I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

And this is the slowdown.

Lately I've taken to opening the app Plainfinder when I spot aircraft in the sky, so that I can view its route. I'd like to imagine a cabin full of passengers, either dozing, reading, listening to music or watching a movie.

I imagine their lives.

Whether their trip is for business or pleasure, who might greet them when they land, what tourist sites they will

visit for the first time.

My impulse to follow airplanes is not unrelated to the pleasure gained in tracking the mind of an author

as they process and interpret experiences inside a poem. Every poem is a map, a transcription of a contemplative and roaming mind.

I'm curious about the images that arise out of the poet's subconscious and the associative

thoughts that follow.

I particularly delight in the poet whose brain works at scale,

a mind that soars from the granular level to expansive ideas

and hovers in between.

Each of us has our own brand of thinking. How we think corresponds to our

demeanor, assumptions, biases, and obsessions all shaped by our experience on Earth.

Today's poem self-consciously cautions us

to the risk associated with thoughts that might fall in the category of pretense

or thoughts that are removed from the everyday.

The Palms Movement itself montages a dynamic energy of symbol and form that paint an indelible

portrait of an inner life and how we might learn too to process our world.

The dangers of contemplation by Ron Slate.

Follow the seagull aloft and arcs above the ballpark.

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