Sometimes I feel like the only way I can say what I mean is to be unclear. This is the only way to be precise: to deviate a little from every day existence and use the exact words that arise. If I attempt to make myself understood, I lose everything. If I attempt to use the words that describe a situation, I fail to describe the situation at all. I am walking roads parallel to reality, then.
The situation is that I look out the window of my office and watch the blue jays and chickadees and I feel like I am the little pebbles at their feet. The sun warms the grainy minerals of my long, slow existence.
The situation is that I step out onto my back deck, mostly undressed, and I feel the cold breeze and the hot sunlight both on my bare thighs, and I watch my sundog run up the dead grass and melting snow, and the birds never stop singing, and when I walk down the deck to press my toes into the loam I feel the earth overtaking my body and the little red and black beetles carrying me piecemeal into the dead land where I meet Cold Earth, whose wet mineral smell puts me to sleep.
The situation is that in my mind I hear bells from a temple that has never been built. The god for whom this temple’s bells are ringing does not as yet exist. As a matter of fact this god will never exist outside of the pattern of my mind.
The situation is that in the evening I hear the great horned owl and the sound is the sound of the earth exhaling. I become a dry creekbed. Dead reeds at my shore clatter in the wind. From this vantage I look up at the setting sun and down into the earth. I am between all things, a border, a dividing line; on either side the universe may work a different kind of miracle. I, however, am touched only when I hear the yipping of a coyote; this is the only gift, the only magic that moves in me.
The situation is that my interior is a white desert. There I live in a shack, and when the coyote calls to me I call back. The coyote’s bark is my only voice.
The situation is that I turn south and west at night and each of the thousands of stars in the enormous sky enters into my blood and its fire pulses in my veins until nothing of me is left at all, just the stars stars stars!
These are a few of the situations. These situations never end. I return endlessly to them. Or they to me. It is unclear how many roads I walk and which of them might lead back to these places.
One day all of this will consume me whole, still living, and I will not regret what I lose for it, because at long last I will understand– what it really is I mean to say.
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