Summer drift

The dryness lifts off the fields of canola. At midday on days like today, it also seems like the heat imbedded in the pavement of Greer Road is about to devour my bike tires. The spread of the thirsty crop blankets the limestone shelf of baked clay that defines much of the soil of Prince Edward County now; the pale noonday sun is a colour match for the land.

I think that our tolerance for noise reaches new benchmarks as we steer away from the main paths that sound the tireless rumble of the world. To once again hear the wind and its mix of birdsong; to hear the grasses shake and branches in the trees rattle in the heart of a dry summer day calls to the psyche of images of higher plains. Crows bark from the tops of the poplars, leaves shimmer like the scales on a sturgeon pulled from the edge of Scotch Bonnet reef.

There is a place we arrive at, I believe, in the silence of nature where that sense of oneness is all pervasive. Where affairs of day-to-day are no longer heard nor felt as we transcend into a zone where everything but the present moment and engagement with the higher self is all we know. And when it comes time to leave these moments of respite we want to cling; to avoid what feels like a long walk back to consciousness and a gradual re-conditioning to the socalled realities of the days.

The idea of flow: The recent work of researchers to define the optimal experience of being in a zone where the task at hand is all consuming and the world as we perceive it appears to vanish. It is a creatively driven experience, inwardly arrived at as opposed to an outwardly driven thing such as concentrating on a movie or operating a can opener.

And so my having difficulty having a conversation while being able to focus on anything else is not unusual after all. It is what it means to be human, I discover. I am not alone. The brain has a cap at processing 110 bits of information per second, and from there it tends to shut out overflow.

I scratch these notes onto my sketch pad, ramblings from a summer-rambler of time and space; a message in a bottle from my island of peace; my path into the emptiness of big sky and land and horizon; from my bike as I stop for a sip of water at the intersection of Greer and Benway roads.

And as I stand here, I know that words are not enough: entering a cathedral of the unknown, immersed in the ethers of the infinite; a seeker on a red bike along the blackened pavement through fields of other places.