wildly bearded lichens draped on the lower reaches of conifer boughs.
And I walk slowly, with deliberation, through the sea-edge forest, where the mouse-wren flits furtive, barely sensed, in an under-story of fern and salal, through a storyline, compelling and intricate.
Here, Grandmother nature unfolds her genesis masterwork by the edge of the riffling, over the surface of the sea of allocation. Grandmother nature, in a spirit of prosperity and layers weaving, serves up an authorship penned in ink of confluence and deeply rooting provision.
And late in the night, by the same rapturous sea, but further down-coast, well beyond sunset’s quiet portal into animal dreamtime, the howling of wolves pierces the veils of primordia arranged to keep human knowing at bay.
For nine years they waited, spanning puppy-hood to elder, down through countless alpha moons. And then, as the calendar of inspiration came to wheel in full circle, now through the rain of night, the creative, wolf-born force holds no longer in abeyance.
Now the howling sings into the stirring of sleepers, into the spaces of wakening. Across the sea of freedom and imagination the wolf pack hurls its healing resonance, sound forming into a vessel that sails over the tumult heaving upon the surface of the feral and shore-less pond.
The moon stimulates the waking of our animal nature. This is why, so often at the time of full moon, insomnia is induced in those sensitive to environmental influence. Within the psyche, the moon enhances those qualities peculiar to this coastal landscape - rooting, sprawling, raining, seeping, dripping, climbing wave on wave, rolling across the soul’s beachhead. . . .
I am driven (by self) to be functional and/or creative. However, at this time I am more in need of centering myself. That is, of asking my deeper core for direction. What am I wanting to engage in, at this moment, from my center?
Seeing myself, then, attuning to the pulse of heart at every turn, going by the Inner Voice, is the same as aspiring to fulfill my incarnation - or, put another way, knighting myself in service to Lady Soul.
Meanwhile, down by the base of a giant old-growth fir, where mindful patience lends passage through a subterranean portal, rooting takes place, a biting into the earthen counterpart of human will forces. Feeding into the soul’s need for holding firm in the face of expanse, the grand-parental tree hums its steadfast tone, never giving way to common worldly dissolution.
In this setting, the milding of temperament proceeds at an even pace.
Here is the true West.
And in this westernmost place, earthen land (physicality) meets the vast arena of spirit’s metaphor (water). Because of this, The West presides as a Threshold.
Interior eyes gaze, here, out over the end of incarnation’s journey. After arriving here, at this metaphysical meeting-ground of sea and shore, one can turn and explore either a Northern, or Southern path. Or one can turn fully round, Eastward, and wend a way backward, regress to a former time and circumstance.
Or, more often, as spirit tends to have its way, one can linger here, centered Westerly - for a duration that can even last beyond a thousand heartbeats.What span can bracket a boundless destiny?
This West Coast is rife with pattern, repeating gesture, repetition of form unending, layers of lamina radiating through the forest, striations interwoven, perpetuation of pattern, leaf by leaf, gesture by gesture, stem and limb and trunk, reverberation of form, under a sky weeping with bands of light and streaming spatter, repetition of rain and light-beam, an unending effulgence. . . .
If a choreographer were to devise a sequenced movement of, perhaps, a minute’s duration, then have the dancer repeat the sequence almost identical to the first expression, but altered in some subtle way - then continue to alter, slightly, the minute long sequences, each time, for an hour’s duration, the dance could be built into a masterpiece that would inspire and elevate the audience (if it was done right) (and, one could even cycle back seamlessly, after the sixty phases, to the original expression - or not....