I Love. You.

The Moon orbits the Earth which orbits the Sun which in turn wheels eternally around the Galactic Center. And I write. 

And wonder, what is the link between the two?

The answer is that the need to write is as elemental and inexorable as the gravity that tugs stars across unfathomable distances and rolls the tides across the face of the deep. To write is to be and not to be forgotten. Writing is starlight that pulses from the furnace of our beings and warps space so completely that we can return again, in another time, in another life and read what we once wrote. Writing is time travel. Writing is giving birth to ideas and leaving them to live on after we are gone. Writing is all that I have except for the love of my son and it is all that I need except for the love of my son.

I write because I cannot look up at the stars without awe and because it is a better way to say I Love.

You.

Never odd or even

It came to me in a dream. The title, plot, characters. The whole thing clear and bright and played out backwards over and over again vivid enough to wake me and important enough that I rose in the night to write it down. The title is Never Odd or Even. The author's name is Red Irene Rider, a pseudonym perfect for a mystery woven around the single thread of an enigmatic sentence; Raw signal slang is war. At the end of the book the reader sees upside down words filling pages still to come. He flips the book over and reads from the back, now front, a new beginning from another point of view but directly related to the story he has just finished. It explains much and leaves a beguiling sense of mystery hanging in the air, a door into summer opened in a wall where once there was nothing. This tattered thread of thought is all that I have left of the dream with which to reweave the brilliant tapestry that my mind created as I slept. The story is there. I just have to remember it. And then write it down.

A soft rain begins to fall outside. The air is still and pregnant with possibility and I am dying. I feel it in my chest where a new pain adds itself to older, more established twinges. This new arrival is not to be ignored and, because I have learned something during the long short years of my life, I write. This is my quiet place, a cyber plot in a graveyard not yet filled, where I come to build my version of Helen's Raft whenever the mood strikes me. The pen, it is written, is a long arm from the grave. That you are here reading makes it so, don't you think? Interesting, if nothing else. You will have more time to consider it. I, on the other hand, do not. Luckily, I don't need more time, at least not for consideration. I know, at last, what my world is made of. The legends and myths, tragedy and mirth, vibrant love, sadness and unutterable joy that is and has been my life all exist here in my mind and through it all runs a song. I could not be happier as I try to capture a tiny fraction of it and I challenge you to understand, as I do, that dying does not matter. We are not bodies with souls. We are souls with bodies.

A very good friend of mine who should have been an author himself and may yet be if I have my way once wrote that when we die we find ourselves, "alone on an island." This single sentence should be immortalized for it's uncanny accuracy if not for it's existence among thousands of others in a long first novel or for having lived in my memory for all these years only to surface on this sultry night to be placed again on paper. I am alone on that island and getting lonelier. This statement is not a plea for comfort and sympathy, but an acknowledgement that our lives are ineffable and, like the dream that caused me to rise and write, cannot be captured by words. That having been said, I am now free to walk among the fireflies and try.

I am immersed in time's river and being carried ever closer to the source. 

Life is a blessing. 

Love continues unabated.

The stories will come. 

Fence post apples

Mystic and I were out of phase today. In the morning I saw him far off in the shade of the scraggly pines that struggle up from the lava dust along the fence line west of the house. He seemed to be watching me but at that distance there was no telling. Later in the day I set an apple on a fence post opposite the kitchen window in the hopes that he would find it and be pleasantly surprised.

I spent the day repairing a cracked transmission cooler return line on my truck and when at last I had it licked and was wrapping up I noticed the apple was gone. The dogs haven't figured out how to climb so I know Mystic got his remote controlled, time traveling treat. Now he will wonder and pay more attention to every fence post he passes.

Long after I leave this place I will remember the peace I felt here and the good times. The memories will be like Mystic's apples, ready and waiting for me as I walk some fence line in my future.

Jacaranda

Jacaranda blossoms carpet the grass and driveway in a profusion of purple, a salute to the procession of the seasons. The sheltering branches cast cool shadows during the heat of the day and time is tangled in their embrace. Linger awhile and look upon its beauty. Can you imagine a forest of them stretching unbroken from horizon to horizon? Would time cease to have meaning under their enchanted boughs? Would you ever want to leave?

Sun dappled dreamscape. Sweet fragrance of Summer wafting on the breeze.

Window on another world, serene and timeless, the Jacaranda sends its roots deep into my soul. And fills my heart with joy.

Endless Night

Night rolls on beneath the quicksilver lantern of the first quarter moon. Crab spiders spin new webs between house and mock orange, guided in their work by unfathomable instinct, natures container for the blueprint of their snares and instructions to hunters of all kinds. Doves roost in the olive bushes along the driveway. Widget stirs on the river rock boundary below my window, dreaming, perhaps, of a piglet along the fence line or a pheasant slow to flight. In the garden a Bufo toad hops toward the dog's water dish, it's stolid progression sounding like footsteps of a larger animal. Dew falls and condenses on the metal roof and drips into the gutter and the grass grows longer and greener beneath each downspout. In the garage the goldfish in their tank hover low and wait, measuring the passing time by the strength of the moonlight that floods through the window behind their cubic foot of pond on the workbench. 

On her bed below the fish Jesse favors her left hip in her sleep and runs through her dreams without a care. In front of me moths batter themselves senseless trying to fly into the light while at the edges of the window geckos wait patiently for them to come within striking distance. 

High above, the multitude of stars contends in vain with the waxing moon for dominance of the endless night. 

Flight

The sunset illuminates towering thunderheads thirty miles to the south as the terminator holds station and the planet rotates. The clouds turn pink and then saffron and then fade gradually to a soft gray that is lighter than the sky behind them. A Pueo takes flight from beyond the sisal patch, silently hunting as the light fades and evening steals over the land. 

A crescent of lambent light takes the stage briefly in the western sky, bright with the promise of nights to come. The owl heads west, following the moon, following the sun.

Somewhere in the grass a mouse breathes easier.   

The Quiet Time

The new moon has set.

Mystic has chosen a spot in the lee of the pepper tree to lie down. He keeps his head held high like a ghostly silver king holding court on a grassy dais and watches as I walk the gravel drive down toward the barn. He is considering whether to stand and walk to the fence to see if I have brought him another apple. We share the night, him resting, dreaming of pursuit, me pursuing a dream without rest.

The wind is a whisper and the air warm. From the highway a mile away I hear the steady drone of a car headed south. A dog barks down the farm lot road and I think of Widget wiggling his wiry way through the cattle fence and following his nose into trouble. I stop and look up at the stars strewn across the sky like pearl dust and diamonds. The rhythm of the night is the beating of my heart and the soft snap of the electric fence.

I turn and head back before Mystic is tempted to rise. 

I know peace.

   

Underway

The sun hammers straight down onto the anvil of the earth from its zenith in the bright blue sky. The land is hot and getting hotter and the heated air of the desert rises, creating a ten mile thick wall in the path of the trades. The relentless wind slows and mellows and the trees sway softly. The dogs laze in the shade, Jesse on her bed in the garage and Widget under the truck, each waiting for something, anything, out of the ordinary to happen. When it does they will burst into action, running after Francolins or doves or barking diligently at perceived intruders. I go to the refrigerator, get an apple and walk out to the fence line of the pasture behind the house, holding my hand aloft. Mystic, a five year old gray warm blooded gelding, sees me and considers. He knows the drill and after a moment begins ambling toward me from the sisal patch a few hundred feet away. I close my eyes and listen. The wind sighs softly in the trees to the north and soon I hear the crunch of dried grass beneath hooves. Mystic whickers and stops a few feet away, regarding me warily, as is if to reassure himself that I'm not a mountain lion in disguise. I chide him gently and offer the apple. He takes it in two bites, happily chewing and probably hoping for more. I return to the house, stopping to rub Jesse's stomach on the way by.

This is the beginning. 

My new life is underway.

Welcome aboard.