking the prescribed paths of everyday life, has been lifting. My time is being reclaimed, it is gathering in me, no longer spread thin over tasks and responsibilities,that though often enjoyable in their own way, I undertake grudgingly, or with scant enthusiasm. As I move towards this great sea change I feel the sizzling issued from the intimate binding of me and time. The ethereal substance of time is becoming like a thick sweet cosmic nectar, softly flooding my awareness, linking my heart and mind and physicality into a whole. The act of waiting is being reclaimed to me, waiting to leave, or for a bus, train or plain, it will be completely my waiting time, bound with me, my time slithering through the fizzle of neuro electrons that fire on high, my time to behold life lived so foreign, so vibrant, so heavy, burried in earth in diesel fumes, in the immediacy of survival, in the ancient paradoxical costumes of beauty and constraint. This may sound selfish, but for me to become authentically selfless I must be selfish (for a time). To allow the unfathomable complexity of life to permeate, disfigure, and finally demolish the confining conceptual boxes that I have intinctually used to slay and contain reality, to stack reality into patterns that make sense, to construct a reality where I am at the center, and where everything returns to me to be judged again and again, placed into ever stronger more logical conceptual boxes- this is selfish. To debase these ignorant (though understandable and instinctual) habbits, to be able to cultivate true empathy, and the sincere compulsion to compassionate action, requires tending to this brash 'I-ness' to which this world falsely quivers before. Too easily do I confine myself and reality into a field of objective concepts. When my-self, united with my-time is cast into a reality so foreign, so tweaked, and askew and chaotic and unfamiliar, the true terrible incomprehensibility of it all has a way of defeating the I-maker, and leaving in its place an emptiness that seems to resound softly with awe and love, with a thingless thing that I can only describe as compassion.