“I’m not really interested in swimming, just interested in not dying due to some careless maneuver. It’s an intimate adventure, this drought. And what a drought its been. Climbing down in the hole. How many of us are used to walking mountain streams barefoot in the fall? The temperatures are bracing. Like the startling slap of words from a friend reminding you that you’re paying a price for speaking unpopular truths. Measuring your defection against their own fears, you’ve become a much maligned touchstone. It disquiets the pack, going down as you do; it’s a steep descent on thin roots and unstable mats of leaf litter. But living dangerously is still necessary in these days of staying safe. I reach with my short legs to find the solid security of gigantic boulders, sort of like spelunking, before torrential rains. Testing the fallen limbs that will become the masts of great ships. It’s a world devoid of guidelines, or rules. Your life matters to you because it doesn’t matter to others unless you care. Because feeling like shit in a shitty situation will drive you either to end it, or go past the conditions that made it. When life strips off what you thought was yours, and dumps your hitchhiking ass on the side of the road, you look for anything, anyone who knows you. Might be a stranger, might be a crow, might be a friend feeling cast off, like you. And when I locked myself out of my car the other night, I found by some amazing miracle that fate had left me a crack in which to insert a long stick. That was reason enough to get up and face another lousy day with a broken shovel and restore a garden. Yes, as I head into my 6th decade maybe slower, supremely fuller & possibly wiser, I won’t be trying to keep up anymore, I’ll be setting my own pace, one of positivity & fortitude. Sending depth charges into the night waters of our future, a love letter to those I’ve had to leave behind.”
