Blog-azic

A maple moon rose low in the east. Its watery light filtered through sleeping trees, diluting the cool, humid dark. The night tasted sweet in my mind, but it was also bitter. A familiar taste, sure. I chase the bitter sweet because it’s where I feel most alive. But now, there was a presence in the space I never knew before. I walked these dark paths fifteen and more years ago, longing to fade away into my private vision of nature. Now, I could remember the longing, but it was old. I was outside it looking in. A new perspective. Is this the wisdom of age? Susan and I were walking the college green, past Cutler Hall on the north side. I gestured to the thin redwood, bearing a new gash. The spreading maple was gone, with a young black gum in its place. A trio of sycamores arched over head, spread out long glowing arms, and made a cathedral. The kind, old Norway spruce still watched Scrips Amphitheater. I wanted to stop and converse with all of them, but we walked on, sipping a decaf

In the heart of the Red River Valley, in the city of Winnipeg, CA, before winter had even officially begun, Hafed and I braced against a biting wind. The stark streets (purely northern their utility) offered no hope against the sting. We trudged by the art museum. Large black statues outside were unimpressed by the cold and unsympathetic to our plight. They sat like pharaohs, almost facing each other but really looking over one another’s shoulder to eternity. They are stone, after all, and unflinching, generally unconcerned with here and now. In contrast, We are flesh and crumpling in the wind. We are shedding and wearing down, and our bodies exert their all trying to repair the damage, to stave off inevitability. They fail, as a matter of course, and they fail quickly - the blink of those statues’ stone eye. Of course, the same happens to stone. It just seems that the statues understand something more than I about the metamorphosis of wrought time on flesh. We are ghosts, fleeting im