STILLNESS

The night storms birth the feral mushrooms big and small. Some live solitary whist others stay in groups on old logs or the moist and verdant ground. It’s overcast there, but there are not many, if any, people, and this lets a walker and dogs to get lost almost divinely in the atmosphere. Daydreaming, gazing, thinking, photographing, spinning this way or that, all while walking through empty pathways and open fields. The summer flowers are gone for the most part, but some bees and wasps have managed to live and found a couple here or there to work at, to buzz and fly ‘round.

I can stop at the top of solitary and secreted ridges far away even from the paths and fields. There have been coyotes, curious, and the odd deer there, - but then there is nothing but silence. Not even a squirrel makes a noise. No bird is heard calling. How could it all be so still? So silent? It is a respite. It is inviolate.

Soon enough we will have to be carried out by the pathways and meet the traffic and the secular

world, - a consensual sort of reality that most by into lock stock and barrel. In the meantime there are long moments under the Oaks, by the Pines, around the chaparral and on the dirt, sand, and pebble pathways. 

Looking down into the valley it is darker and more textured. It seems like the air has levels and shades, that the hillsides carry differences every few feet. All these nuances. What is it like in the night? What it is like when the frost starts to form. One time, sometime, the first real snow shall come. No matter how much tree cover, no matter how deep the valley floor, the snow, though gentle, and perhaps because it is gentle, - will find its way down and down to the ground. Not only will the summer be a dream dreamt long ago, - but even the autumn will take on the life or non-life of a past chapter read and considered and moved on from. To think of the snow is to think of the new book. It shall be fresh and promising. 

But it’s not time yet. Nature has its own time and it does not have to obey silly clocks and days. Its rhythm, even when it brings death, - is deeper and incredibly so. Before those things, - we wait, - on the top of a wave, on the bottom of the dusk, in shadow of clouds that make the world feel opaque. Walking out there are more mushrooms by the green mossy wood that has fallen. It all waits and waits for something or nothing in the stillness of cold October air.

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