“…in his folly will become wise.” -Blake
Late in the day there is only breath and the functions necessary to move forward and avoid sharp rocks. The longer I am out here the more I realize how fundamentally misguided our world-view has become. Language and differentiation, or perhaps merely the instincts of survival, have blinded us. Watts knows: “We have attained a view of the world and a type of sanity which is dried -out like a rusty beer can on the beach. It is a world of objects, of nothing-buts…”
A spring cub skidding to a stop around a blind manzanita slope, straddling a big green rattlesnake after nearly stepping on him, watching fire helicopters circle the Belden fire, scaring a bear larger than me into a tree 15 feet away by my presence, sleeping on the metal deck of a fire lookout atop the Sierra Buttes –these have been some of the exciting points during the long beautiful days in which I have met a range of people; from three round ladies who had blessed America to death with their apparel, to a 75 year old who goes by the name Tarp Man, to an Iraq war veteran bow hunting deer.
“Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance.”
“Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely as she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering. And not merely ‘some day’: now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.”
–Erwin Schrodinger
The golden setting sun has spruced each needle, Mt. Shasta glows purple, and I am nearly out of the long glorious state of California.