We Live On a Bearing Ball

We live on a bearing ball. A bearing ball is one of the balls in the picture below. The whole diagram below is a ball bearing. Bearing balls and ball bearings are used in almost every machine with moveable parts we have in our lives. But imagine the earth is one of those bearing balls. You can see it right? Around and around it goes rolling as it spins. And we live on it.



We don't feel confined  and earth isn't squeezed between races like the ones above, but in an unseen way we are held in place by centrifical force and gravity. So the analogy doesn't hold up perfectly, but we are riding a cosmic bicycle cruising along an old astronomical railroad grade. All the bearing balls in our bike are spinning, bathed in beautiful slippery grease, moving through the great vacuum.


Riding a bike is like riding a planet. It rolls frictionlessly along, like a bird in flight. The feeling is of doing something greater than it appears. The amazement of going so fast and far with the turning of pedals continually overcomes me. This is the enjoyment of the effort. The effort put in gets multiplied tenfold by the leverage of the gearing and the non-resistance of all the bearing enabled parts - miracle! HILL! OK if we must speak about hills they do exist. But even the climbing of a hill, as testing as it is, reveals our limits to be much greater than we might think. Looking at a hill beforehand is to be discouraged. While we are climbing it we are in pain. But in the context of the whole ride it is balanced by the descents that make our orbital route equally up and down. And balance is that other greatness of our cyclogical exploration. We go fast (or slow) and we stay upright as we do it. Wow! and to say it backwards woW!!! These mechanical miracles are astounding on so many levels, and to ride them is to celebrate the alchemy of a living thing becoming one with a machine. We are riding a planet because every part of a bicycle was derived from the elements of our planet.

Espresso ~ the Aroma of the Unattainable

There is a part of me that is aways looking for a coffee shop, a hangout where I can bask in the glow of wifi, nearby strangers, and the aroma of freshly pulled espresso. I could have just left a coffee cafe five minutes ago and the eyes of my heart will begin roaming, looking for that paradise signed with a red curvy neon espresso sculpture in the window. Yes, a sculpture, because coffee is art, and art is the heart of life, the curves, the spirit, the inspiration. A coffee shop is an art gallery where the insides of your skull are the walls where the caffeine buzz hangs its creations. And yet when I do see another one I know I truly would not enjoy another coffee. I've had enough already.

 

I walk into the hip space and everywhere are open laptops, and the sound is soothing yet cool music behind the hissing gurgle of milk being steamed. Everyone is creating amazing graphics, writing inventive short stories, texting inspiring dialogues. The place is so crammed with a symphony of firing neurons that my own muse begins to speak to me in poetry so original I can barely keep up with my own self expression. In fact, there it just went...  I thought....  there was something I wanted to say. And although I can sense its ambiance like something I was going to say and then forgot, the moment is empty. It was a contract between my spirit and the caffeine which in the end has no content. What is called in your language an empty promise.

The reason is because if you could really see what was on those laptop screens you would realize it is  only emails, and spreadsheets, and amazon.com. The real creators must be at home sitting lonely at their desks sweating out words and phrases, creating imaginary worlds that don't flow like soothing waterfalls from their minds, but are more like pulling nails from old scarred wood and piling up the lumber until there is enough there to build the beginnings of a house. And everyday the writer spends most of his hours looking for cast off lumber and pulling the nails out of it so he can have a few sticks to add to his slowly, painfully forming wood pile.

The cafes are beautiful illusions, lovely promises. Espresso is the aroma of the unattainable, visions of  impossible possibilities, aural dreams of unhearable music. And that is why I love them. That is why I keep one eye out for a coffee house while the other is spying cast off lumber.