the ecstasy of melancholy

Riding my bicycle up Clement, just above Lincoln Park, I was arrested by a posse of small birds.

Detained for a moment or two, I was released after showing i.d. and assuring the authorities my intentions were peaceful, that I only wanted to continue my ride to The Great Highway and beyond.

The fearless little black birds went back to their business.

The incident put me in mind of William Carlos Williams, and his poem "To Waken an Old Lady".

I'd taken a poetry class in college and an older student, born in New Jersey, showed the class his birth certificate, signed by Dr. Williams. 

At several places during my long ride, I thought of the man. 

After Whitman, he is our great ecstatic poet.

There's no ecstacy without melancholy I thought, resting after the steep climb from The Great Highway up Balboa, remembering the highs and lows of Williams' writing and thinking how his mind might have worked.

How small the black birds are, how unafraid!

And now the revelation by neuroscience that the smaller you are, the more you live in the moment.