I prefer to write in fiction, and there is a huge difference between the structure and intent of story telling, and the flow and purging in my early morning musings and poetry, which I primarily keep to myself. I was inspired this morning, however, with a collision of forces, and so this humble little piece was born, and I hope it keeps to its more whimsical birth while telling a true story that mirrors certain things...harmonies and conflicts, if you will...that are currently confronting themselves within me.
I just got back into the tiny city. It's a pretty little town, but it isn't the mountains, and it isn't even a full grown city yet. It sits at the bottom of a bowl of tall hills and ridges, with a sleepy, subdued river running through the middle of it in a broad, sweeping, and somehow, very pleasing curve.
I've been in the Copper Basin playing on wild rivers, and the city - even as small as it is - is somehow an abhorrent paradox, or contrast, to my present state of mind. Thank God it isn't a big city...
A few years ago, I met a woman from London. She was beautiful. A bolt of lightning. I liked a lot of the London that she wore, and there was a lot of the London on her that I didn't like. But she was a powerhouse of a woman, and I admired her immensely. We spent two weeks together in the States having a grand adventure all across the southern Appalachian Mountains.
Several years before that, I was lucky enough to witness the collision of two powerful storm cells while standing on the peak of the oldest mountain in the world. Great giants of clouds colliding with other giants. Lightning striking everywhere. Twisting and mating and folding into each other, these storms quarreled and made love...consuming and being consumed in gorgeous, breathtaking violence. I felt the fear that I could die at any moment, and it was mirrored by the way I couldn't catch my breath in the raging winds and pushy, cold gusts. It invoked a panic that stemmed from the minefields of my past. Helpless. Blown up. With mortars and artillery exploding - missing their target - all around me for hours. I thought that one day I could describe a fear like that - that is, once I had lived long enough to have a proper view of the horizons - but I now believe that you just can't describe it in words at all. You have to live it...and I would much rather we not. As I came to grips with these old fears, in a very similar way as that moment from my past, I was astounded by the power and the beauty. I can't really describe that either.
I was all alone up on that peak. The trails had cleared out ahead of the storm, but they are never crowded anyway. That's what I like most about the cities, these factory farms for commodified people. Making value out of nothing. People in cities seem too distracted to be bothered with reality. The city's "Real World" is an imaginary tea party with costumes. So many costumes that there are even costumes for riding bicycles. In cities, people would rather fight over balls in stadiums than venture into the world that sustains the poison factories of people, wastes seeping into the contaminated rivers...into the poisoned oceans.
So the trails stay relatively unused and uncrowded. And I love that!
In that way, I can easily stomach the tourists when I'm working...guiding whitewater rivers...and happily share. And I hope that when they go home, because they can not stay, they will make some art. I hope that they are that moved - by the river, in the way she moves me, not by me - when they return home to these cities, where wars are born and planned...so moved that they make art. Or live artfully. Because great art is really nothing more than attempts to express the archetypes found in nature - in the really real world - that can't exist in an imaginary tea party city, lit in artificial light.
We've covered up this world, peopling so much expanse and vastness. But standing on that mountain, I didn't see any museums. No. Why would you? That mountain is living art, and there is nothing you can build, nothing you can say, that wouldn't be embarrassing next to the magnificence of that stoic, ancient creature. No expression that can compare to the towering view of folds of earth rising up and radiating out into so many other worlds far below.
I am so nothing.
