One brief flick of the wrist, and I pull the keys from the ignition, to let the awkward calamity clank bank of power and diesel oil settle to silent rest.
It is 7:00am and time to cut trees on the wood lot.
Unlike the past few days of meandering about town, painting walls, and cutting trim while letting minutes pass unannounced by speculation saturated seconds, this sunny Thursday stumble into the wilderness has unintentionally inspired new loyalty to meditative ponderances.
In this morning, metaphor took a tiresome breath and with one single sigh, awoke my weary bone deep senses to wander about the wonder in my interior thoughts again.
Three steps out of the cab and I take a deep breath.
I in hail this warm spring’s stale reminder that when my mind is at rest, I become fenced in by quarrelsome second hand chest heaves, of discordant wasteful exhaustion. Empty desires needlessly fed by misplaced hopes, as fuel tanks on redundant societal machinery. Sputtered announcements vindicating engineered commodities who’s comestible utopian enervation leaves them continually in need of more and more.
Which begs me to question why.
Why are they willingly owned and traded by so many to fulfill archetypal vessels of prolonging monotony, validating the need to breath the same air twice. Despite the fact that natural rebirth excites them so very well, every year in the form of spring.
So here I am discerning my own mood, and squinting from the brilliantly slicing sun shining its way through the trees, into my thoughts, and down to cast a shadow behind me about all of us in this new spring.
I set my chain saw down in the crusty crystal snow, grip the handle set the choke, lift, catch, pull once… twice… three times sputter. Flick the choke to 1/2 , pull fourth, pull fifth, and it burbors, hicks, and, throttles to jumbling hungry life.
One more tree to give its own so I can live mine and someone else can share the energy it spent its life saving in peaceful silence.
There is something beautiful today in this active engagement with the worlds greater economy.
An economy of life and death and how the meaning of each ebbs and flows into the winds wafting tree traversing inhalations to what was once whispered breaths and gusting exaltations, and now, newly nourished to silence, by a gentile earth breath. A warm pine whispered summation of all sorts of meaning sweetly simplistic in its hushing proclamation.
“I am”, more then “what I am doing”.
But more importantly so are you.
I saw the initial soul spark, through thought burn when the sun slowly but steadily, muddied darkness with light this morning. An awkward initial step into the cold drenched stillness of dawn’s swampy slush pool of murky illumination. But there was something else too.
There was something else that came from me.
I noticed a new brilliance when last night, gave up its broken gray acceptance of frosty shadowed unanimity for the need to let day bring new light into morning’s desire to identify color and warmth.
Spring… Hopes… Engines… Days… Thoughts.
You and I
These all mean something.
Everything can mean something, even the things we don’t feel, can mean something, but why is it that so often, we try so hard to hold on to suggestions from insincere sources? Why do we try to loose this meaning from others, and why do we try and hold on to the meanings that never make us whole.
And then there is you.
I pilot my saw through the base of a tree levering left to right off the bucking spikes and then back out sliding the saw with gravity to let it bop and bauble at my side jiggling the wrist of the hand holding it while I look up to see where the branches point.
But who are you and who am I really?
This one cut will guide the tree to fall, the way I want it. It is the initial cut and just like life it takes a thousand second guesses in previous cuts to make this one what it is.
I have learned how to make this work.
But I can only do so much.
Since the tree, is a tree, it has branches, and not all of these branches are evenly dispersed. So naturally, when it falls, it will fall in the direction they give weight to.
And then I stop caught by something just out of view… a crocus just standing there in a space free of snow shivering in the wind and brilliantly radiating its purple yellow stare into our cold muddy melting world of gray brown trees and soil soaked leaves slowly thawing in mounds under the sky.
You’re right, I am being too serious I mumbled between exhaust bumbles to the excitedly fibrous flower.
I flair the throttle with an echoing steady yaw, plunge the blade through the trees cold dark side spreading bright white wood flying chips to be tossed by the winds irreconcilable whisper.
Its another tree.
Another whole world of meaning interacting peacefully between my own false sense of urgency and what is.
What if we could chose to bring our worlds to meet up with these new silences. Where we could learn to hold what is in our world of muddied inner dark up to parts of definitive existence for the sake of questioning our misanthropic unanimities of lost hopes. Perhaps instead of getting lost in mastering cyclical subsistence, we could, once again, understand a bit more of something similar to the world of trees, and give up our hopeless need to master and condemn everything that does not seek a relentless calamity of sensory exhaustion.
What is it with this world and insincerity?
But I have had years of practice at this game, and I realize this is not a war, or a debate, or juxtaposing sound ideals one over the other. This is reality that I’m trying to see into, and every silent rhythm of winter warming to spring ensures a timeless insistence to learning a new chaotic consistency, every time.
Even though the whole world works by rhythms I have not yet learned. I’m not sure that I shouldn’t try.
I say that because of its persistence in my hopes.
Sometimes I have felt it surfing, escaping our needless painful proclamations to how we need to be, with the Ocean singing her swell as returning silences of sets and rhythms, I’ve experienced it on mountain tops and long painful walks when my life hasn’t been exactly the way I thought it needed to be.
But I have only ever noticed it when I was able to seek it.
And I don’t think that should be over looked.
Notions of real peace, in our natural chaos.
It was after the first few of these when I began to discover a bit more then I had known could be knowable.
Hope can exist in chaos for any number of reasons, but every one of those reasons is something that we can only begin to see for our selves. Its as if the ability to embrace this notion of inner solitude, as ‘being enough’, is needed to begin an understanding of what validation and virtue were trying to let hope bring us before we got it all wrong.
Which means that this hope of yours can exist out side of this worlds confusion, and even out side of you, while we live directly in the midst of it.
In this idea, as hope born by our nature, and transcending our own naturally individual circumstances, this part of you now exists both in time and out of it. By knowing, and understanding that not all you have come to know and understand is completely yours then you know that not all of your understanding, and not all that you are is limited to what you have begun to know. You are so much more then just your own world of perception.
In this same maxim, what ever it is that our hope encompasses, we should seek to loose our possessions from its ideal, of its unjust relation to being vindicated only by our questionable desires. In doing so we may learn to truly experience it as hope, just as it ‘is’, without the false perceived notion of it’s personally possessive end, and then, when hope can be real, and totally realized even in its unreality, we will not be able to loose it, and will not have to fear its loss. It will simply be.
This could do nothing less then open our eyes to the reality of our relation to everything around us. We would live where our souls could simply desire correctly, and our bodies being understood as parts of our purity of will, could matter very little.
I think we can experience this as a new solitude, but I know that we cannot get there on our own.
We cannot come to the place where there is no quarrelsome air by bounding in the meadows of our own introspection, granted, it may be free enough there, but in reality we will have only managed to lock our selves out of our own cars. Our freedom will remain, but only until we realize we must go home. The soul must find resolution past its self in order for it to gravitate to anything without judgment. It must accept the completeness of knowing of its more-ness of solitude then knowing the less-ness of it’s self in a limiting possessive reduction.
The saw stops and a birds clear song absolutely enforces the resonating differences between heaven and hell.
We have a language to talk about these things, where we can open the doors for others to hear of hope and to open up heaven, and everything can speak it.
We have one command in silence, and that is to seek in solitude. Where we can communicate by no other means then to the one who could speak in this mute world of ours and have it make sense. There in silence we can communicate with one alone, with the silence of our whole being.
Where what we can know, and have the ability to say, is meant for no one else.
What is never related of what could not be spoken, must not be told, because it cannot.
But before we can even begin to come to the edge of what might be there, we will question our desire to stay. Which is an unfortunate byproduct of this common machinery. We can stay on this side and take all it can relate back to others, or we can choose to simply and silently pass on.
It looks kind of like a test of sorts, for those who are waiting to cross into a new day. If you cannot leave your words behind, then you are not ready for what I am suggesting could be. If that is the case, then you must return to pretending your purposes on the trees and mountains, in fear of this calm new worlds accusations to your emptiness. And you must continue announcing your validity by an exhausted plenum of narrow ideals until you can move all the mountains to the sea on your own.
But your lack of peace will lead you back here again.
All of our constructs are an old pretending strength. The lands reality can be seen by its will to consume the road if it is not maintained, the earth will slowly swallow our castles and churches, but quietly and peacefully rebirth will exist, and its call to our souls will be continual.
The world is real, our business is false.
The crocus blooms in silence, this is reality.
And silence, as the mother of all speech, even when there are no words, or sounds sings in continual harmony to this fact. We will never hear any words from the depths of our hearts, where truth breaths silence, but we must let a time come when the words we normally speak fall silent and we ask our selves, if anything we have, has ever had a true meaning.
From silence we can learn distinctions of what is.
A life is not a mass of jargling jargons continuously spat from our faces for fear of our final silences in death. Life is a rhythm born from renewed silences, brought to sense and expression so as to know a deeper culmination in final declaration, and then diminish inaudibly to the stillness of a rest resounding in unending praise.
You see I think that our whole life must be a meditation of our last and most important decision: the choice between life and death. If in life we have chosen life, then in death we will pass from death to life.
Our call here is to choose life, to choose to know life in all of its rhythms, even in death. So when that time comes our new life will not be avoided by fear, but embraced, with a resounding praise, so that we may be meaningfully restored by grace; a reality that surrounds us and has surrounded us all our lives. The grace of an image we were created in, made for, experienced by more then just our means and then restored to a new life in what we are beyond death.
The chain saw is now getting hotter, and I can feel its warmth radiating through my jeans as I let the engine idle at my side.
I hope this isn’t my own excuse for staying on one side verses the other. I guess the only thing I can really know, is that I have to cut 10 more trees and then I get to go home.
