The Life and Times of the Plume

I am a bird on a perch overlooking my mountain valley.  The wind is a force.  I watch the clouds fly by on their strange, invisible currents and think to myself the only thing faster than the pronghorn of the interior West are the shadows cast by clouds as they gallop across the ridge lines on any windy day, reducing the land at my feet to patchwork of lightness and dark, as living as any living thing, zoetic and wild.

I am out scampering on the East Bench, above the Portneuf Valley, and am high enough now that I can see clearly in all directions, across the unfolding ranges in this corner of Idaho, and beyond, almost to Wyoming in the East, that wind bitten state and its glorious high desert, wide valleys and micro-ranges I often find myself daydreaming about.

It is expansive.

It is hard to believe that the planet does not lay out in a rumpled, irregular line, infinite and rolling forever into the new space of itself and beyond any points of possible exploration.  I feel alone.  I turn my back on town where it lays like shards of carefully arranged salt and pepper on a river valley floor.  I look to the sky and anchor myself in the wildness I see there.

I want to write something smart today but I know if I try too hard I’ll sound pretentious, or worse, silly.  So I let the words fly out of my pen and let my thoughts and feelings lead me out into deeper space.  I don’t want to claim to find dichotomy where it does not exist.  Today I am black and white but there is no divergence between those gradients, no strange blend of grey where those two tones meet in me, turn to mud, and gradually branch into separate entities.  I am merely composed of the two certain ends of the spectrum, solid terminal points where white is as pure and strong as its opposite, black.  There is a delicious certainty in absolutes.  Today, grey is for the bellies of the clouds.

Lately, I have pondered at how much life needs death and how much death needs life; the seamless transition between those opposite realms, the interchange of energy and molecules that coast in and out of the world of the living (though never dead unto themselves), always returning as new things, new pieces to intricate puzzles.  I think about the reincarnation that occurs constantly in the molecular and cellular realm.

A plant is alive.  A plant dies.  A plant is reduced to molecules and minerals and energies.  A plant becomes a new thing and so on and so forth until the wildflowers are built of bonemeal and our marrow is made of Indian paintbrush.  When this body fades away, what will my microcosmic pieces become?  Even now I fade, I lose a blond hair and it drifts off into the breeze.  I shed a skin cell, it lodges itself in a stone crevice.  I shed a tear, and the salts of my body are absorbed by the earth.  Already, I am a part of it all.  This is alive.  This is dead.  Somewhere in it all is holiness, a great plan, the promise that my pieces are enduring and always part of a great whole.  I am already turning to wildflowers.  Is it enough to be momentarily beautiful on a mountain slope, bracing against the spring wind, the purple burning out of my petals as the days grow longer, food for a mule deer, meal for marrow?  And what of my spirit?  And what of my soul?  Into what Great Hand do I commit myself — the wispy thing that remains once all else has turned to lupins and larkspur?  Oh.  I know.

I know.

I feel my mind whirl.  I lay my head back against a stone and look up at the sky where the clouds are white bastions of a larger, greater thing — holy and swirling on their way to the East, propelled by the supernatural power of the wind, islands in a great, wide open blue.  I see stray raindrops, plummeting towards my upturned face. Each one that strikes my skin is a shock, a gentle surprise.  The raindrops turn slushy and then comes a smattering of small hail pellets.  Still I sit with my face turned upwards.  I am receiving a benediction.  I fold my hands in my lap and close my eyes in prayer.  This isolated flurry will pass as quickly as it arrived.  I keep sitting in my stone nook, sheltered from the wind, feeling the heat of intermittent spring sunshine warm my legs through my jeans.  The black ink of my pen runs and smudges when the rain strikes the pages of my journal and still, I sit tight, allow the pages to flutter in the wind, as though each one is animated and awaiting the conversation that drips from my pen tip.  So I sit up straight, push my back into stone, and continue to write, to find meaning in everything, to answer the questions I ask of myself and my world.  And slowly, the answers come.