on being

My favorite of the many odd and earthy things to be found on my land (stones, bones) is this large rock with a nautilus shell embedded in it. The story behind it is that it was found and brought down from the top of Truchas Peak 20 or 30 years ago - a leftover from the days 350 million years or so ago when this whole area was under a vast and roiling ocean. The person who found it lugged it back down and drove it home to Des Montes where it's been since. The snow melted just enough to reveal it again. It sort of fits my mood as I'm still thinking about the book Amazing Creatures by Tracy Chevalier - a fictionalized novel of the first dinosaur bones to be unearthed along the English coast. About people who can unravel mysteries and histories with a piece of bone or rock. In my next life I'd like to be a geologist. I'm fascinated with rocks and mountains and the secret language with which geologists read history from them.

I've sort of fallen into an existential bubble today. The crossing off of one year, the beginning of another which we will measure and take note of while the scientists tell us that there is no such thing as time. The white world outside is powerful and feels endless - spring so far away that it can't even be imagined. We have been plunged into a reality so different from last week's reality full of golden light and nearly shirtsleeve warmth. I always feel here that whatever the weather is, it will always be that way, yet it can change in minutes. Where does it all lead? And why? I recall a New Yorker cartoon where a man stands dejected and slumped over, gazing mindlessly out a window, and his wife says, "maybe you should stop reading a book called Being and Nothingness". That's me today. So maybe I'll stop metaphorically reading that book and pull myself together. See the beauty in small things like rocks and shells and abstract versions of snow and wet wood. Return to red yarn.

As usual, I find something that resonates with my mood in Basho's Knapsack Notebook (trans by Sam Hamill):

I write in my notebook...hoping that it will...
be of use to some fellow traveler. 
But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, 
the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. 
If so, read them as such.