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By chris Submitted by chris Date: 2004 Mar 15 Comment on this Work [[2004.03.15.23.15.13875]] |
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I have finally made peace with a deep loneliness, with the elements - climbed piles of black desert rock in the snow and rain (for no good reason), attempted communication with hunger-haunted coyotes in the overgrown arroyo that runs along our apartment building late at night. So the work now is done. There is no more resistance (always futile), only the life to be lived - stretching out as deceptively flat and limitless as the edge of this rift valley that holds us. (I've had the crushes too - Carrie and Manal in Austin, Stephanie in Nederland.... The list is short, though, maybe because I never thought of it as being a list.) True comradeship is the loss most irreplaceable, and I wonder often what happened to Erik, crusader for peace, brother of the Dharma, drinking-buddy bodhisattva - gone to the Balkans almost ten years ago to fix some unholy mess entirely not of his creation. And Alex, maker of films and music and mad midnight art - lost, lost as everyone is, some more intentionally than others - like Justin, once Dean Moriarity to us all, now self-exiled somewhere on the plains of Wyoming. As for the coyotes, a few weeks later - after a cold front plunged temperatures twenty degrees below normal - I saw them again in that same arroyo, in a panic, it seemed, for some human company that might mean warmth or food. But when I returned they fled - possessed suddenly by the unconscious dictate that what is wild cannot be touched by what is not. |