Landscape with Wheel
Cloverdale's annual Citrus Fair offers up a little magic. The day before it opens, carnies spend the day creating a wonderland of lights, merry-go-round zebras and a dragon, mirrors, wheels of capsules that hold screams, corn dogs, racks of stuffed fish, monkeys, bears, giraffes. They take tickets for three days. The next morning, if you walk by the fairgrounds, they are gone, and silence has fallen on the big paved parking lot, swept clean. The rollick of carousel songs almost hangs in the air. Memory has claimed a scream, a painted tiger, the fragrance of cotton candy, the fluorescent rods of light that color the night. Citrus Fair 2012 goes up on the shelf of remembrance along with all the ones that came before. One year, a quilt in the art show claims top memory. Another, the music of five old men--New Orleans jazz from the thirties. Another, a conversation with two college men presenting a talk on the environmental studies program they're enrolled in.
The magic is the presence the carnival demands, or the contest for Miss Citrus Fair, or the scenes made of citrus fruit--a French Quarter trolley made of oranges and boarded by a period band, a building with balconies and shops below built of lemons and limes. A goat or a pig raised by a young person, now in competition for best of show.
I've been thinking a lot recently about presence, about wading in the Now. Forty-five seconds of Now, and my mind begins to grasp for something "solid," like a good cause for worry about what's coming or a retreat to what was, coddling those familiar agonies as though they were boulders in the sea of Now. If I can stay with the mind-wander through the detours without being reined in, I can often return to the deep waters of Now. Dish washing seems to help. If I can just wash dishes, I can fool the mind into staying with the Now. Who knew that was the essence of Zen?
Sunset at Citrus Fair 2012
Like links in a chain, each dabble in the Now adds to the one before, and sometimes I can stay for fifty seconds. What a relief it is to find myself resting in this practice of turning time into a river, a flow, and to realize, maybe for the first time, that all that I have searched for under the various names for wisdom, with the many teachers who have appeared along the path, is simply a matter of washing dishes, watching a Ferris wheel, delving with the eye into a hand-crocheted doily in the craft barn.
Photographs by Luna Zeffer
