timelinesmerging
Beginnings, transitions, and the things that remain the same throughout.
1. Beginning
It seemed strange to her too, like a forcefield encompassing her in quiet, as she walked around this supposed city. She always tried to feel this city around her that would let her know, yes, there are at least a million people who populate the area she also encompasses. But every evening, each morning, almost certainly every afternoon stroll, she found herself the only one out. The only reachable energy moving through her neighborhood. Stillness and quiet surrounding her. The vibrations slow moving - her vibrations stilled along with the sweet, slow-moving, southern air.
This forcefield let the frogs in. Let the hawks swoop down and through the trees. It was loud with dogs left outside for living. Loud with a community high up in the trees and low down in the clovers. Mist would find her in it and change life into an alien lens, glowing orange pockets becoming the trail to follow and experience the shape and texture of mist under. Big puffy clouds would soar high above her little field, slow moving most of the time. Something about clouds when they get to the south, they find time to linger. Gathering into shapely puffs and breaking up the sky so it is gloriously giving true sky.
There would be cars shooting past her. People inside going to and fro, place to place, and she would look in at them. Wonder where they were going? What does this little area she occupies with her walks mean to them? This end of the road place. This road with nature still singing to her loudly at night. This road that cooled in the evening, fragrancing the air with night dew. And grew loud not with city but with a chorus of small town things: cicadas and frogs in the summer signaling the rise of heat or the transition to evening; a car driving by with Mexican accordion style music rising then trailing off; an army of birds singing their morning songs; a rooster cawing mid day.
When she arrived here at this home at the end of the road, this place where the calm energy has stilled and gathered, where she walks with her dog, Jupiter, every day, where she feels both the blessing of stillness and the torture, where she is held so sweetly two stories up in a room that is bathed in an electric light-pink glow, where each morning her window describes the day for her and she can rise to meet it, intrigued by what she will find; when she first arrived her it was like a deposit. The juggling that transition brings was finally plopped down into this singing place. It was a shock to be greeted by the stillness and it was hard to know what to do with herself. There was much to be digested from closing a chapter. She set up a sheet of tan, lined paper on the bedside table next to the open window, and as the sun went down she wrote her dreams for herself and this place down in an orange glitter pen.
The first night she was here the crickets surrounded her in song. Huge late summer thunderstorms dazzled, windows blasted with white light and thunder just warming up it seemed, booming down as if it was crashing right on her and slowly grumbling away until another cough of it. She lay in her bed and let it surround her, smiling. Excited to be here.
Now with the frogs as the chorus, her excitement seems far. She has become familiar here, potted herself amongst the teeming environment, and a grateful contentment replaces that feeling of initial excitement for what’s to come. Coming home to this place at the end of the road is a glorious kind of calm. But that excitement is slightly lost. And she wonders if she is meant to be enveloped, taken, satisfied with this stillness that surrounds her? A beginning always feels new, fresh, full of possibility, and she knows that it will dwindle. The calm embedded into this place is exciting in its own ancient way. But she wonders is it that she finds it or that it finds her? This slow moving way of life?
