The Cowled Mount

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/06/the-cowled-mount

At times like these, I feel I’ve unfettered feet, and more than perhaps two. I’m a centipede, marching mind thinking a hundred things, estranged from my own wandering shoes. I found the glory within, crawling over the pass and seeing the mountain, wearing no hood or cowl to match its name, but gleaming like a frozen font, a spike, a rigid canine, a snow-leopards ear. A valley swoops beneath me, the very land removed from under my rolling toes, and the curving wyrm of the land is like a Chinese dragon colored in wildflowers, a royal carpet sliding towards the sanctified Olympus.

And seeing that vision, the pinnacle of creative mass, I understand the inertia of love and the gravitas of sacrifice and sanctification, if only a little. I can feel the weight of it on my dreams, the deep, heavy sighs of the earth and I imbibe of the grace therein. I need everything, the nearness of it all and the prescience of divinity.

Tonight is the last day before my last best friend is married off. I found the most beautiful road in Newberg (well, I’ll hedge that with a ‘one of the’), and drove along a ridge facing Mount Hood, vineyards and grazing livestock filling the periphery with the perfect ambiance. I wonder whether my words are a subtle injustice, a slight on the majesty of creation. Does poetry only detract from true creativity, and music only a cheap substitute for the orchestra of creation? I cannot believe this to be true, as a general rule, but sometimes I cannot collect any words that portray the mountain, that harness the motion of the river, that captivate as surely as the woods, the rain, the clouds gloomy and playful over the starry sky.

I want to sleep, but my body fights me; I want to eat, but there, too, I’m refused; I want to imagine worlds and write poetry, to sing, play guitar, dream, and write beautiful things, but I’m stymied by an incessant farewell-love. It’s that inhibitive time where nothing can be done until I’ve done what must be done. I’m not the parents, but I feel as though I’m surrendering J and S to each other and to another place, just as I did Matthew, just as I did A and S, just as perhaps I’ve done countless times before, though each time with a greater piece of my heart to offer up.

So here I am, staring down a bag of chips and wondering if my pacing mind will focus enough to finish reading a book, or whether I might just sleep instead. I fear I’ll be stuck in a pasture without sheep to count, dear Olwen, but perhaps this is how all vigils should progress, in existential-quandaries of beauty, peace, and letting go.

There’s probably a Disney song about this. 

Morning Mood

My little brother is graduated, and because his class his relatively small (~100), every student gave a thank-you speech to his/her parents during the ceremony. Because I was only there for my little brother, I spent much of the time reading, but a couple of speeches dragged my attention to the fore. One of the students approached the podium and started off with a stutter. I was immediately yanked into the King's Speech movie, and the heartbreaking tragedy of this student's inability to formulate his words. W-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-would my p-p-p-p-p-p-p-parents p-p-p-p-p-p-pl-pl-please s-s-s-s-stand?

Already I was bawling, and cheering him on with everything in my heart.

Those are bravest who possess no courage at all. If you have no fear, it's not bravery standing before a crowd and speaking. Only by moving through the fear can you defeat it, beat it, and exhibit courage and the tenacity that the King’s Speech expressed so eloquently. So many of the students droned their speeches, or pitched high into a descending resonance with each sentence, portraying an ennui that grinds at my bones. Are they thanking anyone or going through the motions? And I don’t know their stories, but this boy, with the courage of a saint, stood up and bore the pain of stuttering through a two-sentence speech that took him his whole minute to repeat, with all of the emotive outpouring and love that could be.

It filled me, and I was not even the target. It was no wonder that he almost got a standing ovation for his speech, and high-fives from his classmates. I hid my tears – I don’t even have the bravery for those, sometimes.

Now my little brother is graduated; he’s growing up. Already, he’s smarter than I, and I hope, by God’s grace, he’s not long in becoming wiser.

Eventually, Olwen, the crowd dissipates, long in buildup and quick in escape. These trees surround me in tens of thousands, sloping up and beneath in countless disparity, and I know none of their names nor, even, the touch of their high leaves. Not nameless, are they? Glance around with me, do you see the endless they without names? The firs and the false cedar, the maple and pine, the oak, birch, ash, and wisteria vines, the huckleberry, blackberry, and the quaking aspen, the poplar and the elm – I walk below the boughs of many, today, the big-leaf maple clawing its way through the unkempt rhododendron, the keys of maples helicoptering from the tallest branches, the battle for sunlight and its scarcity at the base of these mighty things.

Even the wind reaches me not among the forest and in the valley, where the creek stumbles over pebbles towards the sea, though I suspect not in its wildest dreams can it imagine such a thing, and the pines fill the air with nostalgic mountain redolence. I can tell where I am simply by smelling the leaves and watching the lichen and moss clinging desperately to the limbs of giants, and the trunks of forest legs.

My bare feet quietly skip over sticks and stones and soon carry the color of mud along with me, and the doe recognizes the fae in my soles. I sit in the branches of old-man willow and tarry long in the arms of the burly oak, whose palm stretches out with mighty piano fingers, and tickle the harp strings of the sun, making musical notes of the mountain morning, mournful and full of love.

I don’t think I could ever leave these shores, the pacific northwest lives in me, and I in thee.

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/06/graduation/ ‎
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