...am writing from my nest. Jane's house really is an eyrie. i lift my gaze from this laptop's rectangular plane of light and see the trunks and tops of soaring eucalypti and redwood. there's a road far below, the hillside outside plunging down, down towards Codornices Park. two kinds of plum trees, one with amber leaves another with olive, explode with late summer fruit that i shall go pick later, to break my sunday fast.

i've always loved Jane's house up here in the Berkeley hills... wood floors, inner spaces soaring towards high ceilings and glassed walls. i am lucky to be here, and am ever thankful to my old friend for having me here when i'm back in Cali.

so this is my nomadic life now, and at four decades of life have found the right tuning to my strings, have listened all this time to the vibrating frequencies, and have found the way to ride them, all the way to whatever it is beyond the limits of sight.

say hello to Fletcher, kids... and read his tale either as a cautionary one, or inspirational. or both.

dear Thomas...

your words reach out on this medium, along these planes of thought, and become figments of our imaginations. the limits you speak of become ours, ours to parse and savor like the flesh of summer fruit, or spit out in the form of inedible seed. whichever it may be, it's worthwhile.

i didn't speak lightly when i wrote, in a previous day's weblog, of your adventure there in the southlands as a monastic journey. an hieratic one... for me, learning, school and the life of the mind has always been a sacred task. sometimes we lose sight of this in the detail of things, we forget the end result of the complex equations. it's all good, though. we ought--as i suspect you are in fact--to be reveling in the difficulty, drudgery or sheer panic, of getting stuff into our brains. it all expands us, in the end, after all. and our hearts become wider and wilder, as a result.

how is the sun there? are you actually noticing it? are you seeing it echoed in the flat landscapes of leaves and in the blooming textures of building facades? in the play of water in manmade fountains? is the digital camera gathering dust in the dusk? ;-)

over here, it's still Berkeley for me. riding back in Laura's car from north of the Bay yesterday evening, there was an awesome moment during which the heat and torpor of Solano county quite suddenly changed into the sharp cider tang of incoming fog, around Hercules. the highway turned up and around a hill and there it was... fingers, trunks, bodies of fog flowing under the Golden Gate Bridge and into the bay, cooling, shifting light from silverblue to whalegray.

and so, my dear friend, you start an exciting journey down there, as others go on, over here. and this right here is your first e-postcard from far away, in this new guise and this new form. i'm happy you've come back from the diabolical dungeons of your mathematical imprisonment, to regale us with tales of fear and loathing. and after that episode is over, don't forget to read. otherwise, you'll never catch up. ;-) but then again, you're hardly one to need encouraging about reading, eh?

as ever,
lloyd (in berkeley).

{ net.casting }
^