May Day: To the Sand
I am up on the ridge again. I come here to let things go I guess. When life feels too complex or heavy or confusing, watching the sunset literally gives me perspective. The vultures are out riding the evening thermals. I don’t think there is purpose to it, just play. They circle up until some unknown height and then turn to go up canyon in fighter jet formation. It feels like there is purpose to it, and that is the difficult part, not knowing it.
The cliff swallows chirp and dart in and out of the cliff cracks. It is May Day, a day of rebirth, ritual, growth, and fertility--and me too. After a year of shadowing and mentoring, and 6 months of being an interim director, the university decided not to hire me as the full director. And like that, identity is ripped from you, you fall into liminality, I feel like I am fledgling again. It hurts to try so hard for something and to feel like you fail. Nature reminds me that failure isn’t an end place, perhaps nothing fails in nature. I have worked hard to let my ego go--to see all these moments as opportunities.
The sun is about to set now. The wind grows as the high mountain cold, Lassen still covered in snow, sweep down the canyon to a valley sparked with life and wildflowers. Shadows creep east across the valley floor. I came here to let it go, to you, to this journal, to these relationships that hold me up and carry me. I see in this land the metaphor I seek. I see the way the river cut the rock to create this canyon, each failure in the rock surely must feel that way for the rock, for that moment, to feel the water cutting into you, to feel the cracks widen, to feel that relenting to forces beyond you, but as the sand of the rock washes to the sea, it never sees the beauty of the river which carried it away.
I want so badly to be part of a solution, so badly to make a mark in the world for doing something good, and as you wash to the sea, the moment of letting go is your art.
The sun dips behind the last clouds of the day. This was a dream too. The sun ignites from below the clouds, framed by the mountain below; it seems to hold me there. I stand to take in this breath, the last breath of another sun, another day, another hope for another better day. I found such reward in the work I was doing. Is there something more and better to be done? Isn’t that perhaps the beautiful question at the end of each day--what will come? What is below this rapid, around this bend, down the river, out to sea, pushed on currents that travel the world? The end of each day comes with such hopes for what beauty you will find as the next day rises. What will come?
