“Nor can a mind that is filled with knowledge perceive what truth is; only a mind that is completely capable of learning can do that; learning is not the accumulation of knowledge; learning is a movement from moment to moment.”—Krishnamurti, You Are The World

“Walk this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.”—Walt Whitman, Leaves Of Grass

I like that: “Walk this day and night with me….” I’ve used it before, a few times. To me at any rate it sounds like Krishnamurti’s “movement from moment to moment.”

It’s not: “Sit right there on your pretentious ass and read this book of poems which will blow your mind and crush your puny intellect beneath the titanic mountain of learning that is obviously and indisputably mine.”

Nor is it: “If only you were an artist as I am and could possibly fathom the immeasurable depths of passionate insight that flood my consciousness every instant of the day and render me a being so unimaginably elevated above the common run of humankind all necessity to communicate intelligibly with you wouldn’t be abrogated and in any case utterly futile.”

No. It’s none of that.

It’s simply a ‘let’s go for a walk,’ and perhaps the barriers that separate and imprison us within our self-created cells might slowly dissolve to disclose the unity and harmony underlying all.

A Zen-like (Xenon-like) return to simplicity and clarity. An un-learning of the knowledge which we’ve accumulated in order to fashion a life of sorts in this over-elaborated community we inhabit and a relearning of play, re-creation.

Learning a movement from moment to moment: a wholehearted participation in time, outward from a center. How are we to know and realize the breadth of our being if we don’t act out and learn from a center? Knowledge without center is fact, devoid of relationship and hence meaning.

What goes on here at the Omphalos Cafe, this isn’t writing—it’s play, pure and simple. It’s a celebration.

***

  My lunch is nearly over and there’s more meat to be picked up. There’s a bin full of dead pigs waiting for me out there and another one of the entrails of recently slaughtered pigs too. I’ll roll them on to my truck’s forks and dump them into the box, listening all the while to music on the iPod or the musings of my fancy.

The sky is an unbroken blue and the snow caparisoned Rocky Mountains are sixty kilometers to the west and accompany me for the better part of the afternoon.

What isn’t there to celebrate?

Later, at my next stop, a woman stared into the soggy smelly meat filled bucket of my truck. “You pick this stuff up all day?” she asked in disbelief. “Yes,” I answered, “and later there’ll be pigs and cow guts too.” She walked away shaking her head and muttering: “How can anyone do that?”

“You know,” I said, “it isn’t all glamor and romance. There’s some hard work involved too.”

I like to think I help people feel good about their jobs. If not here at the Cafe, at least where I work.