A little too personal

Stellar weekend, it has been like a vacation, except that I am still here in Atlanta, I think that is the key to enjoying everything, thinking of my weekends as little vacations.  We went to the Indian mounds, which I keep wanting to call the dunes, and breathed in every honeysuckle, we never wanted to stop breathing, and I do believe we said everything there is to say about everything there is over these past 2 days.  Last night, we walked around midtown, just walked through the neighborhoods at 3:30 in the morning, passed a couple arguing on the sidewalk about love, talked to a stranger for probably an hour about Greek and Hindu mythology, this on the same night I sat in a bundle of law students and wondered what on earth was wrong with me that I would resist meeting new people so much, we recounted the moments our parents died, we were texting bandits.

Today I found 2 ants crawling on me and escorted them one by one off my arm and onto a rail which they happily and quickly scurried onto, and I realized how generous the universe is to the gentle, how poisonous fear is, how it breeds more fear and hatred and violence and bugbites, because you see these little fellas did not bite me even one bit, they just scurried, they were grateful to be pointed back in the right direction.  I realized such an obvious thing, that ants bite when they feel threatened, like everything, that even the meanest insects I can think of spend most of their days zipping around with smiles on their buggy faces, exploring this and that, building, birthing, that when I see a bug on my arm and the fear I was taught as a kiddo shocks through me, I should calmly remind myself that there is really nothing to be afraid of with anything, that the ants like all living things are my friends, and all will be well.  It is a scary thing to believe because what if you are wrong, but I believe it is true, I believe it is worth believing.

And we sat by the river and talked about astrology for a coon's age.  I got to stream through the tall grass, I tried egg salad.  Sitting silent by the river, Sam and I shared the first fully comfortable extended silence of our friendship, or was it the second, or the third, sitting silent by the river, I thought of the Indians, cleaning their pots on the banks, canoeing easy downstream, running bare-legged past the trees with bows in their hands, oblivious to the clock, awake to the rhythms of the world, the slow sun overhead.  I thought about how we escape to the woods to feel at peace, to feel serene, but that really we are just escaping to the world, the world before we synthesized it into cars and sofas, minutes and seconds, air conditioning, TPS reports, and I wish, I wish, I wish we could go back, or go forward, to "The house of money is falling!  The weeds are rising!" But the cold, I think.  But the cold and the bears and where will we find clean water, am I really going to drink river water?  the water the frogs croak in and bugs walk on and all manner of things piss in?  And what if I want to take a visit to Spain and what about tornadoes, what about those days when the earth is utterly inhospitable?  It doesn't matter, I want the earth, the earth is my home.

Scent of the pine,
You know how I feel.

And I don't believe I have laughed so much in centuries, everything just tickles me to death, and when Sam and I talk, it is like having a conversation with myself in my head, with a smarter bolder version of myself who understands absolutely everything I could ever want to say no matter how unthinkable it seems to me, I am saying it is that immediate, that surprisingly connected, we are endlessly on the same team, but she is also just different enough to still have endless new and wonderful and curious things to add, we could wind back and forth between our heads for years and never get bored and never find a difference substantial enough to sting in the least, and this is a gift that only someone as strange as me could really appreciate.

Ah but for every night, there is the bed time.