The time is 1:02

Consciousness in a week at a friend’s house where there is always choice to interact or not to interact or to float on one’s way through our existence and even if this is going to be typed to the background of the ridiculous commercials that now happen on HULU it takes so long to get through a story that I might not want to do it anymore. If having the colors flash at you and all of the lines of thought bombard one’s consciousness to buy and buy and buy. I’m noticing that taking part in society is quite literally buying into it.

The time is 1:03

But enough of that, my journey west has been a bit of an interesting stay in Oregon of all states.  Tomorrow, I will finally leave this state after staying here longer than any other place since I walked away.  I mostly say that I stayed in Eugene while here,  when actually, it was here, in Myrtle Creek.

What an interesting place, from the mountains that look like my grandmother’s hands, and the light that sweeps from the cheeriest brights to the pensive grays and the dark times.  The farms of happy animals, and the wild lands that see more people that you’d expect, and the places that no one goes that are rapidly disappearing, replaced by places that people don’t want to go.

What interesting people, a gung ho older generation that seems to see the value in the environment beyond the resources that can be exploited.  The majority of the people in this place that oppose them and the most interesting thing is that it’s possible to change without changing their own views.  I don’t know if I could believe in people that have only bad intent.

I’ve been the loneliest and the most connected I’ve ever been while here, it’s annoying and nice. I’ve tried to be in love and fall in love and maintain it.  I have more friends now than I’ve had before.  And, not just friends as quantity, but people that I understand better than those I would only meet for an hour.  That is probably why I’m not really good at living anyplace for particularly long. It takes so much effort just to try to understand people.

Little town and big towns on the west coast are pretty much the same as little towns and big towns anywhere else.  The landscape however, is wildly different.  So, it’s pretty obvious that I could thrive here if I wanted to, but there is a darkness that leaves me wanting to stay on the edges.

Here’s a poem:

Contrast Sequence

The city has a pulse.

It beats me up inside.

It beats a drilling rain.

The city sheaths the long, forgotten cause

of making edges in the world.

 

The forest is a pause.

Of slow-time disintegrating purpose,

But coping with nature’s uncaring service,

A wanting to know,

Builds in earnest.

Why save an ungrateful goddess?

 

But when do those edges

Of glass and steel and concrete,

Bare forth a sharpness so neat?

People are divided in two

Over border-crossers of ledges and hedges.

 

The protection urge comes

From each who choose, for a common reason.

As the leaves in a darker season.

Choices to obey.

Or the choices of the rebellious, pernicious and precarious.

How can protecting life be treason?

 

In the blood of a community,

But only for a slow-time.

Gratitude is a forever more ever growing difficulty.

Because what is expected is having no expectations,

And all is forgiven because the cycles,

They change characters but not the story.

The many stories of the buildings of the city.

 

Separated from the wild,

Before I was even a child,

I knew not I would take to it so readily.

But I also know,

That I could never fully do it alone.