Inside the Spin-Mosaic Studio

The word "synergy" stems from the days of horses. Two horses together can pull more weight than the sum of what each horse can pull alone. Synergy speaks of more than math; it speaks of heart. It speaks of strength when in reliance together.

The mantra of encouragement, "We are in this together!" drips from the lips of many TV voices as this pandemic goes on. Synergy, indeed: words of gold.

Anyone who owned a horse 150 years ago could tell you about synergy. Anyone was just about everyone "back then" before cars and trucks were invented. By the way, where did all the trash along the road come from before cars with rolling windows were invented? --cans, bags, bottles, strewn plastic weaving tapestries between old dead cornstalks?

That's where my mind wanders when walking our country road with my dog in the first light of morning--like I did today. Fields and trees sway. Birds chirp. The sound of a woodpecker agitates a wooden swing set. Just as quietness reverberates every sound into a chorus, the first few minutes of the first rays illuminate in a different way.

The asphalt crumbles onto the shoulder and fades into a ditch, rising into a burm at the edge of an expansive, barren cornfield. Objects along the pebbly, bushy segue flash like reflecting gold. Even my dog turns her head. A couple times she lunged and bit into the empty air.

What is flashing? --broken parts and pieces of whatever was chucked out windows through the winter months. As the sun rays strike, the edges of each broken glass or plastic shard glistens.

I doubt this phenomenon is unique to my road. As they say in Kentucky, "When hunting for 'coons; you gotta be out when the coons are out." If you want to see how much trash has been thrown out car windows over the winter, show up in the Spring on a county road when the first rays of sun scrape the horizon. 

My dog was not thrilled to linger on her leash while I groveled on my belly to snap pictures of this stream of blue plastic. She has learned this is what artists do. This is what photographers do. We find beauty and analogy in the ordinary.

From the same picture-snapping hand-held device, social media clamors messages to, "Stay clean." Moms are pulling their hair out saying, "My kids are bored." The globe is pleading, "Make the world a better place." Voices from our TV sets (like this one) say, "Get outside. Take walks." I would rather see the backsides of synergistic horses grazing than the backside of a tossed television in the field next to my mailbox.

What if we combined a couple of these mantras and got busy? If every bored person set out to clean more than hands and faces, and took a walk with a trash bag in the midst of our boredom, we could clean up a lot of gold along the edges of our world together...or, chrome. I jumped the ditch to get a picture of this natural hubcap terrarium.

My dog and I were close enough to our driveway now that she tugged the leash a little harder towards home. 

The corner of my eye saw a thick tangle flashing just beyond the backside of the crushed TV--a tossed pile of old VHS tapes! How responsible of the manufacturer to put a caution sticker on the edge, "Be Kind: Please Rewind." Do you remember sitting down with a bowl of hot popcorn to watch a great flick only to find you had to listen to the whir of the rewind button for 20 minutes because the last person to watch it didn't? Popcorn gets cold fast. 

It's too bad the sticker didn't say, "Be Kind: Don't Dump in a Field." There are many ways to be responsible. Must we list them all? 

Working together in synergy can illuminate the best of humanity on dark days and early mornings. Spoiler alert, this is about more than flashy trash. As we live our lives peering from behind anxious face masks, let's be sure our masks block germs and not vision. This world needs more people bonded together with the synergy of horses, not horses with blinders over their eyes.

Let's use our time well as we walk our own unique metaphoric roads. Modernism may strangle the need to return to the days of horses, but the days of synergy?  

Be kind. Please Rewind. Clear the TV's and bring back the horses.