THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love, happiness & understanding

 

December 4, 2025

 

Kim Stafford shared this poem by David Budbill:

 

Sometimes

 

Sometimes when day after day we have cloudless blue skies,
warm temperatures, colorful trees and brilliant sun, when
it seems like all this will go on forever,

 

when I harvest vegetables from the garden all day,
then drink tea and doze in the late afternoon sun,
and in the evening one night make pickled beets
and green tomato chutney, the next red tomato chutney,
and the day after that pick the fruits of my arbor
and make grape jam,

 

when we walk in the woods every evening over fallen leaves,
through yellow light, when nights are cool, and days warm,

 

when I am so happy I am afraid I might explode or disappear
or somehow be taken away from all this,

 

at those times when I feel so happy, so good, so alive, so in love
with the world, with my own sensuous, beautiful life, suddenly

 

I think about all the suffering and pain in the world, the agony
and dying. I think about all those people being tortured, right now,
in my name. But I still feel happy and good, alive and in love with
the world and with my lucky, guilty, sensuous, beautiful life because,

 

I know in the next minute or tomorrow all this may be
taken from me, and therefore I’ve got to say, right now,
what I feel and know and see, I’ve got to say, right now,
how beautiful and sweet this world can be.

 

—David Budbill

*

 

From “The Marginalian,” an online journal:

 

Here we are, living these lives bright and perishable as a poppy, hard and shimmering as obsidian. We know that they are entirely improbable, that we bless that bright improbability with each flash of gratitude for it all, that if we pay attention closely and generously enough we are always repaid in gladness, that it is the handle of the door to the world. And yet over and over we choose to live in the cage of complaint, too preoccupied with how the will of life betrayed our wishes, the wanting monster always growling in the other corner of the cage.

 

Imagine parting the bars and stepping out. Imagine waking up with a rush of gladness at everything we were never promised but got anyway — trees and music, clouds and consciousness, the cobalt eye of the scallop, the golden fan of the gingko, the alabaster chandelier of the ghost pipe.

 

In our age of competitive prostration, this is a headstand hard to hold for long. But it is trainable. It is possible to become strong enough to be tender, it is.

 

—Maria Popova, editor of “The Marginalian,” November 23, 2025

*

 

I’ve been keeping a journal more-or-less daily for 55 years. Sometimes it’s fun to revisit things I’ve written. This is from last Spring:

 

friday, april 25th, 2025

 

the conventional way of looking at perfect moments is that they happen once in a while

they’re brief

and then they’re gone

and we’re back to boring everyday humdrum life

but it’s possible to experience perfect moments as having nothing to do with time

they don’t have a beginning or end

you could say they last a lifetime—or that they are a lifetime

the beauty of humans overwhelms me!!!!!!!

it’s getting ridiculous!

i don’t know what to do with it, or how to communicate it

 

saturday, april 26th, 2025

 

yesterday, i watched “the accountant 2” at the laurelhurst theater, from 4 to 6

it was a beautiful sunny spring day

after two hours in a dark theater, under the spell of a movie, when you come out and it’s still daytime, the sunshine seems brighter and everything more vivid and somehow more real

you’ve been immersed in an imaginary reality—under its spell—and now you’re in the actual world

as i walked by the crema coffee house and the moon shot tavern, lots of people were outside at picnic tables

it’s friday, they’ve just gotten off work, the sun is shining and they’re in a good mood

a little girl of about 4 or 5 is running down the sidewalk toward me

she’s laughing as she runs

she’s the happiest person on earth

her happiness goes right into me

passing a food cart area, there are lots more people at picnic tables

and the sound they are making together is a joyous one

and i have a feeling which is also a thought that people are so beautiful!

and then the thought that moments don’t have boundaries

although we are accustomed to thinking that they do

and thinking that they are short

and that perfect moments are infrequent, and then quickly gone

but they’re not gone

john keats said

a thing of beauty is a joy for ever

maybe a reason that this quote became famous is because it expresses a deeper truth than mr. gradgrind’s facts:

 

Chapter 1

The One Thing Needful

‘Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, Sir!’

 

—Gradgrind, the schoolmaster, from the opening of Hard Times by Charles Dickens

 

the way I was seeing and feeling and being when the little girl was laughing and running toward me and people nearby were in a glorious mood—that way of seeing and feeling and being is truer for me than the feeling i have when i’m reading the new york times

in those boundaryless moments i’m alive!

 

thich nhat hanh says you can spend your whole life in a kind of exile from the present moment and miss your life entirely

if you died and went to the pearly gates, they’d look in the book and see that you haven’t lived yet—and send you back for another try

 

scientific and rational ways of knowing are not bad

and they leave things out, like imagination, love, beauty and meaning

 

to see a world in a grain of sand

and a heaven in a wild flower

 

a thing of beauty is a joy for ever

 

(maybe those romantic poets gave me a blessing)

(maybe they changed the way i see and feel and experience the world)

 

if the sight of a tulip or a hummingbird goes into you deeply enough, it does something to you

it changes you

 

my primary felt experience is that i am living in Paradise

 

—Johnny Stallings

*

 

Earth Born Creatures

 

The gravel parking lot smells

like oil, the trash strewn woods

back up the roadhouse to the creek.

 

A boxy banana-colored car

rusts there, sags a bit in

changeable late afternoon light.

 

The long-waisted girl in torn jeans

pauses over her broom. Fantasy

burns through her, leaves a tired ache

 

for pretty things, clean lines, shine.

She looks at her hands

Her fingers not quite straight

 

caught that way in the womb

they remind her that she is subject

to time and accidents of fate.

 

A scrawny tabby steps out of shadow,

primly wraps his tail round his feet.

They stare at each other. The girl blinks

 

thinks of comfort and laughs.

The cat imagines cornering mice.

An owl awakens hungry back in the trees.

 

—Elizabeth Domike

*

 

Here are a couple of excerpts from two of Rocky’s many letters:

 

November 11, 2025

4 a.m.

Dear Johnny & Nancy

 

We all got the day off in here due to the holidays. We have a lot of holidays this month. Soon the year will be over, too. I’ve been looking back a little in time & knowing 17 years is quite a long time, it seems like it was…only a few days ago that I came into D.O.C. custody! I think it’s because time, in our minds, moves differently. In our minds we can slow it down, or, speed it up. We could freeze it as well, if we wanted to.

 

It’s a sad reality to think that I’ve spent ⅓ of the life I’ve been given this time around as a prisoner. I know that I deserved to serve this time. Without my life in here I would not be who I am now. That would not be good, because I would never have met the people in my life that I love & who help make me who I am. I would never have gotten to become the man I am today. That thought just gave me chills. Those seeds of wild emotions—Empathy, Joy, Kindness, Love, Wonder, Humility—that were scattered upon my heart, mind & soul, like someone scattering handfuls of wildflower seeds on a hillside is what grows inside of me. You two had a hand in scattering those seeds. I believe we each, in our own ways, help each other’s hearts to grow & heal in all sorts of ways…..

 

November 12, 2025

4:27 a.m.

We had a conversation on the phone yesterday afternoon. It was nice to talk about many different things. We had talked a few days before about that! It’s easy to talk about release from prison under the circumstances.

 

One of the things that stuck out to me was the peace that I get from waking up early in here. It truly is the only quiet time of the day. What I’ve been thinking about is that Kim Stafford does that & his dad did too. The fact to me that really rang a bell was how he came by doing it. He started doing it in a prison camp!

 

Prison is not a place where most can find or have a second of peace, most are overwhelmed by frustrations, sadness, hopelessness and misery. All those emotions & vibes come off of them & touch and trigger emotions in others, even reaching the staff sometimes.  I found that if I start my day as early as I can & meditate in my writing, do my letters to home & do my school work, my days are most of the time started on the Golden Path. Everyone is still sleeping and none of the negativity is in the air. I love starting my days off before the world comes to life….

 

Always planting good seeds in the World,

Rocky

—Rocky Hutchinson