dust to dust

I am floating somewhere pleasant this morning. A scuttling on the banana leaves - 2 geckos racing. Birds in stereo. A breeze. No urgency for adventure. 'The Moon is Down' with breakfast. The sweater comes off as the sun erases the last bit of mountain coolness. A dog barks, and at first I think it is a man whooping like a child. A small mound of passion fruits picked up off the ground just looks at me, passionately. Monarch butterflies in my peripheral. Another gecko on the lanai, quite close. He stops, and puffs out his throat - there is a glowing pink ball inside.
I am quite okay that the mac fell down with sickness. I think maybe I'm glad. It is a distraction from the things I don't get to take home with me. This computer is only good for typing blogs and doing work - this is a good thing. It's good because my mind is my friend right now. I like technology, but am always relieved when it's taken away from me. I prefer to write music on paper. I prefer to play instruments that don't need to be plugged in. I prefer reading over watching movies. I prefer to look at the evening than to look at my pictures of it.
This time away has changed something in me. As I said, it has won my mind over - it has made my mind an excellent, kind, amusing companion.
A brain gets overrun with stimuli. There is no time to process before more stimuli floods in. Confusion forces itself down awkward pathways; thoughts get diverted and lost. Other thoughts follow. Temporary salves are applied, crutches are taken up. They become habitual. Simplicity is all but forgotten, and complication drains sorrows into stagnant pools. The sea is not fed. Malfunctions multiply. Instead of one voice there are unwise and haunted voices of many that murmur incessantly.
But beauty breaks what is broken. It makes little fractures in the seized mass of ugly thought. Beauty, I am beginning to understand you now: 'Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dirth of noble nature, of the gloomy days, of all the unhealthy and o'er darkened ways made for our searching.' The beauty - not the prettiness, not the niceness - of a day, of what I can't touch or make or influence in any way, brings me back to myself. In this place, it is a near constant threat to my ego and my evil. What can I do, how can I stay dark and closed and mean, when the air around me is charged by the very core of the earth, and molecules are birthing countless forms of life under my eyes, nose, ears, skin. I have no power here. I can manipulate nothing, and forget why I'd want to. My heart, or rather, the whole cage of my chest, dissolves like dust and is swept up by wind as though it was a cloud of bodiless wings going somewhere unknown. My mind follows it away and I don't know how I ever thought I was a person. That is what happens here.

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