Waking.

Grief. My tongue is tied to write anything else so I’ll let someone else do the speaking. These pictures were taken by Josh on the central coast. The words are Annie Dillard’s.

“I’ve been bloodied and mauled, wrung, dazzled, drawn. I taste salt on my lips in the early morning; I surprise my eyes in the mirror and they are ashes, or fiery sprouts, and I gape appalled, or full of breath. The planet whirls alone and dreaming. Power broods, spins, and lurches down. The planet and the power meet with a shock. They fuse and tumble, lightning, ground fire; they part, mute, submitting, and touch again with hiss and cry. The tree with the lights in it buzzes into flame and th cast-rock mountains ring.

Emerson saw it. ‘I dreamed that I floated at will in the great Ether, and I saw this world floating also not far off, but diminished to th size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, ‘This thou must eat.’ And I ate te world.’ All of it. All of it intricate, speckled, gnawed, fringed, and free. Israel’s priests offered the wave breast and the heave shoulder together, freely, in full knowledge, for thanksgiving. They waved, they heaved, and neither gesture was whole without the other, and both meant a wide-eyed and keen-eyed thanks. Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet, said the bell. A sixteenth century alchemist wrote of the philosopher’s stone, “One finds it in the open country, in the village and in the town. It is in everything which God created. Maids throw it on the street. Children play with it.’ The giant water bug ate the world. And like Billy Bray I go my way, and my left foot says ‘Glory,’ and my right foot says ‘Amen’: in and out of Shadow Creek, upstream and down, exultant, in a daze, dancing, to the twin silver trumpets of praise.”

“Be victim to abruptness and seizures, events intercalated, swellings of heart. You’ll climb trees. You won’t be able to sleep, or need to, for the joy of it. Mornings, when light spreads over the pastures like wings, and fans a secret color into everything, and beats the trees senseless with beauty, so that you can’t tell whether the beauty is in the trees – dazzling in cells like yello sparks or green flashing waters – or on them – transfiguring silver air charged with the wings’ invisible motion; mornings, you won’t be able to walk for the power of it: earth’s too round… Then you kneel, clattering with thoughts, ill, or some days erupting, some days holding the altar rail, gripping the brass-bolt altar rail, so you won’t fly.”