"So much is still to be seen"

take comfort in geologic time and your own breath

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The Breathing Field

by Wyatt Townley

Between each vertebra
is the through line
of your life’s story,
where the setting sun
has burned all colors
into the cord.  Step

over.  Put on the dark
shirt of stars. 
A full moon rises
over the breathing field,
seeps into clover and the brown
lace of its roots
where insects are resting

their legs.  Take in the view.
So much is still
to be seen.  Get back
behind your back, behind
what is behind you. 

From The Breathing Field (Little, Brown and Co., 2002)

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Dear Ones,

I remember when a war began that my loved ones and I protested in every possible way. The day before it began, we lay in the street on Congress Avenue in Austin. Demonstrators either lay on the hot asphalt, or scurried around like fairies with white chalk, tracing our forms in white chalk to represent the dead civilians, should this war begin. We knew it would be an indiscriminate prolonged assault with no clear purpose. I knew that our protest would not change what happened. But it felt important to be there, to register a voice, to commune with those my nation was about to invade.

Looking at the blue sky with slow-moving clouds, placing my whole body directly on the ground, made me realize that my political distress could be alleviated if I moved my attention from human historical time to geologic time. If I touched rocks and dirt to tell time, felt the scale of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of years, the making of stones, sediment layers, mountains, I would be calm.

The next day, I drove to the most ancient-feeling place nearby, Enchanted Rock State Park. I wanted to touch the stones and ask them to lend me their equanimity, their gaze, their inner sense of the truth of time.

I wish for you to feel geologic time, even as rapid changes shake our communities—to feel that the scale of tens of thousands of years, to touch the peace of stones.

xo,

Abriel