Pictures from around my neighborhood, part 2

Dear Readers,

I went on a little walk around my neighborhood again, and I took some pictures. This time I walked outside of my subdivision, to the land beyond the jurisdiction of the HomeOwner's Association. And here are some of the things I saw:

It's a pole with a wooden box attached to the pole, and a big metal pipe painted light blue, coming straight up out of the ground, and something else... I really don't know what this stuff is, but I like the way it looks. And there's a house and a wall... and this picture is about the pretty bits of wilderness, mixed with the pretty bits of civilization.

Here's an intersection, a stop sign, bright green weeds, growing thicker here and growing thinner there, electrical poles, electrical wires that come from the poles; they are criss-crossing the sky... clouds, walls, trees, rooftops, rooftops in the distance with the sun shining on them, room for your vision to expand, empty space, you can see for a long time, which visual expanse is relaxing to the minds of those who are familar with such space... but you can't see 95% of it, because 95% of it is dark matter.

Lots of big clouds. Puffy clouds, gray clouds, clouds that hide the blueness from you... clouds that drift around the atmosphere, and get blown around by the wind, very slowly, and we look at them, and the clouds change shape, and the clouds change color, and they get lower, and higher, and they'll be gone pretty soon. Or changed into different matter. You'll see the cloud later, in a different form, and you won't recognize it. You won't call it a cloud anymore. It rained earlier today. A straight road that goes on for a long time. It runs perfectly east and west. They planned it that way. A big tree. A very big tree. That tree is the King of this little bit of land. He's a nice King. He got to be King by growing for so long, and by getting tall, and he grew and he grew and he grew, and he was loving, and people and animals lived safely in his shadow, and the people and the animals were guided back home by his massive trunk, and Water gladly offered up itself to the King Tree, and Soil was tickled by the roots, and happy to be pressed down upon, and the Water and the Soil and the Animals called him King, but that appellation was but a recognition of what was already fact, and this is a very important poing, for if Water, Soil and Animals had not called him a King, the King Tree exuded his Kingship nevertheless, and the tree is truly a king, for there is absolute truth, and the Tree has a character that does not change based on what the things around it call him... and the King Tree was calm, yes, very calm. Quiet like a soldier after a war. And he looks at the silent battlefield and breathes. The King Tree is as calm with his popularity as he is with his anonymity. Getting his picture taken does not change him. That tree has inside of it the heart of a Pilgrim. He is solitary. He is to be emulated, and this tree is not expendable. It cannot be replaced, so spend time with it now, while you still can. If you got up close enough to it, you could climb it, and it would wrap you up in its compassionate limbs. You would want to stay there a long time. It would tell you some tree secrets, if you are ready to hear them, and his tree secrets are quiet tree secrets, and then you would tell it some human secrets. The soul of the King Tree will feel good as it touches your soul, just for a little while in the afternoon, and the King Tree comes from God.

A school bus. The children on the bus, and the busdriver. A child is adjusting his backpack by his feet. Another child feels the pink lump of hardened gum stuck under his seat. Another child looks out the window, and likes the way his head feels as it is jostled by the vibrations of that gigantic moving bus. The shadow made by the school bus. The yellow lines painted on the road. The white line on the road, faded out here and there. Poles and big wires that carry electricity in them. Little green things, on the sides of the road. The sky. The wall that marks the edge of the subdivision. Do you see the tire marks in the dirt? In the lower left hand corner -- sort of the middle, near the bottom? Somebody drove there recently. When I took this picture, the clouds parted for a bit, and the sun shone down a little more.

They were getting ready to build another subdivision, but then they stopped. It had something to do with an abstract, floating thing called the economy. The economy lives far, far away, in another land, and it tells us how to feel. And it tells us when we should build a lot of houses, and it tells us when we should stop building a lot of houses. Ground, sign, fence, sky, curbs. Did the Indians once live here? Maybe there was a battle here. Or a ceremony.
Pipes sticking out of the ground. They stopped construction on the rows and rows of houses around here, and this is some of the stuff they left behind.
A gigantic power pole. There's all sorts of knobs and metal connectors and wires and everything up there.
This truck is a picture of freedom.

Sincerely,

Telemoonfa