Granular space

[Ralph Copleman]

Back to an earlier train of thought...

I always thought I understood what we meant by ³Have a granular day².

To me it¹s about slowing to feel grains of experience one at a time, and not
to let time and life slip by so as to miss many fine (and important)
distinctions.  I think of it sometimes as squeezing bits of sand through the
hourglass one by one, and carefully.

I have just come home from a 500-mile bicycle ride through remote parts of
Montana and North Dakota (USA).  This completes the second of my two-part
odyssey of riding my bicycle across the country (which is very, very, very,
very big).   There are wide stretches of central and eastern Montana that
provide the opportunity to ponder ³granular² for long periods as one pedals,
pedals, stroke after stroke, mile after mile after mile.  The landscape
remains the same as it endlessly changes.  The buttes, the prairies and the
crumbled landscape they call ³Missouri Breaks²make the same changes all the
livelong day.  The wind and the water of the eons have written the book on
granular, this is for sure.

The ³wide open spaces² as the American West has often been called, are still
there.  It¹s no longer the frontier of previous times, but the locals still
refer to the region as ³the Big Dry², or the ³Big Empty², and even the ³Big
Open².  It¹s granularized open space alright, but it is not still or
unchanging.  I had the thought, as I rode along, often in solitude, that
open spaces of all kinds are changing all the time, that ³expanded nows² are
not static.  They¹re dynamic in a sort of stillness.  Space, like time,
unfolds, like music over the measures.  I can, if I pay attention, hear the
melody and feel the grains.

Ralph Copleman



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