“It’s been a difficult week. Some are like that, when the enormous energy expended to perform a given set of tasks fails, overall. It’s not to say that nothing good happened. Complex systems, that’s the world we live in. Great acts of kindness & generosity can co-exist alongside dungeons of self doubt, as things turn on a dime, or crumble, or flop. Pointing fingers is pointless. Maybe all it would take is a drive, or a caress, or a moment when stillness, and the sounds of natural things allowed in, could begin to penetrate the thick habits of depression, and soothe. We are simple creatures of great power. On the way down, she made sure to casually gesture towards roots, and rocks; the solid things of the present moment. Climbing a cliff to get to a waterfall, from the wrong side, suddenly made sense, gave traction to an otherwise slippery slope. I love the whole tribe of us. How we catch each other, when we fall. But we didn’t fall, or nearly did, but kept our wits polished, our humor ready and our feet firm. It was a long way down. The land I now live in offers many such feats, and pragmatic puzzles. If we are going down, let’s do it honestly, and consciously, because to not do it would mean giving up. The glittering late summer river, hidden by its own hard won, cruel crevasse, was meant for the likes of us. “Brian showed me this,” she said. It didn’t take much imagination to credit Brian for this oddly backward descent. That’s what I love about him, because he does things the hard way, and I can’t say I don’t do the same. Maybe just in different areas. “Okay ... “ I replied, grabbing for anything resembling a hand hold. As I said, it was a long way down. A place I could call up from a long-since buried memory, as the ravine where my first husband had nearly died. Another summer, another flash flood, another set of foolish decisions, and drama, and madness. Now I was ready to return, I guess. On my own time, in my own way. On a day when my own life was feeling futile, almost discarded, near to the edge of abandonment. Why? Because who we love, and why we love, is still a mystery. And sometimes the ones we love, don’t even know how much we care, because we are too ashamed to admit to having longed for them, for so many years. And when we finally reached the bottom, the rock bottom, literally filled with stones much older than we could ever hope to be, while she chose to swim, I chose to lie down in the rubble. A gorgeous, cooling place of inhospitable history, not meant so much for humans, as for time. The big souled tree living high on a boulder, the talons of water, carrying off all our dreams. In paradise’s gutter, I am queen of the swale. The undulating water’s preference, rattling smoothly in its endless choice, of life over death. It was beautiful, how deftly she moved against the cold flow of mountain water. I, myself, had birthed children in such a cleft. My intention still resonates here, and though I was able to scramble out, and make myself presentable at the top, part of me will always be pulled back into these waves made of gravity. Some pagan, baptismal clarity, I reckon, or a sylph disguised in evergreen moss, who has no qualms about returning incognito for millennia. Gone as soon as she touches me, racing along on her way, hell bent towards her next appointment: that of touching me again.”
