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<FONT FACE="Times"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:18.0px'>Back to an earlier train of thought...<BR>
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I always thought I understood what we meant by “Have a granular day”.<BR>
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To me it’s 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.<BR>
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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 “granular” 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 “Missouri Breaks”make 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.<BR>
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The “wide open spaces” as the American West has often been called, are still there. It’s no longer the frontier of previous times, but the locals still refer to the region as “the Big Dry”, or the “Big Empty”, and even the “Big Open”. It’s 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 “expanded nows” are not static. They’re 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.<BR>
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Ralph Copleman<BR>
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