Journal Excerpt
March 16th
(photo from mt. rainier)
Today I went somewhat reluctantly on a hike to Mt. Si. I could
have installed needed countertops and tried to fix my new faucet, or forced
myself to relax with a book and coffee. But I didn’t. Through the forest, etc,
as usual, the lichen and clay-red colored bark and pocked rot and permanent red
roots and scattered faces and feces of shadow and brown ridges and soaking wet hairy
carpets of moss covering south sides of trees draped over dead tress like enormous
columns with dresses. And through it I eased into a few states of stillness,
stopping at a switchback to look down through all the strait trunks and easing
dripping sagging swaying leaning branches and bits held together in the deep
fog by roots and my eyes, and I felt what I saw, and saw what I felt, and
wanted to paint what I felt and saw, and thought about seeing and making and
feeling.
And we reached the top, I jogged up first and hopped over
powder-blasted rocks that reminded me of my experiences at Mt. Rainier, and I
stared into the stingy warm freezing speckled wind of snowflakes and hail, hail
blasting down through bending foliage, wind carving through tree trunks and
clearings through gaps channeled like waves through breaking rocks making paths
and swirling systems of dispersing tracks. The mist carried along these
currents, the particles moving so swiftly that it was impossible not to imagine
and almost see their trajectories traced out in full—in short the steaming rush
of clouds hitting the side of the mountain and blowing upwards, a ceaseless but
unsteady wash of movement making clear and then obscured, open and then closed
different views of the surrounding jagged black rocks rimmed with untouched
islands of snow and compressed icy pathways. The tall cliff face of the
haystack faded in and out of view as the sky rushed past with its endless
offspring of ice crystals and dispersing pellets of frost and soggy drops that
cracked and soaked and melted into the stones hewn with an infinite diversity
of rough angles.
There is a powerful blood of the sky that runs deep and
hidden in the backcountry, that latent in the city, lies beneath everything so
soberly occupying, like static electricity invisibly building and releasing.
Constant movement of the mind distracting from the constant movement of the
world, to really be moving you have to be still, maybe even alone. There is a
soul to living that is inaccessible with language, or maybe, with the thought
of language—the mode I hesitatingly switch to in the presence of other people.
There is a blood of sky that is blue and does not just hover
above the rocks, but saturates the folds of space around them. There is a
surface of stone that pleats the ripples of the earth and does not just sit
atop the ground, but projects from the ground, records of monolithic happenstance,
contingency, chance, and its surface is wrapped in change, wrapped in those
veins of weather and hints of rules. The circulatory system between land and
sky is covered in holes, passages to explore, passages to find, pathways to
crawl inside of on your hands and knees and know like the skin of your hand,
the contours of a dream, arteries that lead to organs, organs that grow and die
and wither to seed new seas of sediment and sky, but covered mostly and not
easily accessible.
The point of light we circle we enchant, but we know too the
eternity of no night and day that endlessly extends from our circling point, we
know the endlessness too of space and meagerness of our hold on, the place we
are in, the places we are. Cutting through this loose grip and giving it depth,
cutting out the bottom and revealing the caverns below are moments of rapture,
things we call on and chase after even as they are the things which cut through
calling and chasing with equal effect, like meteors through butter.
Memories are silent like visual noise.
I want to fill in the caverns with spiritual steps, even if
the only feet that can feel these ghosts are my own I want to build them with
my invisible hands. I want to feel them with my lukewarm eyes, I want to clothe
them in visual surprise, I want to know them like old things know each other. I
want to follow their curves around and keep the records of my touch in a tender
oiled wood box deep in my heart. I want to be this body until I am bones.
Floating through the timeless outer places like stones.
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