My good friend wrote about cynicism recently on his blog. His post got me thinking, and commenting -- but I feel pretty inarticulate at the moment and so far haven't been able to explain myself well at his site.
Although this is many years old, I dug out a journal entry I wrote while up in a Fire Lookout in the Mt. Hood National Forest. I worked it over into a kind-of prose poem. In the comments on Stu's blog post, there is a bit of talk about the personal and the transpersonal, and I thought of this piece. I was young, but it still has some resonance.
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Journal Entry 10/04/93
I'm sitting on a large, rectangular rock, on a humpy beargrass slope, facing West. A small bird, wingbeats quick & powerful, just landed on a tree behind me. It spots me sitting here & begins chittering.
The Huckleberry & Fireweed are both a deep maroon red, where they haven't gone brown already. The butt of a hand-rolled cigarette looks like a dry, curled leaf next to my bootsole. I'll tip its ashes in honor of the star nation; pour the tobacco to the ground for mother earth; and shove the paper in my pocket.
Earlier today when the sun was low, but not yet down, the sky was all creams, grays, and salmon pinks. Smoke from a nearby wildfire provided the effect. The sunset's colors are still soft -- soft, rosy oranges. Looking up and east, the light loses itself amidst all the haze, going indigo & gray.
As if it knew the sun just went down, a cold wind pushes gently against my back. Small birds shift positions in the trees and bushes along the slope -- a little, imperative "whumph!" as they flare & settle on the branches.
Somewhere in this maze of colors & quiet sounds, I hope to enter.
Maybe in the drooping tip of a young Hemlock tree, or the curious, mouselike scratchings of a songbird in the bushes. Somewhere, in all this beauty & wildness, there is a door. That perfect synchronicity of memory & a glance; of a sound & a desire.
"Just once," I ask in earnest, "just once."
So I come and sit at these sunsets -- waiting.
When found, I realize the door was in my bootsole the whole time; in the cigarette butt, or in the blue stripes of my plaid shirt. But the realization fades quickly.
Until that moment stays, my greatest hopes lie with the wild beauties. With the crimson sunset rebounding off the gray boulder and sparrow song -- rebounding off the missing of loved ones, and the other small, acute desires.
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Enjoy employing whatever means you have at your disposal to survive, or even flourish,
Bp
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2 comments:
That's a very nice recollection/reflection. I once sat on a similar mountain at the end of a long day's walk and looked across the border into West Virginia and had some similar thoughts. You have said this really well and I appreciate it and it is the only balance I've found to cynicism and despair and hopelessness and even depression. Thanks for digging this one out for us. jdm- from the realm of finitude
The curious thing for me is that we tend to think of ourselves as apart from the (non-human) world we inhabit, and think of moments like yours as combining.
What I think is rich and meaningful is that we are *a part of* that non-homocentric world, and the tranquility we expereince is from rejoining it.
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