10/19/23
for the privilege of communing with the fleeting fog, you sacrifice decorum — any morning could be one that pulls you half-sleeping from bed into helmet and boots with half-formed words of parting, and deposits you in a field where you’ve stood dozens of times, made unrecognizable by the sound-dampening cloak of water on air. the work of uncountable spiders gleams all around in the dim light as i tow my still-waking body through the colorless world of spent wildflowers, legs growing heavy with collected dew.
all weather is a lesson come back around to remind you of itself, and this morning holds me mutely, slows my steps between the toothed branches of steadily hybridizing hawthorns, where someone has slept and eaten convenience store sandwiches, where frail twigs offer numb insects to the warmth of a future sunbeam, where unremarkable grasses sparkle with a wealth that fine jewels would envy, where reverence dampens my heartbeat to a volume that will not frighten the peppering of small-voiced birds who wisp through the tree above my head. the incongruous laughter from the nearby trail is a reminder of my own forgetfulness of the context of things: the way that fog obscures us along with the rest of the world, whether we believe we have stepped out into it or not; the way that the ordinary adorns the common ground we crush underfoot in constant pursuit of the exceptional; the way we’ll stumble through thin strands of silken connection everywhere we go, until we learn to mind the light in the spaces between things that can only be seen against darkness, or with a small shift in perspective.
holding my short-lived cloud-granted wisdom around me like a shroud in the gloom, i ghost among the herons and kingfishers who open their wings at the scrape of others’ footsteps, i drift up the limb of the willow alongside darkly curling fingers of witches’ broom, body unmirrored in the the shallow marsh, i speak with the boldly curious mink who appears as silently as i to circle my mock-animal form, dive into hollow logs, slip into black water, and leave wet footprints on the fallen trees that slough off their bark as we all will our skin one day. the fog holds for longer than reason could endorse; maybe something about it alters time, just as it constricts our sense of what exists to an intimate world of close proximity. when it does lift, the lessons quickly fade with it, and i am again tangible and busy, full of sound and distractions, unmoored by the wide scope of our ever-expanding field of vision.
