Yesterday afternoon a friend called. Well, she didn’t actually call call; she sent me an email. Which is what she does instead of calling. But her emails have the quality of a phone call, so I think of them as ‘calls’. Anyway, she said “What exciting thing did you do today?” As if all my days are filled with exciting things.

“I moved a couple of stones around on the table on the deck,” I said. “Then looked at the places where the stones used to be.” Not what you’d call traditionally exciting.

There’s this table on the deck — a little round glass-topped table — and I put stuff on it. You know how it is; you move around through the world and you pick stuff up. An odd-shaped stone or an interesting piece of wood or dried dog-chewed chunk of tennis ball. I don’t know what most folks do with that stuff, but me, I put it on the table. I used to put stuff on the table then photograph the stuff. An art project, I guess you could say. Then after a year or so I stopped doing that as a project. I still put stuff on the table and occasionally photograph it — just not as a project.

Here’s something obvious: if you leave a thing on the table for a while, it gathers dust. When it rains, the dust washes off. That dust dries around the base of the thing. So if you leave a thing on the table for a long while, then move it, sometimes it leaves an interesting pattern. Sometimes it just leaves a mess, but sometimes there’s a pattern and sometimes that pattern is interesting.

I like to look at those patterns. They please me. The whole process of creating that pattern pleases me. Sometimes I’ll leave the pattern and wait for the next rain to destroy it. More often I’ll just Windex the hell out of it and wipe it away. Then I’ll put something else on the table. Or maybe just re-arrange whatever crap is already at rest on the table.

Then I’ll wait. It’s a calm, still, quiet, personal sort of excitement.

Anyway, that’s the exciting thing I did. I picked up the stones and looked at the patterns left behind. Then I put one of the stones down again.

It’s a pleasant little stone. Looks a bit like an egg. I saw it as I was walking down Delaware Avenue, sitting with a few thousand other decorative stones surrounding some greenery in front of Guadalajara, a Mexican restaurant. Only took a moment to stop, stoop down, and pick it up. I don’t think the folks at Guadalajara would mind that I took their stone.

Later, the cat came wandering out. The cat takes a limited interest in these things. The cat doesn’t particularly care about patterns of dust left by rain-washed stones; the cat just wants to be around when something’s happening — even if that something is nothing much.

The cat has her own metrics for excitement.

I have a dream.

Okay, it’s not as good as the Rev. Martin Luther King’s dream. His was a most excellent dream. It’s really difficult for any dream to compete with one in which the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners are all sitting down together at the table of brotherhood. That’s some seriously fine dreaming, right there. It remains only a dream, of course, but nobody can deny the quality of the dreaming involved.

My dream is less ambitious than Dr. King’s, though it’s equally unlikely to come to pass. Almost everybody will say they support Dr. King’s dream — even if they don’t. Very few would support my dream. Still, I think it’s a perfectly fine dream and I like it.

Here’s my dream: reinstate the draft.

WPA – painting figures for museum dioramas.

No, seriously, that’s my dream. Conscription. Not military conscription, but conscription for national service. I would like for every citizen in the United States to perform two years of mandatory national service.

That’s right, mandatory. All those folks who talk about how great this nation is, I’d like them to actually put some skin in the game. Talk is cheap and all that. And all those folks who talk about how lousy this nation is, I want to give them an opportunity to improve it. It’s easy to complain. Actually fixing stuff is inconvenient.

WPA – collecting fossils in Texas.

Two years of service. I don’t care what sort of service they engage in. I don’t care if they spend a couple of years working in the national parks, or helping old folks, or rebuilding roads and bridges and dams, or assisting in archaeological digs, or researching a cure for breast cancer, or documenting historic buildings, or restoring native prairie grasses, or updating and upgrading FBI computer systems, or responding to natural disasters, or painting murals in post offices, or cleaning beaches befouled with pollution, or gathering oral histories of the people who built the Alaskan Highway, or earthquake-proofing old structures, or teaching and promoting traditional rural arts and crafts, or cataloging beetles at the Smithsonian, or yeah — carrying a weapon and walking a post in Afghanistan.

WPA – sculpture workshop.

Two years of service, right out of high school. Would it fuck up the career plans of some folks? Yeah, sure it would. But mostly it would fuck up the career plans of the privileged classes — and let’s face it, their privilege would survive and they’d still have lots of advantages over ordinary folks. Giving up a couple of years to improve the nation that gave them their privilege isn’t asking too much.

Two years of service, without exception (aside for extreme physical, psychological, or emotional disability). Two years, no deferments and damned few exemptions. College can wait. Only child of disabled parents? There’s bound to be some sort of national service that can be served locally. Doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from or what your situation is, there’s stuff you can do to improve and support the nation.

WPA – relocating beaver.

The photographs here illustrate projects sponsored by the Work Projects Administration back in the 1930s and 40s. It was essentially an employment project, and over its lifetime it employed millions of people to engage in all manner of public works. Most of the work back then involved unskilled labor — building roads and all that. But they also employed artists and musicians and writers and actors to create and perform and document works of art for public consumption. People did things that were worthwhile.

The people employed by the WPA were just looking for work, of course. They needed a job. My dream would simply shift the motivation behind the work. It would be less about needing to make a buck and put food on the table, and more about providing a national service.

That’s it, that’s my dream. Two years of service. Two years serving other folks, serving something larger than personal interests, serving the nation. It’s not too much to ask; it may be too much to expect.

Which is why it’s a dream.

Much of what I do for a living requires (or allows) me to sit in a little room and think about stuff, then write something about the stuff I’ve thought about. Some of the stuff I think about is real stuff that’s actually happening in the real world; some of it is just shit I’m making up, and some of it is shit other folks have made up but aren’t entirely happy with. But I think and I write, and yeah, it’s a pretty weird gig.

The nice thing — one of the nice things — about the gig is that it’s not governed by space. I may be physically sitting in that little room, but my mind and imagination are pretty much unfettered. All those clichés you’ve heard about your thoughts only being limited by the stretch of your imagination — corny, but true. It’s a pretty sweet gig for my mind. My body, though, resents the little room. My body wants to get up and move around.

So almost every day I indulge my body’s wishes. I go for a walk or a bike ride. I ride the bike for the fun in it. Sometimes I’ll run errands on my bike, and yeah, that’s good for my body and for the environment and all — but mostly it’s just fun.

But here’s the thing about a bike: you have to pay attention. Cars and trucks will run into you, pedestrians will step directly in your way (even if you call out ‘On your left’ as you approach), dogs will chase you (so will geese, by the way — and that’s a lot more alarming than it sounds), the streets have potholes, the bike trails sometimes have walnuts or other detritus scattered around. When I’m cycling, I have to keep a big chunk of my mind constantly engaged with the world around me. I enjoy that, partly because it makes it impossible to think about whatever I’d been thinking about in that little room.

Walking, though — totally different. Walking doesn’t require the same level of situational awareness that cycling does. Sure, you have to pay enough attention to avoid stepping in dog shit or tripping over a curb, but basically walking doesn’t require much in the way of immediate vigilance.

So I walk a lot, and I walk all over. Suburban neighborhoods, bike paths, city streets, alleys, hiking trails, country roads, the city skywalk. I walk year around, regardless of the season (though rarely in the rain). Sometimes I tote a camera. Most often, I don’t — though with a smartphone you always have a camera with you. Sometimes I take photos of stuff I see when I’m walking. All the photos you see here were shot while I was taking a walk.

I do three types of walking. Some of it is just utilitarian — a way to get somewhere and do something. You know, drop off a package at the local FedEx office, buy a clove of garlic, that sort of thing. Ordinary chores and tasks that are located nearby and aren’t particularly time-dependent.

Most often, though, I walk and think — usually about something I’m writing. Or want to write. Or have been paid to write. That type of walking is essentially an extension of sitting and thinking in that little room, only without the sitting or the little room. Without the four walls and the computer screen in front of me, I’m generally more relaxed and flexible in my thinking. When I’m walking, I’m not distracted by the words on the screen. Instead, I’m thinking about what those words need to do.

I also walk as a form of meditation. A million years ago I briefly belonged to one of those strict, formal Zen communities where meditation practice was regimented. It was a group activity, with a starting time and a stopping time. You enter the zendo, make gassho to your zafu (which is basically bowing to the cushion you sit on), sit in orderly lines, wait for somebody to tap a brass bowl, which gives out a lovely tone that’s the signal to get to meditating. You sit very still, focus on your breathing, release all distracting thoughts. While you’re meditating some guy walks quietly around, watching to make sure you’re actually meditating and not thinking about what you’re going to make for supper or whether you should adopt a cat. If he thinks you’ve allowed yourself to become distracted, he whacks you with a little stick.

It works for some folks. It didn’t work for me. After a few months of that, I stopped going. I didn’t abandon Buddhism, but I abandoned meditation. Years later I stumbled across an article that mentioned a monk named Thich Nhat Hanh and walking meditation. No rows of cushions, no regimented starting or stopping time, and no guy behind me with a fucking stick — sounded good to me. So I did some reading, talked to some people, gave it a try.

It’s still about breathing. But walking meditation creates rhythm between your breathing and your steps. The heart of the idea, according to Thich Nhat Hanh, is to ‘arrive’ with every step — which sounds awfully buddha-buddha, but is really pretty simple. It just means being aware of every step, connecting with every step. My walking meditation is slower than my usual walking pace. I breathe in for three steps, out for four steps. It’s that simple.

And it’s easy to transition from my utility walking or work-walking into walking meditation. When I decide to meditate, I usually start by thinking of a simple Buddhist poem.

Washing the dishes
Is bathing the Buddha

And that triggers the meditation. I breathe in with the first line, and breathe out with the second. After a bit, the words becoming nothing but sounds and lose their meaning, and then it’s all about the rhythm. Everything else slides away. Easy peasy, lemon breezy.

I meditate until — well, until I stop meditating. It might a couple of minutes — it might be twenty. Doesn’t really matter. The meditation shifts back to plain walking, but I feel more refreshed and creative.

I had a point when I began writing this. I’ve completely forgotten what it was. Something about walking, probably. Or maybe something about writing. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t about meditation. It could have been about how sitting too long in a little room thinking about stuff can turn your mind into guava jelly.

Clearly, I’ve been sitting in this little room too long.