Traveling with Crows

Babel

Dang it, the piano is collecting dust, and I feel like life is running me.  The frustration builds as my mountain bike, too, gathers a bit of dust, though not too much, and I suck down antibiotics for the ear infection that manzanita in bloom seems to bring on.  Just talked to the hairdresser, too -- seems we forgot to make our follow-up appointment, and two or three local businesses await my call back on services that cannot be rendered until I figure out how to put my life in order.  Spring.  So I sat on some rocks today at Whiskeytown Lake while my son made a special shrine to the quartz crystal he found.  We walked there, to some remote spot, where the dog chased the Canada geese, and I learned how sharp rocks can indent the behind.  Om mani padme hung hri.  I'm not sure why the edges blend, why things have to accrue a sense of busyness, for me to come home to what matters.  It's when all the trying blends into all the happening that life is both rich and utterly lost, and free will becomes only a wish, but in that, noble enough is best.  A glass of saki helps steady the imagination, along with bowls of meat and barley.  Or white rice and organic kale, sprinkled with Braggs Liquid Aminos.  And a little bluegrass music helps, especially mandolin and piano.  Piano.  The other night, I opened to Beethoven's Sonata Facile and played it on through, having not done so for at least twenty-two years.  I felt the young woman in the fingers, all her joys and sorrows, and my fingers remembered most everything, especially the recurring mistakes.  I loved her then, as I love her now, the best fruition of not-knowing an older me can think of.  These are the words of a madwoman whose days have just given her an hour extra to contemplate the sky.

What keeps us?

Wind, wings, and wizardry keep us
next to the promise of spring, even
rivermud drying on the dog
tells us things can change.

In the middle of a moonless night,
stars obscured by clouds, rain
pelting on, what can we
but hunker down in our own limbs,

remember how to caress ourselves?
Stark mornings do come on then
when the sky as it might could be
translucent as wings, delicious

fruit for any kind of day at all.
Like yesterday.  Along the roadway,
spinning into motion, small seeds
take to air, the owl with talons carved

toward some bloody meal.  Even
the coyote by the roadside so much
a dog on the hearth, ears tipped,
tail flung out to full stride.

Still spring comes.
Still the river greens its way onward.
Still the trout will rise and snap all the weak
lines, bursting sunwater realm
beyond understanding.

Going Off

Falling off the earth kind of feeling, right after a launch downhill on the mountain bike, no sense of wheels or brakes, rock or earth, just wind.  And right there, the wind is almost too much, because of an austere focus, eyes glued to the recession of space below, that the wind interrupts.  I can almost find my edge there, ironically, a couple thousand out for the suspension that holds me upright for this downhill.  Technical information like the disc brakes, the fork in the fore, the cost of my gears, the name of the bike (Stumpjumper, though I plan not to), all of that is not for me.  I can't imagine why I'm here, really, except that the mountains call me here.  In an hour and a half, I covered more ground than I could ever give an afternoon to on foot, and the climb up wasn't easy, either.  My heart pounding out of my eardrums, I had to get off, walk the bike.  At the top of Keswick Dam, one of the country's biggest EPA cleanup sites, I caught my breath watching a vulture wheel overhead.  Salmon the bird's honey target there, dead in pieces all along the Sacramento.  I wonder how the salmon get on from here, or if they, too, must stop at Keswick, named after the man who mined this place. 

Later, recovering, taking my turkey dinner out of the oven at my home, I listen to the news, the representative from West Virginia touting the benefits of coal.  Better than diesel.  I bet no one will take the time to clean up West Virginia.  The mines will pock a mountain of black flies.  That's all I remember from a Fourth of July softball game in West Viriginia.  All those black flies swarming on my face.  I felt so much like I wanted to be anywhere else, and now I am.  Maybe like here, all the West Virginia young people will join the Marines.  Sail the world.  I don't know, but the advantage of old iron ore mines and acidity running off at alarming rates is this unpaved raw landscape to ride around.  So I push my bike upward, explore the wreckage, pump my veins full with blood, rise into the steep decline I will eventually turn myself into, clasping my brakes hard all the way down.

Resolutions

Asked what we're giving up, what we're making up for the New Year, and I have no pat answers this time.  I have decided to limit myself to a word, vulnerability.  The word becomes a statement, Be vulnerability.  I think about the trees in my yard, standing maple against the onslaught of winter storm.  Their armor is their woody essence, and their essence is their vulnerability.  Though they are hardwoods, they do not think "hardwood" into the wind.  I know I have.  I have bound myself to hardness, to creating a shell, and leaned into the wind defiantly.  Yesterday, among the tidepools of La Jolla, I admired the delicate fronds of sea kelp waving into the currents that rose through shallow rocks from open ocean, and I found hermit crabs.  They gather a shell to live in, pull it on and gently rock it toward debris good enough to eat.  Their antennae are delicate and accurate.  But the shell they put on, hard as it is, is not part of their thoughts.  It will be discarded soon enough, when the eating and the molting make it cramped and difficult to maneuver.  I think of all my old shells, and my similar taste for them, and the ways I thought myself into them, letting my thoughts run through the shells, animating them.  Now I want to discard the need for all of that for 2007 and beyond.  There is warmth enough here to do it.  I let my thoughts ride out with the tide.