Come closer
I offer more than a glimpse
I am fuller than light across the sill
Let me take your breath away with my vastness
I do not fear you looking in
Seeing my bent tree and cracked stone
On balance I am the grand view not the lone pebble.
Re-posted from Collective Evolution Facebook page
Cracked open
Human seed exposed
Germinating in decay
Rotted trunk gardens
Brewing organisms in deathbeds
Steeped in sun and water
Igniting delicious
Hunger for
Life
Anew
Free Bing photos
Oh that whore! She comes on like a beast. Whipping her snow and ice, demanding I heel. She blinds in her furious whiteness and pushes me hard against the door with her pounding wind. I slam it in her face and stumble to the stairs, breathless. I am Ahab and she Moby Dick.
“You shall not pass!” If I had Gandalf’s staff I’d have slammed it to the earth, but in truth, this statement is made rather weakly as she has, in fact, commanded me thoroughly all the way home. I have skated more than walked. Trudged bent, more than floated, regally. My fingers are stiff, my face wind burned and cold. I learned in karate, though, that if your opponent has greater skill, at least come out sounding ferocious. It may, in the end, be the only edge you’ll ever have. I head up stairs and unravel myself of gloves, coat and scarf. Snow pours off onto the floor and the cats scatter. My nose is soon running, but I am not put off. I stand before the dining room window and survey my winter kingdom and sniffle. I may be a snotty queen, but I am The Queen here.
Snow lifts off in waves from the roofs curling and swirling and slamming back hard toward the earth. Trees rock and sway in the gusting winds and the broken slot in one of my gutters whistles and moans. I startle at the sudden whipping of the screens against the windows, but regain my composure lest she think she has caught me off guard. She is impressive, I must give her that, but I am no puny human. I raise my arms up to command the winds, “Regale me with your winter taunts, you nefarious witch! Tear the shingles if you must, I will not be intimidated.” Admittedly, my cavalier stance comes from good homeowner’s insurance, but she knows nothing of this. She only sees my defiance and strength.
“I, not you,” I hiss, venomously with flashing eyes, “am the Winter Queen here!”
Couple at Johnston Lake: Photo by Noelle
My neighbor’s wife had a stroke, not sure how long before I moved here. He is her full time caregiver and maybe in his early seventies. On a rare occasion, when the weather is warm, he brings her out to sit in a lawn chair in the garage and feel the sun. He will listen to talk radio or in baseball season the Rockies losing badly to someone. Every day he walks his chihuahua who barks as if he were a pitbull about to take your leg off. Though the sound can be grating, I can’t help but be impressed by the bravado of a creature that would be a single gulp to a real pitbull. My neighbor shares with this tiniest of fellows the only walks of freedom he knows all day away from his wife. Sometimes he leaves his dog out on the porch below mine late at night and the dog barks persistently to come in. I realize without seeing that my neighbor has likely fallen asleep in front of the TV and forgotten the dog. I wake him to bring the dog in by knocking at his door. He always seems so embarrassed, but I can feel his exhaustion, as he stands in his T-shirt at the door. I’m not sure how to say I’m not worried about the dog, just him.
The neighbor caddy corner to me never opens their shades. I haven’t a clue who or how many people live there, but the lights are on each evening. Winter, spring, summer, fall… Always down. I used to wonder if such people are hoarders, but over the years I’ve learned some people see only a world within, while still others fear the world without.
Two doors over and a flight down a grandfather comes out regularly with his golden retriever and grandson. Oh how the boy giggles and delights in the golden hip dip in snow. Across the parking lot a man stands, cigarette in his mouth, and watches without any interest; never looking away, but not looking at them really either. I wonder what he sees in the ring of smoke that circles his head. I don’t think his wife lets him smoke indoors. This is also true for my neighbor to the west. She sits in her running car, in the garage, with door open, smoking at all hours. I once approached thinking she’d accidentally left her car running. Given her irritation with my query as to whether she was all right, it was evident she’d been asked this before. Opportunities to a smoker to smoke are oddly sacred things, since it’s become an ordeal to do it. I used to smoke, so I get it, but listening to her react I realize how much I don’t miss it.
The planet is covered in billions of lives. Each person carving out their own patterns and habits. Living out stories we know nothing about. It’s not our business what all these people do, but sometimes it’s worth bearing witness to what we don’t know about so much that we see and take for granted as pieces of our own weird little world’s. My neighbor two doors down is as mousy a person as you could ever meet, but her penchant for holiday lights, banners, window displays and colorful decorations year round goes unmatched. She a gray mouse has a vibrant dragon inside her soul that pours out all over her front stoop. I rarely see her out, but I will return home and Valentine’s Day is gone and a lucky clover leaf greets me as I walk up. She is both a caricature of dime store decorations and someone entirely unknown to me beyond my random observations.
Who am I, I wonder, to all of them? What do they see as they see me come and go day to day? Am I acting out of blind habits I’ve performed a thousand times or am I mindful of who I am in this moment and who I am becoming? So many moments pass with little attention that I cannot take back. Somehow it seems very important to really see this moment and feel what is happening in it. It may make no difference to my neighbors, but I’m thinking it should make a great deal of difference to me.
Free Bing Photos.
I’m not sure how I got lost. The moon was out and I’d chosen a wooded trail, but with unseasonably warm weather the snow had all melted and it proved darker than I’d expected. I’d been following the creek which meandered off to my left. I’d hear it occasionally babbling away in the dark; happily, contentedly, peacefully. Such a lovely sound, but then at some point I realized I was running into more trees. As I looked back over my shoulder to see if I could discern the trail I stepped full on into the creek. A pair of mallards had been sleeping in the same spot and my sudden arrival sent them into the air dashing right by my head as they aimed for the creek. (Okay, maybe an exaggeration, but if FELT like they flew by my head) Such a ruckus they made, and now completely startled, I screamed stumbling backwards, slipping on some river stones and bum-planted into the muddy embankment. For a second, I was a bit stunned, until that comedian’s voice that lives in my head suddenly piped up, “It’s always a good time until someone ends up in the river”. If I hadn’t been so cold I might’ve laughed. The birds continued to squawk and quack announcing to the entire woodland that the sky was falling, as they splashed down into the creek maybe fifty yards out.
“What are you all quacking about?” I hollered at them, completely flummoxed, “I’m the one in this bloody snow melt with no duck fat!”
Ducks will gad on, long after they’ve headed downstream, as if they are endlessly calling back rude comments at you.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah…” I mutter as I pulled my now cold, wet and muddy arse out of the creek. “Everyone’s gotta an opinion. Move on,” I call out as strong as a Boston beat cop. “There’s nothing more to see here….” The birds ignore me, but their quacking is now idle bitching and I stumble back toward the trail.
Profanities are a greater gift than most people realize. In such moments they give real vigor to an otherwise completely impotent moment. The “F” word in particular is not only The Great Profanity, but one of my favorite words in the English language. No word holds its influence or power. We use it to express anger, fear, love, passion, confusion and brimming joy. It’s a noun, a verb, an adverb and an adjective depending on our predicament. On this occasion I used it liberally on the long and numbing walk home. I make no apologies. My feet were colder than Icelandic cod three days dead. If the ducks were offended I can hardly be held to blame. I certainly didn’t teach them English, but if I did, I would’ve definitely started with the “F” word.
Anticipation builds as you climb the hill and near the crest or travel the road that comes to a bend. You could come this way a dozen times and you never lose the sense of magic at what lies around the corner or over the hill. It is as ingrained in our spirit as the breath of life itself. We are meant to explore, discover and ponder this Universe we were given. We are all adventurers, though some of us have fallen asleep in the field. Comfy we’ve become that we are more like a cat in a sunny window, even when the sun has diminished and the earth has grown cold.
Wake up, wake up, you sleepy head! Do not linger in this spot for too long. There is more of Magellan in your belly than the sitting hen, you oft convince yourself you’ve become. Listen closely. Do you not hear it? The trail calls just over the hill. Just over the hill and around the next bend.
If you ever want to see how ingrained a habit is, try breaking it, even once. I meditate every day after work. The weather has been unseasonably warm and to not go out in it would be a travesty, as my mother would say. To catch it I have to leave as soon as I get home and delay my sit for just a bit. Small thing, right? Even as I feel an exhilaration to hit the trail my feet drag as my body clearly wants to sit for meditation. Working at getting out the front door is tantamount to walking through a tunnel of cotton candy. It’s odd feeling your body wanting to go back inside as your head, heads out. That odd feeling though, is the sound of gears grinding on my ego’s ideas on how life should be. I’ve been thinking lately that I should practice that grind more often.
On any given day, goose poop litters the paths and sidewalks all the way to the marsh. On my walks I hop between the piles looking as if I’m playing the longest game of hopscotch ever. I know it’s pointless since, as the snow melts, the runoff is full of goose poop. What appears to be a clean path, isn’t. Still, I hop along imagining I am a paratrooper crossing a mind field into enemy lines. One wrong step and I’m done. Its entertainment for me, if not my neighbors and reminds me of being ten. Today, however, I remembered the muckers. I have sneakers I only wear to my friend’s barn to muck the stalls. Their bottoms have slogged through a lot of horse manure and I leave them in the garage. I don them happily knowing they were made for the world’s biggest piles of dung and finally leave my stoop.
A neighbor’s voice carries easily across the lake in a deep baritone, as he appears to be talking to someone on the phone. It is impossible not to eavesdrop.
“Everywhere we go, I ask after someone and they always say, “Oh that guy, he’s been dead for ages”. Then they seem all apologetic. Alice just says, “Don’t worry honey, we thought we should be dead ages ago, too.” His laughter banks off the houses on the other side of the lake and I can’t help but smile.
“Listen, listen here… I went to my 61st high school reunion. They had a list of names of those who graduated that year. Three pages of dead folks and a page of the living. All anyone wants to talk about is how so and so died. If he died parachuting out of a plane or in a runaway train ya got my ear, but other than that, hearing how old people died is about as interesting as stewed beets. Honestly, I’ve had a better time at a funeral.” He guffaws loudly. “Huh? Hell, I’ve already written my obit. No one lies about my accomplishments better than me. Ain’t that right, Alice.” I think I hear a kind of grunt come from inside the house, presumably Alice.
“No, no… I’m gonna be 87 next week. No, I’m not kidding.” He slams his hand down, emphatically, on the deck rail. “I’ll be 87. A guy called the other day to try to sell Alice and I life insurance. We told ’em if he was selling death insurance we’d be in!” Laughter storms the lake.
“I make a damn fine Rob Roy, I tell ya and here, listen up… If I get to heaven before you, I’ll have the finest Rob Roy you’ve ever had sittin’ there on the bar…. Well, hell, if you can’t drink in heaven where can you drink? Ain’t that right, Alice” Finally, Alice appears on the deck, “Ask him if he thinks that was water they were drinkin’ in those cups at the last supper? Ask him that.” I realize I’ve fallen in love with a woman I’ve never met.
Their banter continues and I walk on facing the setting western sun. They say sunlight is good for the cones in your eyes and that all of our sunglass wearing is actually weakening our eyesight. All our indoors-ness and computer screens are shortening our cones and causing them to vibrate in shorter color ranges. Holistic practitioners say we should get at least thirty minutes of sun every day. This is also true of the pituitary gland, I’ve read. That as we age the pituitary calcifies and it needs sunlight to blast off those calcifications. These are the sort of odd concerns and thoughts one has as they age. Do I have a clean pituitary gland? I mean, who wants a pituitary as hard as your shin bone. So I walk with my eye lids half closed and let the sun warm my eyes and imagine a limber pituitary and long, vibrating cones. Or I do for few moments, but the sun is warm and speaks so much of spring that after a time I am walking, half lidded thinking of beaches and warmer days to come. My meditation time is now long forgotten, along with the goose poop, as I walk into the sunny marsh. I realize I have gone from weird hopscotch lady to pituitary worrying sun bather. I remember the old man having himself a fine laugh at death with his old gal, Alice. I laugh, too. Me and my muckers and my calcified pituitary and short, faded, retinal cones, breaking the ceiling on my wierd little habits. I laugh even harder and wish I could confirm how funny life is with old Alice.
Bear Creek Lake: Photo by Noelle
Late afternoon and they are the briefest flash. Light catchers snagging flames before dark. I don’t know who I was before I was the one who sees them. I suspect it doesn’t matter now. Once the heart sees it can never be truly blind again.
Lakeside: Photo by Noelle
The bench is on the west side of the lake. The trail on this side is little more than mud in January’s warm up. The Eastern side has some stone trails that are well cleared and thus, more trafficked. I am alone, for the moment, and commit to listening and little more.
The wind rubs the winter grass stalks at my feet against each other, dry even in the mud. A warm sun would turn them green, but in these short days their rattle is little more than a reminder of summer snakes long asleep in their holes. Prairie dogs bark incessantly at me, at first. My stillness conquers. Eventually, they chatter amongst themselves no more than old women over a mahjong board. Even in the animal kingdom, neighborhoods have their gossips. The jet passes to the north heading up the spine of the Rockies. I think of travel and vacations both taken and imagined, but the real fly boys bring me back, as the geese come trumpeting off the icy lake heading for fields to dine. I marvel at the pattern. Squawking and honking begins until some unknown pitch is hit and then part of the flock suddenly rises and flies off. The length of this flock must be more than a city block. The group that rises comes from one end of the lake to the other. Some of the groups head east, while others to the south, as if they are aware where the group before them headed and know to seek pastures elsewhere.
I can hear the jogger coming for some time as her running shoes slap the surface of the mud. She is breathing hard and there is the faint tinny sound of music coming through earbuds. Another flock takes off and the wind pushes back my hood. Two women cut through the grassy hillside to beat the muddy trail and talk about teenagers with piercings. The longer I sit the more I’m aware I seem to have left the machine. The swaying cattails are riveting compared to nose rings. I wonder, briefly, where this disengagement with the fast moving world will take me, but even that thought seems more intense then this winter sun will allow. I rest back against the bench and listen.
After a time, I forget I’m not growing out of the dirt like the grass.
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