Really Now?

Really now? What is the point of typing all this stuff? It's simple. I'll explain in a moment.

In Costa Rica a couple years ago, there was a line of leaf cutter ants in the night delivering their goods back to some palace and their queen. (Ants have queens, right?) In the busy marching thousands came pinkish purple pieces of a blossom. Flower delivery. Yep. Some ant was getting something special. Maybe it was Valentine's Day in the ant universe. 

We, every last one of us, need a constant reminder to love better. Love better yourself -- the voice in your head reading this and weighing it and judging whether it's worthy of your time. THAT. That voice needs to remind the thing that is listening to that voice to ease up, lean in, you got this. Love your body and all its weirdness of your shoulder or knee or back talking to that thing between your ears. It is, after all, the astronomically absurd machine we live inside, AND every freaking day we open our eyes is the big miracle. Show that knee a little extra love. Your back doesn't want to hear you complaining about it. It wants love, recognition, some attention.

Love better those close to you, and you find out how to do this by asking. Get out of your looping head and lean in to the ones you care about the most, and consciously find out what they need that you can provide. Sometimes just expressing the curiosity is all it takes. Likely though, very likely, it is a list, maybe a long one, that could be addressed. Every one of us can be better. Moi, I am working on it. Honestly, what is more important than this? 

Then there's the jump: Love better the inanimate, or seemingly inanimate, world around you. Stop rushing by that picture hanging in the hall. Pause for a moment to consider that piece of art that you see everyday as just part of the room. Somebody poured herself into that. Who? Why? My particular obsession is the way light moves, the way we see it, its subtlety and dynamism, in constant flux. Sunlight on the snow in the air this morning at six below. Anodized titanium in the shop last night looking just like a hummingbird's shimmering. And then, stop on your walk, hike, snowshoe, sandy toes stroll. What can you hear? A tree creaking trying to tell you something. The sssshhhhhhh of the sand as the wave retreats, resets to rumble again and then ssshhhhhhh....Think swapping the background to the foreground. The subtleties that you are overlooking need looking over. 

Bob Weir died a couple weeks ago. The outpouring of love in the musical community is a tsunami of Love. Sixty years of playing guitar to the dancing humans at Dead shows, Ratdog shows, Kingfish shows, The Other Ones, Further, Bobby and the Midnights, Dead and Company, Bob and the Wolf Bros, Bob and Rob Wasserman shows... Has any performer in history played to more listening ears? Nope. Bob is the bashful king of musical grace. What has to be the defining ethos of his life? It's a simple phrase and the one that will return this country to who we can be in a higher state. I am waiting for the politician to step forward and lead with the platform of Peace and Love. It is the solution and it can't be diminished by any objection. Bob stepped onto a stage when hippies and the Peace and Love movement poured into our culture, and he lived a life of endless munificence ever since.  

This is a process of turning inside out -- you show yourself some love and then expand it to immediate family and friends and the world where you walk and the kids making a ruckus and peeps dancing to the band and the friends holding up the signs and the people who really, really need some help... 

I sat down to write this morning about rock and roll and art and the blues and then this happened. No apologies. I'm voting for the Peace and Love ticket whoever starts waving it around. And I will continue to remind my friends to slow down and smell the flowers, even the flakes of ones carried through the darkness a half inch off the dry forest floor by bugs. This is your only chance. 

For real,

Do it today,

B mac 

P.S. Speaking of ants, do you know about anting? Yep, the verb. Some birds, members of the Corvus family in particular, (you know, the ones with the sly minds), find ant hills and stand over them with their feathers out stretched. The angry ants swarm over the birds or the birds pick up ants and rub them all over their bodies. Apparently, ants secrete formic acid and other chemicals that  fight against parasites and bacteria. I'm thinking we humans need to come up with some analogous maintenance behavior rooted in the natural world. Maybe cold plunges. Maybe hot springs. Maybe sound bathing in front of wailing musicians. Rolling in grass. Ocean swimming. Flower gardens. Please Mother Nature, we need help. 

P.P.S. My granddaddy was born Christmas Day, 1900. He lived through the First World War, the Spanish Flu that killed two to three percent of all human beings, the Depression, World War Two and the Holocaust, the Korean War, the Cold War, civil rights marches and assassinations, Vietnam. His favorite thing to say to everyone was, "You are wonderful."  

Don't hold back. 

P.P.S. He also used to call me and my brothers, "Skookerinkus." I still have no idea what that means. Anybody? 

P.P.S.S. Bobby, thank you. Force of nature, the other one, we are heartbroken but you left us the medicine. We will survive.