Missing Rhythms

A black silhouette of a crow alights on the phone wire and pole outside, and then stands still as stone.

I look past it, up at the fog, a gray blank, a cool, still, unyielding cover over everything as far as I can see.  This nonweather has no pulse, no variation, no obvious challenge to me, but now I begin to think of weather differently.  I feel tested in some new way by this, but the test seems unclear, the rules vague, aggravating.

In winter, a heavy downpour or a lightning storm rivets my attention.  Its danger is exhilarating, violent even; it reminds me that disaster may come at any time, and I may be called upon to be resilient and resourceful, face frightening things and stare them down in order to survive.  My ancient forebears could have survived great threat from the forces of nature in order to survive.  In a storm, the drama of side-slanting rain slashing past my window reminds me that I exist, that there is a wild form to life and its patterns, but there is a known potential for harm.  I am thrilled when I think how severe the drenching cold would be if I were caught in it.  I feel the wild pulse of danger; it is palpable and immediate.

But, fog?  It is brooding, persistent, dully unchanging, and instigates a creeping mood, misgivings, and uncertainties within me.  The insidious sameness of it day after day and its tendency to negate any sense of being in step with time and natural cycles is unnerving.  I make no plans, feel there is no potential for the day, have no sense of progress or accomplishment.

Now there are several dark crows sitting on the phone lines outside my window, walking back and forth on the thick wires, the small feathers on their shoulders ruffled by a slight breeze.  Their folded wings are hunched and the black-on-black forms look like cutouts from the sky rather than living birds, a sort of negative space, placeholders for real birds that will arrive once the sun shines again.  I've heard no songbirds lately; the spring migration is long over.  The crows, unlike the songbirds, reside here; they're just biding time, patiently resting, and provide commentary with jagged monotonous cawing, a tuneless punctuation for the fog's gray sameness.

The fog diminishes any sense of the passage of time, makes me feel as if I have entered a limbo or suspended animation.  I find myself listening to things that might help me sense differences in the world.  When the fog is draped so heavily on us for so many days, even the accustomed afternoon wind fails.  In a preponderantly fog-bound existence, it's light out and then it's not.  Day is simply not night, and then night replaces it.  The stars, the sun and moon are missing.  Those now-unseen heralds of change in the universe cannot tell me anything in the fog.  I'm on my own.  I have no inner resources to cope with the monotony of these doldrums.  I may be just as lost as if I were in the wildest storm.  What saves me from this uncertain sameness when I am used to the signs and contrasts, cycles and rhythms of nature?  What shall inform me of life out there, of my ability to live?

Sitting quietly here at my table, I watch the silhouetted crows whose small black feathers lift and fall in the light air, and I feel my heart beat.  It's almost quiet enough that I can hear it, too.  I hold very still and breathe quietly.  All my attention is on my heart, its rhythm, the tiny cycle of lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub.  It's so reassuring, and yet so basically natural; I always take it for granted.  I look back at the crows and imagine their beating hearts, small as they are, and the beating hearts of every creature on the planet.

The crows shuffle their wing feathers and settle on the wires, facing east.  Again, they are very still.  They seem to become two-dimensional images of themselves for a moment but then spring into full form again as I sense that they, too, may be feeling the beat of their own hearts and awaiting subtle changes in the world.    

Amber Memory

I had some honey today, right out of the jar, and I thought of summer in Carmel Valley where I was a child.  The honey was the same color as the dried grass and foxtails that I would pick my way through with bare feet. Silty brown dry dirt, hot but soft on my skin.

There is an intoxicating herbal-floral aroma, a heady fragrance that California shrublands exude.  Sage, bay laurel, coyote brush, grasses, oak, redwood, and the dirt itself are oily and the oils evaporate in hot air, perfuming it and penetrating into the deepest core of the people and animals who live in it, residing in their hearts and souls.  It is a fragrance that asks allegiance and devotion, acknowledgment of its ancient and abiding qualities.  I remember it lingering like the fading sounds of laughter past dark and then finally subsiding entirely in full darkness.  It was the very breath of the summer day, pleasant and sweet.

Brittle amber-colored wild grass crackled and stood like small tipis of dry stalks by August, with a litter of crushed and desiccated leaves and seeds lying about the bases on dry cocoa-brown silt.  Mica flecks twinkled like starry sparks in the dust kicked up with our bare toes.  We'd pick our way across lots and exposed small meadows and fields, using tufts of dry grass to rest on when the skin of our feet felt scorched by the dark earth.  We were explorers, wild Indians, children of imagination looking for and finding small mysteries and clues to worlds unknown to adults and their civilization.  All of nature in the region of our home was textured, fragrant, a beckoning world we needed and wanted to be part of.

A child who has lived in a California coastal valley knows the time of day by the amount of moisture in the air and the strength of the breeze.  Morning air is fresh, dewey and cool, wetted by the lifting fog.  Deer out grazing after dawn pick their way back to thickets and shaded glens to sleep until evening.  Then, midday is still and hot; nothing breathes or sings or chirps; only the bees hum in the sagebrush.  Then, at one o'clock the air lifts and stirs, the wind shifts to the distant reaches of more inland valleys and hills, drawn there by the heat.  The grasses and oaks, hot in the flat light of early afternoon, toss and sway in the push of the wind until just before dusk when everything pauses again.  Then, light seems to settle down into the ground, fading very slowly and fragrantly to its resting place.

Day after day, all summer long, some days cloaked in fog at the coast and some more intensely hot than others, the ocean inhales and exhales its wind over the coastal valleys.  Its gusting, rushing sound is a constant presence in the trees and across hillsides, a hushing sound of respiration that rises and falls, swelling and then dying away, only to rise and fall again.

After being outdoors in the morning before the day was hot, the afternoon wind in the treetops was lulling, soothing us to an enervating torpor.  Lost to daydreaming and reading, we dozed and rested.  Then, as we felt cooler and sensed the dampness of the chill evening coming on, and the fog in the distance, we'd begin a game of hide-and-seek, playing on and on to the dimmest light at dusk and beyond.

Playing, running and calling in the twilight on summer days, inhaling the intoxicating promise of amber light and honey gathered from the sage on the hills and willows by the river, we lived and breathed in the same rhythm set by the wind itself.

At the end of the day, our eyes grew accustomed to the gradual dimness of the evening until after dusk we'd run indoors, pushing and laughing, feeling like wild animals coming home again.  Then we peered goggle-eyed back at the dark from the doors and windows, and then listen for the wakening deer and rustle of their movements in the dry oak leaves.