Evening thoughts

Tonight the sky is clear. Altogether cloudless as far as vision will carry. Slivers of pale hues stream through the seemingly timeless Douglas Firs standing immeasurably tall still after these years traversing the west for a southern boy bound to the vision of Pine forests and Black Walnut. This perspective of the cosmos on this land changed over years of use and misuse provide an ephemeral glimpse of the ages long passed populated by individuals whose names and their pronunciations long forgotten but whose bodies perhaps still fertilize this ground. For that time is not altogether lost not eternally silenced by the march of our progressive colonization of the living. I still hear the coyotes merely yards away and the breeze through these trees who were mere saplings. We are not separated from the past, yet. When the rough calloused bark makes contact with skin it is not the individual tree which is known but a family of trees reaching back before myth, before gods, before polarity before all that which we manifested. It is eternity.

The moon rises ever upward to its nightly crescendo in silence but the wild dogs seem to herald its course through the increasing lonesomeness of sound. These nights are cherished. Nights where I can sit in the deepening darkness without concern for the dawn. The time of division and separation lapses if only for a moment. This is peace. This is the time where the self and the other find union. By day we have divided and subdivided and yet again divided our lives into an ever increasing segregation of roles and tasks which have little bearing on the real only the contrived. But by evening we can, if we are quiet, if we are humble, be sewn back into the fabric that is our breath. There are no closed systems despite our attempts to compartmentalize everything. As if the health of our bodies was independent from spiritual health or the health of the soil. That our sex could be separated from our words or from our thoughts. That our work could be cloistered away from our home. In the enveloping darkness we may find unity.

The sky is still clear...Big Bear is passing slowly overhead. The air smells faintly of decay, summers decomposition. The cloudlessness and the fragrance of slow earthly death speak to the frigidity of the morning which will greet me as i rise from the grass. It is in moments such as these when clarity comes when living is far greater than making a living. When the need for life blooms in my heart. If we as a culture could collectively silence ourselves in the presence of darkness perhaps we would find no need to divide ourselves and fill in the empty spaces left behind with cheap substitutions. There is no replacement for silence, there can be no bridge to connect a divided self.