A Sunday morning, and what I have been doing but sleeping and reading? Yesterday I drove down to Soquel village and off to the pool where I go swimming. All day long I thought yesterday was Sunday, and nobody seemed interested in correcting me. Namely because nobody knew what I was thinking. I was thinking that the streets looked empty, as they do on Sundays. I was thinking that the local Congregational Church had gotten out early, or perhaps either I was driving by it later than usual or they had changed the hours when they conduct their services. Nothing out there gave me indication that this was not Sunday, until later in the day, the early afternoon, when I sat up close to the house while reading a novel in the sunshine, when suddenly the US Mail truck pulled up next to my mail box down on the road. Why would the mail lady come to my house on Sunday? Was it a very, very special package or letter she was bringing me that just could not wait for my receipt? Oh, wait, today is Saturday!

My five-day work week used to rule all my thoughts all the time. Even in the ticking of seconds in the weekend afternoons, I was subconsciously counting or estimating the number of ticks through which I might live, before I must once again arise, put on my work clothes, and go be part of that collective world where all synchronize their efforts according to the clock. Now there is very little of that. Even the livelihood of payments from pension and government security float into my banking account surreptitiously in the middle of the night when I am asleep, when I am not particularly caring or concerned about the timeliness of the process.

Garbage and recycle trucks arrive on Wednesdays, usually in the early mornings, so if I am interested in sleeping in on Wednesdays, which I usually am, then it means I must get the cans out to the edge of the road sometime on Tuesday night. But when is Tuesday night? There is nothing else in my day that requires me to relate garbage night and the day of the week, unless I conscientiously make the effort to watch the calendar. I spend enough time at the computer, however, that Bill Gates is always willing to deliver the correct time down in the tiny, bottom right-hand corner of my screen. I get that and anti-virus alerts, and internet connectivity indications, and a whole lot of dull and somewhat useless information, all within a detailed half-square inch on my screen, in a place that doesn't really exist except in the cyberworld, in a thing called a tray.

Monday, many of my neighbors get up early and go somewhere all day long. If I am awake that early, I can hear them going down the road before the sun is up. They must drive far and what they do when they get there must be important to somebody else, because they sure drive by here fast in the morning darkness. I remember having that less than delightful urgency always hanging over me during my working years. Such deep knowledge of the movements of the clock, such deep desire to please someone somewhere, a boss perhaps, in some concrete and lifeless building somewhere far away from me and from the forest in which I live.

I know there are new rhythms to living besides that of the clock, which is a totally man-made invention used to enslave people. In winter I try to stick to the rhythm of the sun rising and setting, but often the mornings are too cold to leave the warmth of the fire place, and besides, even the birds in the forest are hardly awake, so why I should be? Winter sunsets come too early to call it the end of the day, as these days then slide into darkness about the time I feel like I have finally awakened. No, I get the sense that some other rhythm is available with which to clock my life. What did people do before they got hung up counting and watching hours slide by? Maybe listen to the hunger inside of themselves, count the cycles of the moon, and not fuss too much over the passage of time.