Left Behind

Lol... Well, it's funny. I vegetated for days, enjoying the routine of a happy old man... Naps at two... Another Sherlock Holmes story at four...a cigarillo on the porch at sunset, then firing up the grill. 

My tent was supposed to arrive Saturday. I waited patiently enough, but finally on Tuesday I went to the post office to inquire. 

They'd had it sitting there since Saturday.

What?

Why didn't they deliver it to the hotel, the address on the label?

Oh well. 

All the folks I know are ahead, and there is a fresh set of people in town with whom I have no history.

I didn't have time to seam seal the tent, as the afternoon was threatening rain. I'm hoping it stays dry until Pagosa Springs.

I was invited to dinner last night by locals Bobby and Suzanne, neighbor Julie joined as well. They cooked delicious enchiladas, with guacamole, which I finally, at 51 years of age, decided to enjoy (I hated guacamole).

Damn fine, that stuff. Bobby had been a fur trapper in the Chihuahuan desert and mountains of Mexico and southern New Mexico when he was younger. He talked about the beauty and remoteness of those peaks, and the amazing Mexican families who lived there. Julie had been a chef all over the world, and told us about the difficult but ultimately successful attempt to move a house to the other side of a mountain in Hawaii.

Just amazing people out here... Tough, of extremely varied experience, capable, and generous at the slightest hint of need.

Bobby and Julie on Bobby and Suzanne's patio.

Bobby shared some extremely smooth and buttery whiskey after the stars came out, and we talked about the shape of the thin and quivering bodiless shape between the worlds of life and death, as we'd felt it in the mountains... The place where the Real dances just behind sight.

"Dance" is the right word, because death is a door to a womb. Behind the dance and the womb, breathes the feminine in which force is shaped into form... Where we awaken again into a new drama.

I think... The male attraction to danger is a thread of truth mixed with error... And though we know we should be patient, and return to our responsibilities, the truth in the thread is irresistible, and we walk further into it than we should.

The truth is that nature, the Great Mother, is indifferent to the change of state in us from life to death. And yet is felt by us to be so deeply Real, that we walk towards her anyway. It is a conversation in which the rational mind is stunned and silent, and this is itself interesting. A song is playing, and we would not stop it, because we would not hinder the unrolling of Truth in our dim, physical world.

Can we bottle this indifference to conditions and take it home... To infuse the Home Life with the magic we felt in Wildness? 

It is my job, I think!

Reading in the Tao Te Ching today:

Heaven and Earth cultivate no preference for outcomes. They regard creations as straw dogs.

The Sage likewise cultivates no preference. She regards all people without favouritism, as if they were straw dogs.

Tao functions like an emptied center between Heaven and Earth, acting here as a bellows to stoke fire or there as a flute to sound music. One can never exhaust these emptied spaces of their variations and gifts. What will run dry is chatter trying to reckon with this mystery. Where is your place?

In this silent center.

And so my chatter must end.

Comments

  1. Thanks for the tip about the Brave browser. Catch up, homes!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lordsburg

84 miles down, heading north to Silver City

well, shucks