Letting Go

This photo about sums up how I'm feeling these days. Wandering naked and barefoot through a forest of tall, silent trees, the sun warm on my skin, the gentle breeze sighing, the damp earth rolling away before me.

Photo by David Winge, 2012

 It's finally cooling down here in Austin, and the shift in seasons has brought with it all manner of beautiful, strange, overwhelming, and transformational changes. It's as if someone has dropped a large stone into the middle of a calm lake, and I am watching the ripples and capillary waves glide and stretch out, becoming farther apart, finally reaching the soft sand at the edge of the shore. Change is sweeping across the land and I struggle to explain it. Things are morphing and evolving here for me, shaping and defining who I've been and who I am, providing me with a clear view of my future. a thousand miles away, in my home state of California, things are also changing exponentially, and the winds of fate have brought news of it to my uncertain ears.

How to put such delicate feelings into words? How to catch a moth and set it free without damaging its wings? I fear I am too blunt, too passionate, too invested. I let things seep into my heart as rainwater into an aquifer, and when the thunderheads all vanish I am left staring at the horizon, an empty blue sky as far as I can see, wondering what happened. Forever will I carry these tiny fragments inside myself. The impressions people have made on me, the places I have been, can never be erased, no matter how desperately I may want some of them to be.

Photo by Joel D'angelo, 2012

What is the strange force within us that oft-resists change? I have always been one to scoff at those who are afraid of anything new or different - those who will never leave the town they grew up in, who are cautious in their work, their social and romantic lives, and their travels, because they are worried that their lives will be altered forever. They resist change because it is often accompanied by pain. They avoid taking risks if there is a possibility of a negative consequence. Since I was young I have striven to eradicate this feeling from my life and embrace the forces of change, but in my darkest and weakest moments I can sense that some ugly miniscule shred of it still exists within me. This is the selfish beast that causes my heart to hurt when I see an old lover, when I hear the music that drove me through the countryside alone in the dead of summer, when I am dropped from someone's life without warning like a leaf from a tree.

"The connections run through both time and space...Time has a different quality in a forest, a different kind of flow. Time moves in circles, and events are linked, even if it's not obvious that they are linked. Events in a forest occur with precision in the flow of tree time, like the motions of an endless dance."
-Richard Preston, The Wild Trees

I'm trying to let the wind and the sea take me, so I can float on gentle currents above a deep blue, rocked to sleep as if in the boughs of a redwood.