266. As If You Were Different from Them

You're in a forest, so weary you wedge yourself in the hollow of an old-growth red cedar tree. You sleep deeply and wake to black darkness.  You hear raccoons and foxes, coyotes and bobcats--they're all commuting to work.

You climb out of the tree and stand in a city: noise, rain, crowds, stench, neon, fluorescence, larceny, fraud.  You're leaning on a metal light-pole.  And now you remember: it took years but the city finally broke you by revealing how absurd it is.  You saw how you'd betrayed yourself by living, working, there.  You began to suffer spells, every day, so that you might find yourself on a sidewalk when your mind takes off and flees to a forest, sleeps in a tree, and leaves you looking quite mad.  "Disoriented," they call it, although your state has nothing to do with East.

You know none of the people passing by.  They stare at you as if you were different from them. Your struggling scares them momentarily.



hans ostrom 2017

243. High Morning Learn

It is a high morning learn: the sun in a pure sky; an angel moves across a meadow. She stops here. Our wonder flares. Then we receive our high morning learn. Her dark face is purged of worry. She has lived beyond our evil. She take us to an aromatic red-cedar grove to teach us things that last beyond our petty passions. She is the angel of the high morning learn. div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">

174. Red-Cedar Think

Think red cedar consider aroma mountain geology owned science Descartes God wheat bread ground fire husbandry gather stay goat dog domesticate darkness fear myth anything can kill hope medicine faith.

Cedar consider stare wind touch-red-bark, smell cedar-sap. Memory light/no light, life/no life. Red resin. Consider cedar. Think cedar your life memory green memory red thick bark. Yellow pollen wheat faith science knows nothing sure is ground fear darkness and cold death faith cedar rooted in ground in soil in rock. Water.