Horizonal Awareness

After the Age of Books came the Great Escape. It paradised two years and sunrise storm began with me telling my father, 'Why don't you just send me away to boarding school!' No sooner said than done, in the outpaced trail of a ciggarette butt tossed out a highway window, there I was.

There I was. In a school of scarcely three hundred. Surrounded by a deep forest. Grounded just a mile from a pacific stormy beach. It was two years of discovering how to make friends who shared interests. It was; it was understanding learning as the mind-expanding elation that only greatening awareness can betide. And happily, nickoftimely, it was finding out I was so much more than the sadness and frustration I had been forced to define myself with.

I made such friends there as I shall never forget. Shades of myself and my selfcomtemplations have grown from them, from who they were and what they expressed of themselves and their beliefs. Pride of the Self, no matter what you've been through. That was Pat. Adventure and exuberence in everything you do with a constant respect for animals. That was Jim. Thinking beyond your bounds every day. That was Ken.

And it was running with Ken one day along the endless sandy tracks in the surrounding forest that we stopped at the top of a hill to catch our breath. This hill was just tall enough to give us a view in all directions of yet more forest, green, constant, and without variation. "What if everything you can see from here was all there is?" Ken said. And you know...In the most earnest of moments that we all come to in our lives. He was and is exactly right.

Near the Pool of Bright Fish

I can't count the chapters in the Age of Wandering. I only remember that it is measured in slow meandering travels up, down, away from, and towards... the coast. It is indexed by the meanings of connections I made with the people who went to and fro, into and out of my experiences, my learnings and my troubles.

On quiet days when reading back into that age, I chapter to when I was furthest from the sea. At the beginning there were daytime September storms casting lightning with thunder shaking the foundations of the stony city bed. Enough excitement for anyone to be swept up in it all.

There was a basement apartment I shared with an ex-friend's friend, a raven-haired punkrocker who filled it with cats and lost teens, each blue haired, mohawked and with nowhere to go. There was my job in the bakery down on the tracks, hot work tending ovens, hard work that paid just eight dollars an hour but fed us, the lost kids and the cats with pilfered goods and breads. Ann Arber was a place to which I had known I would arrive one day as I traced the old hippie weather-driven circuits. Knowledge of the circuits had been passed down to me as verbal lessons by fellow hitchhikers and through smokey park bound conversations. Ann Arbor lay at the far borders of the Age of Wanderings' realm.

In that place, a season passed where I aloned my time walking. I would pace trails with my tapes, head-phones and red-high-tops as far as I could circle in a single sleepless trek. Maybe I was trying to drown out my own too fast thoughts. I could do this you know. Once on a glass beach on the greatest of shores I paced from crescents' end to end the littered sands and attended my mind to casting waves so in tune that in the end, my only thought was it...the Sound, the Great Songless Call of the Sea. No thoughts went through my head. No words complicated mood, balance, meditated quiet being...

Here, farther than I had ever traveled from the sea, I could nighttime reckon the unseen kildeer calling circles round me in sleeping fields; their longing cries family enough that I would, at every small call, pause and scan for the gulls. By the sea my mothers' mother told me that gulls in the fields warned of a storm out at sea; storms that in their swelling greys and crashing whites heaved with titanic strength and broke upon the shore to be known to the inlanders as only rain.
Kildeer, when away from the ocean, cry out in mourning. When in sight of the sea, they call out of joy. Feeling their cries and no more able to heedless be of them than not breathe in, not breathe out, I chose the trails through their fields. The trails led to and by the river where I would travel daily, mindful of the missing ocean as I followed the waters, cold threads that even out of sight, I knew with the trust of gravity, somewhere they touched The Sea.

So it was I came to a constant path each day the rain did not come in torrents. After bringing the foods the lost kids were so hard to come by elsewhere, I would leave them to their music, conversations and cigarettes; I would follow down the road to the forest park where the tiny nighttime owls would sometimes fly. A simple trail grew out of the edge of this places' grass and twisted under great and many trees to burrow through the now almost leafless forest towards the waters.

On the way it passed the straightened edge of a small rectangular pond, too overgrown to let tell if it was natural or not. A bench aged there under which no grass grew for the passage of countless feet. If I was quiet enough at the edge of night I could creep up and, peering over the bench, see the great black red-tailed fish that slept in just four inches of water there without a movement for the world, dreaming its breathless dreams.

Onward the quiet trail pathed to a set of steel rails, twins to the set across the River by its side where the grey concrete blocks of the bakery could be seen if there was no fog. I usually left the trail to walk on the rail ties and think of my grandfather who had taught me how to balance on tracks. A mile or two and the trail wrapped away from tracks and river and curved into a set of trees curtaining a small grass field with little lamps growing from the curved blades of green grass. A wildflower, it seemed, had bloomed the summer before. It's lantern shaped, closed flowers had skeletonized to the look of leaves left late on the forest floor and in the center of each cagelike remnant a little yellow sphere hung motionless from the arching stem. For all the world it looked as if tiny lamplights lit the grassy meadow in wait for faery dancers, in wait for magic.

I was so close, so very close. I could have kept on forever. There was a master baker there who was content to teach me the step by step of baking sourdough bread and all the secrets of hard work and building a career. There were friends to trade stories with, to drink beer with and visit with over Christmas. There was a girl who was trying to get close enough to me to let me know, let me know she loved me.

But breaking away, breaking away forever from the calling rough green waves would not happen, could not happen. No matter the distance I traveled or the time I would lay in, it would come with the rush of an autumn wind; it would fall from the shrill of a seagulls' cry and pull me back with its unseen tether, with its unemcompassable and unfading image, The Call of The Sea.

I left the paths, the bakery, the girl and the friends abandoned there, by me, as some futures cost just too dear a price. That which centers us, for so many, is the place where we are from. And the moment that these words swell to, the thought to which they spiral up, is the one where I realized that there is no place in heart to dwell but home.

OUTSIDE THE AQUARIUM

Before electricity propagated and evolved quite as much as it has today, there was a simpler time. In my own life I refer to it as the Age of Books. This was before the Age of Marriage where I journey today. This was before the Age of the Army whose dark wisdom I learned and scarredly escaped. This was even before the Age of College, Cristine, and Wandering (which took up a very long time indeed).

In the Age of Books, everywhere was come to by foot or AC Transit and the count of places to be, they ended shortly past school, home, friends' houses and stores.

Among these few destinations stood the library at Claremont. It lighthoused solid and ancient, the most important bits of which were made of stone. As was its purpose, the inside existed larger than the outside. And I but a snapshot intersection to it, I had my steps memorized: Right, up the six steps, pull open the left doorside, two steps in and right 'til the end of the streetside wall. Crouch down I would and, never noticing that the city sounds had once again diminished fully from within the great vault, as always, there they were, the four books on salamanders, the same four books on frogs.
Some colored illustrations habited there of course. Quiet, stately behavior descriptions spoke from their paper trays as well, those as had been noticed by that time in society's' relations to and observations of the environments.

I read them.

I read them again; I read them again, and I read them again. For long moments I could exist so quietly and so in tune. Exist thinking of the Small Things, the beautiful things, creeping about in safe places: shadowed streams, mossy places under leaf boughs and stony undersides that hadn't any peerings by eyes but mine. Safe places. Safe places to rhyme with a separate peace, with the boundaries of ones' expanding and personal universe when all is good and stable. Words alone could take me there; Inspiration being what it is.

So once in this elevated state of mind, this state of mine alone, transcendental with a lower case t, I would leave the books akimbo on their great table slab and fix gaze on the glass cased birds. There were two of them. Maybe three of them. Each one pressed out vacant air that would have cycled there. Each one elegantly stood, a glassed off, single brick of somewhere else's' reality. Bricks of clay you see, these stand stoically, stoning out shapes of places and forcing gazes to what is without them rather than within. But these, these were open to the gaze, entrancing, pulling eyes in deeper than to what is just there. Their glass edgings left off the quiet of the room and jeweler set the within. Beautiful. Still. Quiet moments of birds doing what birds must do in their hidden roosts and nests.

I could focus my mind to it, the owl's full piercing stare from its frozen moment perch. I could see it, see everything around it and understand it, just for that one slice of time, as a small thing in its place. The connection of what to where becoming momentarily clear and forever meaningful.

A final note. There at the bottom of the owls' case, beneath the creatures' nest, was a small little space where a mouse was tending her nest. She was as motionless as the owl above and all was so still that I in my youth, in the Age of Books, was the only one to spot her. The only one to see her as I stood outside the glass feeling the mystery, felling the wondrousness of it all.

SIMULCRA

We all at times see faces in the every day passing by that we come to believe as divine. Faces shaped from strains of our desire; clips of the prettier bits of other peoples' dreams. And all of this wrapped up becomes the simulcra we take for the look of True Love, for completing ourselves, for what...for what we've always wanted.

A PERSONAL MYTH

Bruce was a friend from college. One of those friends you made that reminded you of no one you had ever met and so therefore became an icon of the time that shaped you into how you came to be now. Bruce taught me to listen to strange music no one had ever heard. He told me stories of people living larger than I had imagined and led me on adventures I once boasted of and now, in my mature life, seldom mention outside of remaniscing with equally once outrageous friends.
There was a time when we both lived in a vegetarian commune called the Big Yellow House. We lived day to day with most beautiful hippie women and while I wrote Bruce's term papers, Bruce taught me how to get lost in mirrors and juggle in pairs across a room.
Once when a cousin of mine dissappeared, Bruce spent days asking every friend he knew for news. And so it was that late in the halfway span of the pre-dawn night, in a park by an urban lake, Bruce figured it out. One of the Jaden brothers, Damon, told him she had gone across state, sent to live with farmer relatives by her father. Such a good friend he was, Bruce walked with me down to the train yard near the Big Yellow House, climbed up into a box car and stood side by side with me as the line pulled us south and east across the mountains, the forests and the starlit desert on our way to find her...which we did.
But years and leaves both fade and fall aside. The paths we each shape are loth to lie twain, invariably spiralling askew, casting bright then faint firework trails whose totalled brilliance we are lucky to recall with nostalgia. As my time went by I travelled far and met many whose faces I had never seen, whose experiences hadn't crossed with mine. Trains, smoke and mirrors fell from day to day and the works of a career came to house my day to day.
And so it is that I find myself older, more professional and more like the strangers on the bus than my own old pictures. I see none of my old friends, my cousin, nor even the places that all these memories came to happen in. But once I was lucky. Just once I got a glimpse of my own past and it was good to come back to it for even just the few moments that it passed. I found myself, one night late after work, trapped under a downtown bridge by a winter rain. Having a smoke pointed the time and it was about halfway down the white paper column with smoke clouding slowy and stately up into the night sky as it was pierced by cold drop columns that I saw him walking consequently by my path.
"Bruce." I said. And with a glance to his right through the urban gloom he stopped and smiled and said, "It figures that it would be you."

COYOTE RISING TO WOLFDOM

After the Age of Books came the Great Escape. It paradised two years and sunrise storm began with me telling my father, 'Why don't you just send me away to boarding school!' No sooner said than done, in the outpaced trail of a cigarette butt tossed out a highway window, there I was.

There I was. In a school of scarcely three hundred. Surrounded by a deep forest. Grounded just a mile from a pacific stormy beach. It was two years of discovering how to make friends who shared interests. It was; it was understanding learning as the mind-expanding elation that only greatening awareness can betide. And happily, nickoftimely, it was finding out I was so much more than the sadness and frustration I had been forced to define myself with.

I made such friends there as I shall never forget. Shades of myself and my selfcomtemplations have grown from them, from who they were and what they expressed of themselves and their beliefs. Pride of the Self, no matter what you've been through. That was Pat. Adventure and exuberence in everything you do with a constant respect for animals. That was Jim. Thinking beyond your bounds every day. That was Ken.

And it was running with Ken one day along the endless sandy tracks in the surrounding forest that we stopped at the top of a hill to catch our breath. This hill was just tall enough to give us a view in all directions of yet more forest, green, constant, and without variation. "What if everything you can see from here was all there is?" Ken said. And you know...In the most earnest of moments that we all come to in our lives. He was and is exactly right.

COMARADERIE

Two times in my life I was a part of something bigger, something vaster, than just myself.

First was when we were smoking and reading each others' works in the earned first light of morning as we kept the night for daytime and daily slept through the sun. All the knowledge of everything that could be learned swept round me, an ocean I dreamed to drown in. If only I had had the money...the material wealth to live the life immaterial.

Second was a circle of comrades, all the same hair style, all the same clothes. We followed the plan each day from dawn to dark and then more and more again. We were proud to be one, honored to carry out the orders we dared not contemplate for fear of being crushed in our own guilt, in our own shame.

THE WALRII

The Walrii watch over the city on Third where they look down on the corner where I kissed Marrianne Morgan for the very first time. The smell of the sea waved through the air while the cool of midnight hung silence about us as we kissed, and breathed, and kissed again. Her eyes were the green of a far shores' grass; her hair was raven as autumn night. She was the first to say yes to the question one dreams of never asking twice. Such time has gone by now...even in the quiet I can't seem to remember her face.