I take a day trip through California’s Coastal Range:
rolling hills golden with dry grass
scattered with crumbling rocks and gnarled trees.
It’s late afternoon and everything
bronze in the lowering sun.

I love these hills –
the softness of their curves,
the vastness of their open spaces,
the constancy of their presence,
holding me, enfolding me,
enfolding all of us in our little metal boxes,
winding our way through them.

Looking up and out, my instinct is a surge
of gratitude.
“Thank you. Thank you,” I say inside,
not knowing to whom.
A stripe of pain streaks through
the wonder in my soul
as I think on this.
Is God a conscious being
as I was taught?
Or an impersonal force?
A construction of human minds and yearnings?
Every option is riddled with
things I want
and don’t want to be true.

“I’m here,” I hear, my gaze on golden hills transfixed.
“We’re here.”
What can I make of this singular? This plural?
Mysterious reassurances.

Ahead the gentle curves are
penetrated by an enormous chunk of
earth from deep below,
its horizontal layers turned
vertical in their thrust toward air
and light.
Something far more ancient,
yet here, also new,
confronts the weathered hills’ monotony.

A picture of the movement
in my soul?

Windmills spinning where hills meet sky
speak more to me of movement
in the otherwise stillness
of the landscape.
Around a bend a power plant
converts their wind to that which
lights and warms and energizes:
the blood of cities,
pulsing through miles of wire veins
that start here:
in the golden wasteland
of silent, stolid hills.

Barrenness –
suffering, yearning,
wounds, confusion, losses,
the silence of a Holy
I’ve wished more deeply than life itself
would speak –
this barrenness, the windmills whisper, can be a spring,
life-sustaining blood at pulse from its center,
its heart.

I assent, but not gladly.

The hills in my rearview mirror are pink now
in the setting sun
as the freeway lanes multiply
and all around are overpasses
skyscrapers
airplanes crisscrossing the darkening sky.

In a sea of crawling taillights I feel strangely held.
You hem me in, behind and before
instinctually rises.
Golden hills now only inner rollings,
soul enfolding,
I inch my way toward Home.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 8th, 2004 at 9:42 am and is filed under Books and Art, Mindfulness, Religion/Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.