Taking a walk just now, I realized that things sometimes seem “just so.” And others, not so. A few weeks ago I saw a seal who seemed a bit sick, or perhaps just tired lay on the beach, slowly adjusting every twenty minutes, but mostly lounging under and umbering sky, falling into night, before a swarthy ocean, crashing upon rocks, its surface ripping to the north in currents like electric fields without boundaries, sworling up and up without a map. It just lay there as elegantly as an old Greek on a day couch, taking lunch, as though the only real concern of the day was an extremely abstract question about eternity. I wondered about its landscape: what is this seal’s home? How does it feel when it takes in that first breath of air, the underwater breath, and return, navigating “home?” I have always thought seals look like men trapped in some evolutionary bag, writhing and stretching in a protean ballet… a patient audience to themselves. So just now, walking, looking up at the great creaking pines, slowly gesturing in the first fall winds… I realized how placeless we are, or how so just not so things can be when we don’t cleave to a place like it were already where we’re going to die. I lived in a farm manor at one point, taking care of it and making things in its carriage house. At some point, months after living there, the doctor who owned it moved back in and I was his room mate. He suffered from depression and treated it by going fly fishing with his dog every day, and every day without fail he brought back at least one steelhead. The deal went: I could eat of this bounty if I cooked which I liked because I loved the fish and I like to cook fish. I always tore the cooked head off and stared into the inside of it, in line with the fish, looking through the back of its head, the head that took it out to sea, to somewhere near Alaska, and back, sometimes several times; and when I looked just so, I looked at an evolution-museum, the bio-mechanics behind a miracle: this creature was tuned into a magnetic geo navigation tracking system that enabled it to go to mecca once, twice, thrice…? and then get caught and serve itself up. How is it, in its environment, anything like what we have? I wondered, walking tonight, looking at the trees that natives had walked amid years ago, as well as a lot of animals who let go as well as the salmon and the seal. I looked at an art deco front doorway with thin stand off numbers, 4427, their thin lines shadows cast against stucco. What if a four fell upside down? Would it still be 4427? Or would we loose our way? A dangling upside-down symbol. Stands for everything wrong. We don’t hunt, don’t gather, don’t reap, don’t sew. Where do we go? How do we return to that sea, fulfill the story that is embedded in the back of our heads, like the fish, engineered to river-go? All I could do was return home and notice the kitchen needed a more than thorough cleaning, pull the containers away from the back-splash and scrub them, scrub the seams, scald the pots and leave squeaky clean crystal clear finishes on all glass, there’s a product for that. O, take us where we want to go, where the earth shaker plays his drums and nymphs and messengers meet to share meals …
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