Local Roads

I feel like a solid rock sometimes, the indissoluble solid, mid-creek. Every once in a while, karma … or grace … approaches with a large lever & sets me into motion.  “The Lever” frequently is preceded by the sound of metal dragging across rocky ground: It foretells change.

I let this Lever upend me to where I live now. I moved from the ocean to live in the elbow of Percha Creek. In the running stream of consciousness that is my life, I taste everyone else’s. As they taste me & mine…it’s something Biblical (at least for me.) So, as it is with water, I am everywhere, as all of us are.

Books can be a Lever, as can movies & other creative works. For me, it’s been serial walkabout which has most changed my life. When the wind spoke in one ear only, I knew it was the way to turn when time came to leave.

Right now, I hear birdcalls, water running over rocks too big to put in my pockets, I hear the metal stanchions of the bridge quietly flexing.

With nothing but these in my awareness, I now also hear faint chimes of bells & bamboo, footsteps crossing behind me & a dog panting. These are bleed-throughs from a parallel time-stream, the “when” that these happened not mine to directly perceive. Yet they swell my awareness. So much is possible over magical running water.

Straight ahead of me rises a wall of sheared & shattered rock, sliced by centuries, a southwestern sculpture garden in the vertical.

To believe this now-miniature creek – Percha Creek – wore through this eternity of rock jumble is farcical, fantastical! Yet, since the glaciers left long ago, since the ocean formed & filled & fled, this creek has had full charge of wearing out the walls I look at, wearing them smooth & carving these edges. If there is a song from rock, there is only a chant in sharp whispers here.

Vegetation is sparse & spiky, clinging to a dust of soil & worn-down pebbles with scrabbling roots. Along the ridgeline, the yucca plants display their seed-stalks, like so many feathers in a headdress. The mesquite provides some variation to already roughened texture.

As I sit, balanced on a tiny chair & leaning one leg against the fence, lap desk astride, the sun beats down on me. The sun is the reason I am out here, as well as some sweet isolation & nature quality time. September offered itself on the breeze in last night’s windows. I want to be brown again for my birthday, coming soon.

Elsewhere & everywhere, the world wears itself into existential frenzy. Friend’s ships sail in different directions, one to sea & one to land. But here & now, I am aware of only the love that created this earth & this water to bring them to this harmonious co-existence. The shapes all interact & indwell with each other far from the tiny world of my perceptions. I am not of centuries; I am now. There is only this moment.

I’m ready.