Dandelion Wine

Experience never misleads; what you are misled by is only your judgment, and this misleads you by anticipating results from experience of a kind that is not produced by your experiments. — Leonardo Da Vinci

We need neither to paint like Picasso or write like Shakespeare to experience creation.  The simple act of breathing in and out is always our most powerful and enduring experience of creation.

I am a middle class home, I am a worn out banjo
I'll never dance in Swan Lake, I'll never play the cello
I am the Northern Lights, I am invisible
I am a dandelion, I am forever wild 

But you were looking for an orchid
And I will always be a dandelion
 ---  Antje Duvekot, Dandelion

I have decided to rename this work to Dandelion Wine.  The name Mobius Trip comes from a much earlier time and was more of a private reference at that time. 

In case you are not familiar with the reference, Dandelion Wine was the name of a 1957 novel from famed science fiction writer Ray Bradbury.  In my early years I read a lot of Bradbury but I did not run across this one until much later.  I am not sure when I found it but it was probably over 40 years ago.  For some reason, the book had a profound effect on me.  I have re-read it many times and still keep a copy of it.  I had just finished reading it again when I wrote my first short story, The Crack.  Bradbury’s style influenced my own style immensely.  The book is, on the surface, a sort of autobiographical look at small town life in the Midwestern US.   It is not his usual style and is quite lyrical and populated with metaphors that probe deeply into the undercurrents of our experiential life.   It is essentially a collection of vignettes tied together as a summer of a twelve-year old boy.   That was also how I wrote my story.  In those days, I rode a transit bus to work and I decided to try writing a chapter on each 45 minute commute.  So it turned out to also be an episodic look at that crossroads in my path, tied together by the appearance of a mysterious crack in the wall of my room.

The other feature of the book that I found so powerful was that it was, in many ways, just the stream of experience and consciousness of the boy.  A whole chapter often was not much more than a vibrant description of Presence in the experience of the ordinary life.  In later readings this aspect of the writing seemed to be highlighted by my experiment in surrendering to the flow of life and in cultivating presence and mindfulness.  My life has always been quite ordinary and simple.  But when not under the pressure of the world, I seemed to maintain the ability to be absorbed by the ordinary – particularly the backside of the world around me.  On walks I would go down the alleys – a totally different experience of a neighborhood than when experienced from the street level where an image was usually consciously projected by the homeowners.  I liked going down the stairwells at work rather than the elevators.  The bare concrete with all of the pipes, meters and other infrastructure was more nourishing.  Now my life seems to have reached a new level of ordinariness and simplicity.  Cultivation of awareness in these moments and letting go of the strong conceptual filters of my conditioning attenuates time.  When awareness was only triggered by the high

points or landmarks of the day, the intervening time between those highlights was lost to memory.  But when every moment starts to be experienced and recognized then the flow becomes more fluid.  Time then is experienced differently as it is not broken up by specific events.  Meaning is experienced differently as the influence of expectation recedes and a kind of equanimity of the felt perception takes over.  

I know that I am just touching on my ability to surrender to that level – to stay in a mindful state.  But that has been an unexpected result of this path, at least in the sense that it wasn’t something I set out to do.  Now I have a taste of what living at that level of awareness is like. 

Right now, that is what writing here is like for me.   In the book, the bottling of dandelion wine mirrored Douglas Spaulding’s experience of his summer.  The ordinary and mundane parts of life, the weeds can be magical and intoxicating from a different perspective, a distillation of life itself.    What is the connecting thread of these isolated vignettes?   I am not sure it matters anymore to me.  Everything rises and passes away.  It is only while it is here that it has any meaning but that meaning comes after the experience of it.  Later, after you uncork that bottle of Dandelion Wine.