The color green...wet.

   Most days of the week during the times of the year when it's light outside at seven in the morning, I go for a walk around Stow Lake here in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. I enjoy starting my day this way, it's a good form of light exercise, and there are very few people around so early, which allows me to relax more and experience the natural world in a way that I find more difficult when there is a lot of human activity around me.
   At this time of day, in this part of the city, it is generally somewhat to quite foggy, and the moisture and early morning sun highlight the plant life here in an always soothing, and sometimes remarkable way. There have been multiple times that I have been walking the one mile path around the lake that I have experienced the colors as I come around a turn as if I am seeing them under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs, and well, I haven't done any of those in many years, and I'm pretty sure that I've never had a "flashback" on them, anyway. What I do believe is that the combination of being quite relaxed, and at the same time open to the colors around me allows me to experience them in the way that they actually are, unclouded by all the garbage normally tinting my vision. I know it sounds very spiritual (and that makes me kind of uncomfortable), but I do believe that is what happens.
   The colors that most move me on my walks are the greens of the early morning, and the way the color is saturated by the morning dew and fog. It's a shame that the dews and fogs which usually cloud my vision aren't as beautiful to me.

                 

     

George Harrison

The image below is culled from a video clip from youtube that I have been watching pretty regularly for the past five months or so, usually when I am in bed before going to sleep for the night or taking an afternoon nap on the weekend. This is the time, most often, that it feels like my mind begins to slow down, and I can think the most clearly. When I do decide to look at videos at these times, the one that I usually watch is a live version of the song "Awaiting On You All' by George Harrison, from his 1970 album, "All Things Must Pass', and appears to be about, as are many of the songs on the triple album, Harrison's spiritual quest at that time. The main chorus states:

By chanting the names of the lord and you'll be free

The lord is awaiting on you all to awaken and see.

The still image shows Harrison between the two lines of the first chorus in the song, and he appears to be concentrating on the music, but to me, it also represents the emotional pain that I imagine Harrison to be feeling, as his quest always struck me as a search to escape his own demons. Perhaps this is far-fetched and too personal a feeling on my part, but that's how it looks to me. Being well known for his interest in Eastern religion from his time with The Beatles to the time of his death from cancer, he always seemed to be looking for a method of escaping from the bondage of self, and in an interview he gave on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, in response to questions Cavett posed about famous rock stars overdosing on drugs and alcohol, Harrison states that he imagines that they were all are probably looking for "some deep love or something like that". He then states, "if you can get straight, really straight, it's much higher", but then says, "I'm somewhat in the middle".

I relate very much to Harrison's quest for inner peace, though my search for that calmness exists solely in the world around me, though it is still of the spirit. When I am happy, I don't think much about self imprisonment, but when I am nervous or agitated, I am very much aware of how impossible it is to escape my own body. 

The song "Awaiting On You All" was released in 1970, when I was six (I would be seven in one week), and is a time which I have very few recollections of (more of the pain that blocks those memories in another piece), but I will say that my parents marriage was becoming very messy, and  George must in one way seem like my father to me, suppressed (by his band members), and in another way, like me, still trying to find my own voice. Watching this video allows me to index that time from afar...just the way my subconscious likes it.

Still from "The Concert For Bangladesh" (1972), directed by Saul Swimmer

When I woke up this morning, I felt compelled to write this piece, although I have been thinking

about writing again for some time. When I saved the first draft this morning, I noticed that it was one year to the day since I wrote the last time.