[MD] Clouds

[ian glendinning]

Hi Dan, an excellent moving piece.

I know that "alone but not lonely" feeling of clarity too, and in fact
often go to places to seek it out - just as easily crowded places -
music bars - as isolated mountain tops.

Regards
Ian

On 2/3/07, Dan Glover <daneglover at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>
> moq_discuss mailing list
> Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
> Archives:
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
> http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
>