One figure in the diorama

While I was walking at work last week, I had another "trippy" sensation.  (I have to find a better word than trippy!)

I sat on the bench by the Community Center, and began to notice the simultaneousness of things.  I was getting more and more "in the frame."  a couple is walking along a sidewalk; school kids are chasing each other up a hill, a plane leaves a sound cone through the air, the slow crescendo of wind sounding in the new leaves, birds chipping, calling...

As I reflect on it now (a week at least later) I get the impression that this "building up" of a complex world then "crowds out" or "short circuits" the normal planning and rumination.  

I develop an altered, diminished sense of myself.  When I'm writing "diminished," I mean not less important but less "central," I'm thinking words like... bracketed, less prominent, not "centered."  Normally, there are "lines of connection"... me to calling bird, me to wind in the tree branches, me to sound of tennis ball being hit.  I'm the spider at the center of this web.  

But during this "altered" time... I'm off-center... one figure in the diorama.

It's also affectively positive and interesting.  I'm curious, following along the developing "soundtrack."

It's something like this poem I recently read by Clint Smith, "All at Once"

"All At Once." 

The redwoods are on fire in California. A flood submerges a neighborhood that sat quiet on the coast for three centuries. A child takes their first steps and tumbles into a father's arms. Two people in New Orleans fall in love under an oak tree whose branches bend like sorrow. A forest of seeds are planted in new soil. A glacier melts into the ocean and the sea climbs closer to the land.

A man comes home from war and holds his son for the first time. A man is killed by a drone that thinks his jug of water is a bomb. Your best friend relapses and isn't picking up the phone. Your son's teacher calls to say he stood up for another boy in class. A country below the equator ends a 20-year civil war. A soldier across the Atlantic fires the shot that begins another.

The scientists find a vaccine that will save millions of people's lives. Your mother's cancer has returned, and doctors say there is nothing else they can do. There is a funeral procession in the morning and a wedding in the afternoon. The river that gives us water to drink is the same one that might wash us away.