you’d think that the urgency would grow greater as time moved on. however, in truth, the urgency dulls. and the passage of time becomes a lulling, rocking, ocean putting me to sleep.
i lay on my back staring at the blue, blue sky. not a cloud in it but here and there a sea bird; gulls and terns, if i’m lucky an osprey. the boat moves underneath me, bring me closer into the bowl of the sky and then drawing me down. the water laps against the sides, little ripples that can otherwise be so devastating.
i turn my head so i can see the shore – the house looks so still and austere. bathed in sunlight and haloed by the green trees, the rocks of the maine coastline make a perfect, crackless foundation. brett is on the porch w/ my friend silence, feet up on the railing, leaning back in the rocking chairs. every once in a while i believe i can catch the tones of their laughter ringing out across the still water.
open moments like this don’t come often enough and i wish i could inhabit them more fully. i fill my breath again and exhale consciously, knowing there is life all around me. how do i ensure that life will go on? how do i stop the machines from rolling forward? i take it for granted that if people knew what they were doing, they would stop. it disappoints to know that is not true.
i stare at the hotel across the shallow canyon – even in this wild place someone thought to build a mega-plex – what business had they? i spent yesterday up in an ice-carved granite basin. jumping into glacial waters, listening to the sounds of waterfalls (some i could see through the tall pines and juniper scrub and others i could not). there were so few people there being reminded of their proper place in the universe. a mother and daughter who asked us if they were close to the top, a husband and wife in their late 60s saying hello and passing us on the way down, a hiker-outdoorsy queen who’d lived up in the glen alpine wilderness in 1966. “It was very hippy. It was very, very hippy.” he shared his discontent with the size of the vehicles that inhabit the tahoe roads nowadays. the hangouts have moved from the campground general store to the supermarket parking lot.
it used to be that you could be reminded of your place by joining a wagon train across the west. or riding your horse through the woods. or looking off your back porch to where your fields ended, and the forest began. but now, where do we look to know we are small? as people move more and more into cities, what we see is largely made up of things we create in our perceived dominance. it takes a natural disaster to remind us that we are incidental to continued life on this planet. these waves do not care if i am here to enjoy their roll.