I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown. slow down. Whether heading to work or walking to my car through a grocery store lot or taking my dog

Finn out for a walk, I spend a good deal of winter's cold days imagining my toes burrowed in sand on a beach somewhere. To generate

heat I transport myself mentally to warm spots on the earth.

After years of living in a region of the country,

where wind chills dip temperatures to Arctic levels,

I habitually picture myself leaning back in a chair on the edge of an ocean.

Dozing as filtered light penetrates my closed eyelids and the sound of the surf sway guides me to the land of slumber.

What feeds that projection are my memories. That summer trip to the Kult dazieu in 2011 returns to me most easily.

How easily I see the lemon-colored light of the Mediterranean, glittering Azure blue waters, summer crowds

with umbrellas, blankets, flip-flops, and beverage coolers.

Yet lately, I've wondered if the nether regions of my brain are in on the action.

That is, is it possible that I also tap into the well spring of films, paintings, and literature

I've absorbed over the years that reside in me to help counter the weight of shortened days.

It's like the mind transcends the limits of the body in its physical environment, or guides the conscious part of us to make art

by assessing those areas of our subconscious where the works of imagination and real events are stored.

For example, because of my interest in the Harlem Renaissance

and writers like County Cullen, Zora Neil Hurston and Langston Hughes. I have read quite a bit of literature

and criticism written during the 1920s. I have also seen the decade set on the big screen in many movies and listened to the music of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Cab Callaway, all of which feeds into the subconscious, so that I actually hear the era we know as the jazz age. I imagine other poets, scholars, musicians and artists can seemingly inhabit years past.

Today's poem taps into the beauty and spirit of California seaside beaches,

whose a mass mythology and symbolism feeds so much of how we imagine and hear America.

Fish Pier Santa Monica by Vernon Duke,

...