Conversations For Transformation: Essays Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard

Conversations For Transformation

Essays By Laurence Platt

Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard

And More




Wine Country

Napa Valley, California, USA

May 20, 2006



This essay, Wine Country, is the companion piece to
  1. Dog Days
  2. Woman Of A Thousand Faces
  3. Driving In A Watercolor
in that order.




Photograph courtesy webshots.com
Wine Country Above

Standing on a grassy hill in the cool of an oak tree, with my hands in my pockets I let my gaze bathe the wine country. An open skyscape above, an open landscape below show up in my opened space. I can't find edges between the two scapes and my space. I am the skyscape. I am the landscape. I am the wine country.

In the unity of it all, in the oneness of all this that I am, a still small voice calls out in the back of my head desperate to be heard. From time to time I may listen to it. From time to time I may even respond like a loving parent listening to a child crying for attention. That's when I notice with wonder and awe how, being one with it all, I'm thrown automatically to pull back, to separate myself from it. I am this wine country / I'm not this wine country. The mixture is both disconcerting and liberating.

I love this wine country bathing in my gaze. It's more than love - I don't know what it is but it's more than love.

When it's hot I'm hot. When it's cool I'm cool. When I'm in the mood for creating I dab ice white cloud wisps high on the deep saffron sunrise sky. Then, just for fun, I skitter them languidly from horizon to horizon, playfully chasing after them with a moaning in ecstasy softly sighing dry morning breeze.

When I look down at the valley floor carpeted with ruler edged corduroy lines of vines, it's groaning under the weight of a rich, bountiful harvest. In my mind's eye I run my fingers through them just as I would caress my lover's long sensuous hair as it cascades over my body like water from a breaking wave.

This is my lover, this wine country. And I'm the wine country. I'm totally blown away by it and slightly in tears. We're surrounded by beauty like this which we drive by everyday not seeing. I'm that beauty which is trivialized into normalcy by frittering talk of no consequence. Yet when I'm here, when I'm this wine country, there's enough for everyone, there's no war, and everyone goes to sleep at night with a satisfied stomach.

This is the possibility of the wine country.

Wine Country Below
Photograph courtesy webshots.com



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