It's been a minute....

I am so restless now; I can’t settle on much. We are starting to snap back into some semblance of the un-affected life. But somehow we are almost more isolated, as our small little Covid-covens break up, spinning into other streams of existence, work, school, exercise classes, leaving us between worlds, between what used to be and what used to be before that.

 

What I mean is, those relationships formed by the necessity of limited contact during Covid might not work so well as we get back into the flow of going places and doing things, while many of our previous connections have been broken or stretched way too thin to hook up again.

 

I am so restless and yet so stuck. Sitting on the tan sand yesterday afternoon, the grit of beach invading the seams of the swimsuit -- a new one because after two years of neglect, I can’t even find my old ones, which truth be told, probably won’t even fit any more. This beach has a touch of heaven to it, a small cove at the bottom of canyon eroded into the bluff, a canyon edged by tall pines and Douglas fir, full of butterflies and the calls of juncos and bushtits, chickadees, the echo of ravens. Over the narrow bay, the gulls  cry their funny, searing call, then strut along the edge of the wavelets, little martinets commanding your chip-crumbs or the ragged core of your consumed pear by their mere presence of their upright posture, their parade-ground bearing.  

 

The water – it is the water that makes the difference, that creates the spell, the transmutation  – cold, of course, but not so cold as to be impossible. The long narrow finger of this bay marks the San Andreas fault as it rips into the crust of the planet; it is a hinge, a meeting and a long leavetaking of plates, a matrix of tectonics. Here we can feel the fold of our lives, how that past can flip up and across the present like pleats. I may be in the kitchen, folding the batter for blueberry muffins, but I am also on the side of the road, hitch-hiking to Woodstock.

 

I run into the bay water, the same fold of water that serves as a nursery for white sharks. I float, looking up at the serrated edges of the sky, the tops of my world, but the bushy bottoms for the raven, the osprey, the lone bald eagle. 

 

From writing prompts on Wednesday night, August 31, 2022