i started my morning today watching clips of brian regan, a comedian. non-stop giggles. i started to feel myself lift out of my funk. but no, that was simply readjusting the bad habit to another level; i ended up listening to his standup and playing dr. mario all damn morning.
i finally fled the house at my preceptor's invitation to visit her horses. it was interesting how just a couple hours at the community barn felt like an entire day. around these beasts, time ceased to matter. all there was was their deep hoofbeats, and the cloudy sky. to touch their hides and palpate so much MASS underneath was a wonderment. the old one, her back hocks were stiff and deformed by arthritis. there was a cloudy fog in her saucer eyes. and yet she stamped her foot repeatedly, impatient for treats like a small puppy. watching the people ride and groom and feed their horses was hypnotizing. the barn smelled impossibly sweet. it was a different planet.
it was a good reminder to keep going outdoors. when people disappoint you, there is always the natural world. it is so much bigger than our petty shit. it is a force that will continue long after you and i are dust.
when i hike through the forest, i am struck by the number of gigantic redwood stumps jutting out from the soft, fern-laden ground. they look unmistakably dead. but in fact, they are teeming with innumerable shrubs and weeds springing from their every crevice, and their sloping roots are cloaked in green and white moss. they stand apart like neatly and tenderly kept gravestones of giants -- stoic, immovable, as if they had been forged in paleolithic furnaces. i am moved by the intent of it all. where the rest of the forest seemed in gentle chaos, each stump contained terrariums, carefully curated by unseen forces. i am afraid to approach, lest they break like glass threads. during one walk, i instead placed my hands upon a younger redwood. i expected to feel a hard tree; i felt myself falling into the red bark, as if it were made of foam. ...maybe i was projecting -- but maybe, maybe, i actually felt it -- a feeling of the fluids of the tree moving downwards, skywards, around and around. a force driven by not the evaporative action at the level of the leaves, nor the capillary action of roots soaking up water from the ground, but of the Divine Organizer, the Breath that takes our universe and molds it into the discrete. i found that i was listening. listening for an answer. expecting this tree, this random tree in a random forest, to give one to me. it was a foolish thought, because there was no question to begin with. and that's why i was unhappy. i was searching for an answer with no question. i had convinced myself that i was searching for something, and that without it, i would not be whole. the truth is, i was never in pieces in the first place.
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