1.
Where are you?
Not place, but yes, place. I mean: within you, where are you? No need to respond. No obligation to wonder, to wander.
But, please, do try.
2.
I thought the ocean would redeem me. Sprawled flat-back against warm September sand, palms open and lifted, I once declared a new start.
But winter came and came and came and flattened me into something less. Granular. Between wave, wind, and saturating storm, the dull pressure of gray soaked and rearranged. Through rain and tears, I curled into my self.
I traveled for miles, for years, then stumbled back where I began, on dry land where suede hills roll across a landscape scraggled and wide. Canyon, mountain, meadow and swale, in all directions the earth does not erode or ebb, does not shift or sink, does not wear me away.
Here, the horizon is an unbroken line of nothing. This is the long gestation, a slow appreciation for absence. When you think there is nothing, the smallest life blooms. Sage in spring, bunchgrass summers, rabbitbrush in fall, and winters of scrubby strays that tumble through lonely stretches.
A single meadowlark calls, another answers from far away. Everything here is away, and yet this distance draws you near. Just as silence fills a noisy gap, absence is a virtue. The something of nothing. I hunger for it now, these vast saddle soft edges, a place to put my quiet.
3.
If only we could keep going, out of harm's way, writes Robert Vivian in Hereafter in Fields, and take with us only the best parts of ourselves.
4.
There are hundreds of routes to the same place. Sometimes I imagine how this geography can make me better, or that one kinder. Sometimes gauzy appreciation is truth steeped in love. Mostly, though, it's hope for better around the bend, a few more miles, the very next stop.
5.
Why do I need these landscapes, Anna Kamienska asks. The roots of my astonishment at the world cling tight to my inner life, in a tangle of memories, experiences.
6.
I have learned this land slowly, mulling as I usually do. Resistant then relenting, hiking through gravel and shale, basalt ridges and sun-bleached plateau, doubting the way, doubling back. This is the shape of my days, which is to say, my life.
In this terrain, a tether is tendered. It's a filament so slight that trust must fill what the hand can't grip, what the heart is desperate to hold.
7.
But sometimes, says John Ashberry, standing still is also life.
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