summer_jackel

This month's thoughts.

I come to the realization that the experience of love is fundamentally solitary. Though it can feel like connection, something that exists necessarily in the context of another being, I become more vividly aware that the emotion is intensely personal, something that can never really be shared or explained. The experience of love is its own reinforcement---in the context, perhaps, but also irrevocably separated from the other.

*

There is an interesting joy in attempting to find one’s physical limits. Getting off the bike after four hours on a stationary trainer and having my limbs start to shake is just so interesting, so satisfying. Hurts, as they say, so good.

*

It is a cold and perfect December day, the sky a vivid blue into which the sun gives clarity but little warmth. The Pacific is the color of slate, rolling slowly as it moves its dangerous colors into low tide. As far as I’m concerned, it might as well be Christmas morning, and me five again. The tide pools spread invitingly in front of me like the most miraculous gift in the world and I am doing my best to look into all of them.

I think the trick to grieving is to let yourself do it, do the work of exploring the sorrow, because if you ignore these things too much they won’t heal properly; but to experience joy at the same time. For instance, this. These pools, this place. This world.

Always on these trips, I look for nudibranchs, the colorful little ocean slugs, but I almost never find them. Except for now, because there it is poised on a rock, so casual, as if it were not one of my most sought-out prizes. Seeking is hardly any preparation for presence: the perfect, delicate beauty of feathery, vividly carmine gills, its tiny spots of improbably neon yellow, its cuteness. The thrill of seeing it move, witnessing such an amazingly wild little being.

In this moment, I am consumed, filled with joy; there isn't place for anything other. There is no room; I am full.

*

I have stopped calling for Fenris out of habit. It has been long enough that my less than fully conscious mind has begun to accept her absence; I do not startle any more when I look down to find her missing. And there is Coba, the puppy, about as different from Fen as he could be and still be a dog I'd want to share my life with. Coba and Fenris were never with me at the same time, never met each other, and I think that his small and energetic presence at my heel helps my animal mind understand that a change happened; that she is gone.

A thing that has changed: there is a pool in the stream where Fenris daily would run down the steep hill, splash around and stand blissfully belly-deep. Cold did not matter to her. She wore a thin red path in the bank, which faded gradually in the months after her death as leaves fell and the season changed. Now a tan oak has fallen, obliterating it completely.

We had our other patterns as well, our small rituals. When she was a young dog, it seemed as though I'd witnessed nothing so beautiful as Fenris in motion as she ran through the waves, her lean and wolfish body stretching and leaping. I loved watching her, running with her, sometimes. When we first began, I was a very different person, newly grown with a wolf-husky pup at my side. Taking us to the beach was one of the first things I learned to do with a car and newfound independence, and when I remember what I did and thought and felt and was back then, I'm a little amazed at how far from now it’s become, how different and similar an experience I find living to be.

As I walk the beach with Fenris' aging children and the new puppy, remember playing with her in the surf when we were young together, I feel an odd dislocation. I am attempting to get to know this stranger in my skin without hostility, with gentleness. Still, there are constants to ease the transition, little rituals which tie together the pieces. The joy in the movement of a dog, the love. If I knew that I had only another day to live, I would probably come down here, to the moving water and the life that thrives between the tides.

*

Near Solstice. It's early, a clear morning, and very cold. The forest is wet from the first, brief rains, but these many small rivulets, little veins of water, have not yet filled. Redwoods shield from frost, and beneath them the soil is cold and moist, giving and spongy beneath my running feet and the dogs’ paws. Plants in the rare clearings are all etched in white powder, glitter-rimmed, seeming half made of glass. The walls of young ferns are hard-edged and brittle. My breath plumes in front of me as I run, sweat chilling me as it moves down the bare skin of my chest and arms. I am hot and cold at the same time, my fingers aching while vapor rises from my overheated core. I like to make myself run in winter. I cherish the odd sensation of this, at once perfectly wonderful and not quite unpleasant, at least until I stop for a moment. I try to become what I seek: still minded, body in motion through the expectant, thirsting forest, alone in the silence and the cold.

*

To set an intention: May I be aware in every moment that each brings me closer to death. That always I am dying, as we are all dying, losing a little more in each breath, failing a little even as we grow and live. That nothing is in stasis, that nothing persists. And let me find in each moment its tiny joy, that thrill in the ache of loss, the taste of an imminent ecstasy.

*

On the Solstice, the rains come. Big, inexorable drops, filling all of the little waterways, bringing the fungus blooming from the earth, greening everything. The vivid moss on the trees is tight and bursting with life and moisture, giving forth its tiny, beautiful reproductive structures in abundant bunches. Ferns, which in a few months will die off, are unfurling everywhere, from every possible wet cranny, pale, delicate, dripping walls of them.

The sky is gray-white and sill for now, quiet, full of water. The trees are ghostly gray-green punctuated with yellow from the last few deciduous leaves. Beneath them, the fallen leaves, the dead tanoaks, are mulching into black, wet earth. I think that I want live another year.