The boy is asleep now in the tent in the living room. We set it up again last night, after he asked me why we ever took it down. I tried to explain that sometimes I like to use my living room as something other than a campsite, but the concept was either lost on him or irrelevant. The tent being set up, filled with pillows, comforters, sleeping bags and stuffed animals of all kinds is all that is wanted. Oh, to be young and filled with dreams of piracies and puppies.
I'm in need of a long walking hike, perhaps Sugarloaf here in Sonoma valley. I need a hike that feels like a Van Morrison album, one that sits between the temporal and the eternal, the natural and the contrived.
I mean the hike, not a VM album. A trail is a contrivance through nature.
Yet that is what I need, the breath of flora and fauna. I've spent too many days waking up, sitting here reading bad journalism, drinking coffee, writing, working, then picking up the boy after, eating dinner, repeat, repeat, repeat. I need to lightly derail my life, to do something differently. Even if it is only a walk through familiar woods, along known ridges, to get off of the road and out onto my feet.
... only a walk through familiar woods
Can you believe the way that I talk about my local portion of the mighty cosmos? It's narrow, dismissive, and unnatural.
I should stop commenting on my own writing. It's not necessary.
What is?
We can mistake framing devices for the thing being framed.
Or rather, I do.
I want more life.
I might not be prepared to spend it any differently than I have.
I should find a way of adjusting, reconciling myself to change, so that there would be more opportunities for experience.
As it is, the only thing that might change my life would be a crisis.
Is there more than only emergencies and routine, something good and unexpected, something that can sustain the weight of life, like a hidden hammock hung between two trees, somewhere as yet unknown - secret silence, solace, sleep.
Sabbatical is a religious term used irreligiously, particularly if you chant it with your eyes closed as I have, head hidden under pillows, in hurried and hushed whispers.
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