deer mountain
"But life had shifted its weight from one point to another, like a silent giant in the vast shadows against the ridge, and I did not feel like the person I had been when this day began, and I did not even know if that was something to be sorry for."
- Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses
It begins with birds, desperation. Casting about. Night falling on dead leaves, ice in the spring. Listless, half the time. Interrogating nothingness, sowing wind. I had the idea that I could find or at least move toward some other plane. Maybe somewhere deep in the hills, tinted with power and benevolence and most of all meaning. Or something. Everywhere I went I walked through earnest forced worthless projection. Thin sentiments regarding imagined ghosts, life itself being of course the true phantom. An interior view, eidolon light. I went among the trees clothed in fiction and grief, expecting vision. Thus the "real" was cheapened and all the while I was still just bones and skin. Sometimes the heart continues to do its job solely on a technical level and so the mind, stranded, flails and then numbs. Still, I live. And so.
Litanies of failure, lessons in trust. Falsehoods, soothsayers, nightmares. A sea of trees owned by paper companies. Views of the celestial pantheon from where I stand with the teeth of the trap sunk deep into my leg. Freedom is not free. Neither is apathy.
Everything is always there, everything, everything. To expect vision is folly, this I know now. The world is obfuscation, occlusion. Motion, eclipse, atemporal mirage. Thus the beauty of stillness: all else makes way for silence, sometimes. It may be that there is only space for vision in emptiness. So here I walk, receiver, believer, bones and skin. Marching to the beat of a dead horse.
"I went through one of those giddy periods where I believed what people told me, and naturally it ended in grief."
- Hunter S. Thompson, 11/25/1982