#61

11/17. That's a special day for me. I have mentioned my favor for seven, and eleven, and seventeen, and one hundred and seventeen, and other such permutations. I also like primes, so I like that this is the sixty-first post. 

No special deed, nor any ritual; no observance at all really except for my private acknowledgement that the calendar has branded this day with those numbers. To a person of my psychic makeup and spiritual background, significance is its own reward, and its own justification.

*

I walk by a field with a sycamore at the far edge on my way home. It stands all stark among a throng of smaller, uniformly dark trees. To the eye they are nameless drab, a murmuring backdrop like sackcloth behind a graceful nude in white marble. The tree, tall and slender, leaps into the field of vision, springs up fresh every day like the next step of a nigh-incomprehensibly slow dance yet more joyful in high exuberance and vaulting through an air more upper and rarefied than any dancer quickened by heart and pulse and dragging bone could ever hope to even briefly breathe.

*

Incidentally, the skis by the speed limit sign never did get picked up by the trash folks. Eventually, they were thrown into the underbrush near the sign, which is just up a hill from the place where I look over at the field with the sycamore tree.

*

There is a row of sycamore trees by the river in the park across the river from the bluffs which are my favorite place to be in town. They are huge, towering, thick bastions whose great slabs of bark could split the top of your head open when they come down on a molt. 

Eagles sometimes build their nests in their highest branches. Hawks nest all around there. The trails take you to places where you can stand high above the world, above the branches where the raptors build their generations and ply their killing drive, above the rivers and bridges and the playgrounds and the fields and the roads. 

Above all that pounded pavement and all those lived-in, worked-in buildings. Above all the shadows being cast.

*

My face is cold. I need to grow a beard. My hair is bothering me, so I ought to shave it down. I wore my hair long for a long time. I've been keeping it tight for a while.

I think we have embarrassingly close relationships with our hair. Even a brutalist or performatively non-performative or minimalistic approach is this whole fucking undeniable thing. 

As for my beard, it mainly reminds me of mortality. 

*

Cool. That's a very believable blog post; totally full of words and images. Chew on that, readers! Masticate! Devour! 

Happy November the seventeenth, everybody. Do your part to bring about peace on earth. Whatever small victory you can score.


--JL