Geese Playing Free Jazz in the Park

Beams of sunlight / Photograph / 2024 / Russell C. Smith

In the park this morning, the geese were playing free jazz circa 1961, Ornette Coleman style, and the squirrels were busy wondering where they’d buried their nuts. Up in the nearby trees, herons let out their prehistoric screeches telling everyone within earshot below, they are in mating season so don’t mess with our nests. I just remembered a blonde friend sitting next to me in a pickup truck, bouncing down a dusty country backroad and her hiccups wouldn’t stop. It’s alright, the mind does strange things in the spring. When the flowers are blooming like crazy, it’s fairly insane not to walk by them and inhale the competing purple, yellow, white colors of a morning out of so many in a lifetime. But it feels like this start of day was made for me. In the celestial bargain of this moment, there’s a larger macrocosm of time and space going on. Elsewhere, worlds are created or destroyed by a sneeze, the striking of a match, or mispronouncing certain words. As I raise a razor to shave off a few days growth – I see how each action, each incident, is separate and alive. Mirror in front, or sky above, our life is always directly in front of our faces. At the base of my Medulla Oblongata, there are pockets of longing and mythical rivers of time flowing through distant galaxies. Medulla Oblongata is a retro hardcore punk band that just might make it to the top of the charts. “What is the Medulla Oblongata?” is the correct answer on Jeopardy, because sometimes answers come in the form of questions. We are curiously interpreting life forms, fascinated by the flying, squeaking, and mumbling living forms surrounding us. The ducks are swimmingly absorbed in the act of paddling, or flying just over the feathered heads of their aquatic bird tribe. It’s up to us to pay closer attention in this interactive world. Always in the background of our minds, we sense time, swifter than an elephant, swaying off into the slow-moving clouds far in the distance, high above the mountaintops.