Tag: Hillsboro

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.

 

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Rain

4/28-29/17

The rain woke me after midnight. This is the first rain since I’ve been here, just over a month now. I thought at first it was leaves tapping against the concrete walkway outside. I thought, “more sweeping to do” as I’ve swept every day, sometimes twice to keep the walk clear. Saves the heavier work of vacuuming what is tracked or blown in the door.

As I surfaced from full sleep, I realized there could be no leaves this crispy in spring…

This rain is tentative but steady, tap-tapping on the metal roof. I climb from bed to make a cup of chai, and return to cover up & sip it. And listen, cup in one hand, pen in the other. The heavy curtains belly out with that distinctive fragrance: Rain In The Desert. The Balinese cow bell serving as my doorbell sounds quietly, announcing a soft gusting accompaniment of breeze.

(In the desert, the smell of moisture precedes it, distinct & heady from the usual baked-sand scent. This rain will help to settle some of the dust raised by the highway department lately on a mission to dump yet more dirt. This seems to me an exercise in futility since dirt is hardly scarce here & quite abundantly distributed. But with their arcane signage & the unexplained descent of men in orange vests driving orange earthmovers, there is nothing to do but obey the “stop” & “go” of their outriders.  I question their purpose & their presence, especially when they leave the soil on the roadway – the one place it was not before their unexplained project. Are they burying us in more?)

When I thought the rain had passed by & started to doze again, another mild volley begins. I can feel the trees outside expanding, the weeds under them reaching out for sustenance. Are there others brewing tea & returning to cover up their legs in bed, just listening to the fall? A rare & delightful sound, a “joyful noise.” Who else in town lies awake scenting this perfume of suspended water falling on a dry world? More than I know? Fewer than I think?

Geoengineering has upended the weather patterns. The changes in Mother Nature herself wing out from that foul ruination of climate integrity. As the sun rolls from yellow to white & the clocks continue a relentless march forward, tonight’s quiet cleansing gentles the planet: rhythmic, soulful, fragrant, musical.

I pull the covers up to my ears & return to sleep, listening to the lullaby.

 

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Hillsboro

This is my reality now: sun-filled days, whirring wings, the strange, coaxing cries of ring-neck pigeons. A tan-white cat with arctic eyes who visits, meowing, for a pet & a pat. A bedroom in pale green; a bed with a hard mattress I settle into carefully at night. Three deep sinks & water that heats up just as I’m finishing the dishes.

The ocean is above in the sky now, endlessly blue with irregular white waves of cloud. My life is organized as I want it to be, with no commitments other than what I make, no activities other than what I put myself forward to do.

I am rounder here without the regularity of the gym to help. I need a bigger commitment & heavier weights to trim off & I have not yet committed to these. One day soon, though, I will do so.

Here I am not concerned about my age anymore. I don’t fetch up four times a day telling myself I’m a septuagenarian. I don’t feel it here: the light has made me lighter of thought.

I notice things more or I notice more things. It is easier to be kind. I enjoy dressing nicely each day & I really enjoy having nice clothes to dress in. I find myself watching much that goes by, cars, people, animals. The stars seem to wink on when the sky goes black – some celestial switch is flipped. The moon carries proudly into the morning & remains visible most of the day; you just have to look for it. Today is the first day I have thought about seagulls.

History is harsh here, dusty & drowned in risen rivers. In its beginnings as a mining town, there was little enough law (and strangely, this still seems to be of minimal presence as drivers fly through at all speeds except that cited on the limit signs.) There were no rescue groups to distribute blankets & water when tragedy struck. There were raiding Apaches versus “decent” households – huts built on stolen land where the warriors did not want habitation by whites to root or grow. To them, we were the pests with our domestications & demands upon the land, with our claims to scarce water & women dressed in layers & men in hot collars & coats, the children like children everywhere, wild-eyed but brought up to obey, so conflicted (as perhaps even today) by reality & what was passing for civilization. The East imported to the West was an unfitted overlay. Adaptation to local habits was “going native” with all the negative connotations thereto. We are a mixed-match, a blended heritage, a small, tightly-knit community where everyone knows something else about who you are.

I could vacuum everyday so I learn to live with tiny leaves shaped like small dimes carried in on my sandals. Flip-flops pick up grit in the toes – a startling pain – unless I’m staying on the map-cracked sidewalk, I wear closed-toe shoes.

Perhaps the history impacts more here since I grew up at the seashore & so know that with my blood. There is a taut ethic called into survival by realism: cactus, snakes, endless & unmarked space in all directions. Yet I love it & there is a westernized me indwelling, caught up in every breeze & flicker of light dancing among the leaves.

Here I can live as though I belong. Here I can make choices not based on need, but based on a personal truth. Here I can notice what does not belong to me & set that much more aside for recycle.

I have all I need.

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