I sway back and forth, dancing with the motion of the earth as it spins unforgotten until the shape-shifting waters tremble. Ebb and flow, drift and twist - the briny freshness burning my eyes as I rub them with wrinkled fingers through button shut eyelids. Dancing with the raw force; now it’s soft and caressing, gently encouraging my limbs. And now it pulls and insists with or without my consent. My body is taut but compliant as I give my ground with as much grace as I can muster. And it pushes me like a skilled tango master, it’s fingers forcing my waist and hips this way and that. I emerge from the icy-but-refreshing (as only my Pacific Northwest Native mind would think) waters and feel the force of gravity hit me as though a harness has been thrown over my shoulders. I sway now with the perceived stillness as my body reacquaints itself with the predictable spin of the globe.

The sand is golden honey tan, slate pewter-grey and baby-cheek pink, and I rest with my head cradled in the warm lap of the beach. The robin’s egg sky above is broken only occasionally by a wisp of cloud or the geometric black and white wings of a gull. Every now and then the breeze kicks up and a chill runs the length of my body, lightening-fast eruption out of my skull, my hair on end as the energy of the cold escapes. For a thousand years I lay there; or maybe it is only a few minutes. My thoughts in and out of the present, called to the forefront only when my senses are confronted. I’m day dreaming grandiose plans; intricate and detailed, and impossibly optimistic – you’d think I was still six or something. And the raucous caw of the birds sings an afternoon lullaby into my wavering consciousness.

tsuyu no yo wa tsuyu no yo nagara sari nagara

(The world of dew, a world of dew it is indeed, and yet)

                                                                                                               - Kobayashi Issa

….well, and gnarly goats too.

The moon rose gracefully tonight

a deliberate regal rise

All the way to the tips of its toes

like an agile

pirouetting, auspicious

golden Buddha

The following is a true story:

The other night I had a very vivid realistic dream where a stranger approached me and told me this:  “The universe isn’t laid out the way we had presupposed. Its always thought of in round, circular, huge, spiraling terms - and it’s true that up close, on a microscopic level, that is how it physically appears. Round, oval and elliptical orbits around globular planets, moons and stars. Gravity spinning galaxies into spiraling, pinwheels of fairy gold dust sprayed across the sky.

However if one were to take a step back and see the universe in totality, one would see that the fabric of the universe is far more akin to lichen creeping over the surface of the forest floor. A carpet of the living energy and dying energy feeding in a symbiotic relationship off one another - the life constantly living in the shadow of death, the death constantly being replaced by life. The lichen that is the universe is laid out like a blanket across all things physical - the way lichen itself is laid out in the forest; covering stones, and soil, wrapping back on itself around trees, covering all things in an organism that is constantly dying and being reborn.

The universe isn’t held together by huge solitary forces - but like the lichen it’s held together by millions of delicate strands, tiny fingers grasping one onto another, in an unyielding fabric of energy and love.

Lichen

The Milky Way

Gold Lichen atom

Space