Wyoming

mine shaft- a splurge of rock crumbs which have seeped down the mountain stopping abruptly, where nature somehow intends to shapen a nice composition as viewed from the ranch, of soft crumbs and earnest hard working boulders as a backdrop with a fly away sky that gently grays over the ridge tips.

Rolling hedge hills to the left, never quite in focus and everytime I survey them I have more confusion about the form. The crafty shadows from drifting clouds or the evening mists plays out different stories of form. Sometimes that land is a stock of endless symetrical curves, all equally proportioned and somehow rolling again and again into form, other times I see more or less three different fields in a line to the blue horizon which are thick high mattresses of sagebrush, a vision backed up by watching pronghorn who apparently bounce along them.

A high ridge to the near right, a flat wall of rock aperched by giant boulder of that cliched yellow, not really yellow, but there are hues of yellow and somehow so gentle is their purpose, to just be there, to slowly over unimaginable aoens of time fall away.

one night a raincloud sat still behind them and from the east the pondourous setting sun shone directly at them, and then for two minutes they were golden and luminous, which seemed to darken the rain cloud to a heavenly deep purple, then for precious moments the colours all danced together, urging each other to put out more, so the gold glistened with a sheen of silver and the blue purple streamed into thinning rays across neighbouring hard grey sky.

Foreground- a red roofed cabin put neatly together in timber rolls and painted a dark coffee brown. The walk there was through a marsh which formed itself from the runaway and overspill of the small nearby pond that flashes the sky, bright in your eyes. the cabin looks homely and neat and yet with a plonked-there, new-boy in-school discomfort. The rain when it falls at night drums hard on the roof seaps down to the porch via a broken gutter. the porch then dampens its fawn timber to a dark chocolate which drys out in daylight in ever decreasing mottles.

Before the pond is a flat patch of flowering grass, a lilac and a yellow mix. irresistibly neat and inviting, and which spreads to the first paddock on the right. When I follow its spread through the paddock fence i remifd myself of a comment about Africa. Where the narually ocurring tribes are split by country borders and therefore reluctanltly given a new and unworkable identity. And so the loose, free grass tribe is somehow other than its brothers in the paddock, a fresher strain, brighter glimmer in the 10 3pm sun, but at he same time, misplaced and lonely, like the cabin, like the mineshaft.

in all the forms, from vigilant mountain tips to oblivious beetles there is the pull to the company of each other. The clouds press a little close to the ridges. The ridges soften to welcome them. The night sort of misses the day.

Fear

You can pretend it's not there, but it keeps coming back; in the dark night, on the cold, hopeless drive to work, in the words you thought they just said to you, in the trip to the hospital, with the strange twinge in the chest, in the late-night rattle at the door. It keeps coming back to wipe that ignorant smile of your face. What to do? Align with the scripture? Non-dualize yourself into non-existence? What?

Post Hate Clarity

It's hard to do admit that you hate this state, people, circumstance or feeling. Somehow hating is undignified, like the bursting tantrums of a callow teen and yet when it has been internally whispered or owned, as some people say, there is a new freedom, a surging empowerment; new ideas come and solutions seem possible. This is what I notice inside as I journey out of this little Spanish town- the week-old grey sky is cracking up, an old worn blue is peering through and I am calmly clear.

And when clarity comes it always surprises me that it wasn't there before. What access is there to it? It seems hidden in the woods, in a lonely old forgotten shack.