[MD] Clouds

[Dan Glover]

Hello everyone

I've been away spending time in the mountains. Winter caught me a bit off 
guard forcing me to stay longer than was my plan. I brought enough food for 
a week so the snow and ice storm I found myself caught up in didn't much 
concern me.

I holed up by a frozen rocky creek in between a pair of rather large 
boulders that offered some little shelter from the wintery blasts of wind 
coming down over the mountain tops. Kindling a small fire to cook dehydrated 
vegetable stew provided me with a bit of warmth. My poncho protected me from 
the freezing rain. I feel confined in tents so I don't carry one. I 
stretched a tarp between the boulders with clothesline to get out of the 
weather as best I could.

Snow began falling around the time darkness came. Those mountains are 
normally so quiet that I can hear my own heart beating and with the snow now 
covering everything the quiet became enormous. Almost unbearable. There was 
time to think as I sat there deep in the mountains feeding small twigs into 
the fire every few minutes and watching the snow fall hissing into the tiny 
flames. Ah, solitude.

I've never been lucky enough to have many friends. Perhaps it would be 
better to say any. I remember standing in a corner of the school yard 
watching all the other kids play, unable to join in. It's not that I dislike 
people. I'm just not much good at small talk and the social graces that seem 
to come to others so easily. I find myself time and again sitting alone in 
the middle of crowded rooms. When I move to sit with others they seem to get 
up and leave one by one until I find myself sitting alone once more. After a 
while I just give up. It doesn't matter.

Alcohol and drugs seemed to help, ages ago. They loosened my inhibitions but 
also loosened my anger so gradually all that dropped away. When I began my 
zazen some years ago the drinking got in the way so it stopped one day, I 
don't remember when. Nothing intentional, mind you. It just stopped and I 
could see no reason to begin again. Drugs too. I didn't need them so I put 
them down. The price was clarity. And aloneness. Yet I am never lonely. Just 
alone.

I seem to see things others do not. There is very little to connect me with 
the world of people. Words, maybe. One day I feel I will fade away all 
together and that's okay. There's very little here anyway. Very little that 
is actually me. I am a cloud passing on a summer day. When one looks I am 
gone and one wonders if I was ever here at all.

It is cold there in the mountains. Bone chilling cold. So cold one wonders 
if the warmth of summer will ever come again. My food began running low 
while the storm still raged. Wave after wave of freezing rain covered the 
trees until they began giving way under the weight. I could hear the 
branches breaking during the night with loud cracks that startled me from 
fitful sleep.

One night I dreamed my dad was there shaking me by the shoulder trying to 
wake me so I could go to work picking asparagus before school. I've always 
had trouble sleeping and rising early and he grew angry with me, shouting my 
name  and shaking me ever harder. I woke with a start but only the mountains 
were there. I felt so alone. So alone. The dream had been so vivid I 
couldn't reach sleep again that night so I sat and watched the light grow 
slowly to reveal an ice-covered world.

Another night I dreamed I was with a woman. Soft. Tender. It'd been so long. 
I didn't know her yet she was familiar. I knew all her lines and just how to 
touch her and where to put my mouth so she responded under my carress. When 
I woke I wished she was really there. But, of course... she wasn't. And I 
wondered who she was, if indeed she was at all. I remember how her eyes 
shined and how good she felt. I went to sleep the next night hoping to see 
her again but she failed to return. I woke cold and hungry.

The food was gone by now so I decided that I should begin my trek out of 
those mountains despite the storm. I knew the way. I'd been there so many 
times that the maze like-paths are my only friends. The snow and ice made 
for treacherous traveling and in those mountains a turned ankle can mean 
death. So the going was slow. It didn't matter. I didn't care. I had time 
and I had clarity. And there was no one waiting for me. No one to care. No 
one to worry.

I tightened my belt all I could yet my pants still wouldn't stay up so I 
took the time to make a new hole in the belt with my pocket knife and a 
couple days later another and yet another. I felt lighter and lighter. I'd 
been out of food for days. I made tea from boiled snow and crushed pine 
needles. It was bitter but good. Hunger gnawed at me at first but as the 
days passed it gradually grew quiet as my mind grew ever sharper. I felt 
good. Yet I felt bad.

We are in such danger. Civilization is so precarious. How did all this get 
started. Technology will not save us but it just might destroy us. Perhaps 
it would be better to turn back if only we could. But we can't. Not without 
being fanatics and no one likes a fanatic. I don't worry for myself, mind 
you. I worry for you. I worry for my family. For my loved ones, all. If only 
I could save myself I could save the whole world. But I cannot. We are in 
such danger. Terrible danger.

No one seems to see it. They go about their lives as if. As if everything 
will be okay. They don't see. I envy them. I want to live paycheck to 
paycheck and go home after work to plop in front of the tv and eat garbage 
and have a soft warm woman to sleep with. But I can't hold a job and I don't 
know how to talk to women. So I drift and dream. And I stay hungry. Always 
hungry.

I don't understand any of it. I haven't worked a real job in thirty years. 
And fast food makes me sick. I can't keep it down. The tv is so stupid that 
I want to be ignorant enough to watch. I want it more than anything. But 
clarity gets in the way. I hate it. Yet I crave it. What does that say about 
me? I don't understand.

Even with clarity I find that I don't know much for certain. In fact on 
examination I find I know nothing at all for certain. I believe that I know 
yet when I stare into the darkness of those mountains I realize how it is, 
even though the words to convey what I realize will not come. Maybe there 
are no words. I fill my mind with words but they mean nothing at all. 
Nothing.

It is all a waste, I suspect. Such a magnificent waste. There's nothing to 
believe in. An imaginary God perhaps if it suits one's fancy. Not mine, 
thank you Jesus anyway. And when we return to the crumbled dust from which 
we all sprang perhaps that realization will come to us all. I just don't 
know for certain. That's all I can say. And there's no one to ask. No one 
with answers. It all seems so exaggerated. So absurd.

On the sixth day of walking I saw something red flitting through the icy 
trees. I wondered at it and then I realized I had come to my truck. For a 
moment I considered turning back and returning the way I'd come. It was just 
a passing moment. Like life. Like this wonderful world. A cloud passing by 
on a sweet summer day never to return.

Then I got in my truck, drove to a grocery for some fresh fruit, and then to 
a motel for a long hot shower and a night in bed. The mountains wait. They 
know I'll be back. Until I am no more. And we will be together again. 
Forever. If there is such a thing.

Thanks for reading,

Dan