I've recently begun a love affair. It leaves me, sweaty, breathless, aching, covered in tiny bites and scratches yet desiring more. When I'm not worshiping my new love I can only think about the moments spent together, of new intimate tricks played and my own abilities. I anticipate greedily the next encounter. I'm jealous of the time spent away and have bitten off more than a few heads of fools who delay me in attending my much anticipated scheduled meetings with my love. The encounters always leave me feeling satisfied, refreshed and if but for a moment, completely speechless. It is profoundly moving. It is a true of truest loves and like many lovers it is entirely one sided. My new love barely notices my existence, treats me as being utterly insignificant, a state of being with which I readily agree. Should I grow up? Move on? Never, not while I can move! This love sustains me in my life, without it I would be merely another urban wretch. A man creature shriveled in decay, despondency and dependency. My new love leaves me smiling, keeps a bounce in my step and best of all, when I'm in the heat of it, burns up a lot of calories. It leaves me with an incredible sense of being free. It's done in the sunny wide open. It is solitary hiking in the Mid -Peninsula Open Space Preserve!
The Wilderness- Oh wild California. True California, untouched in its' primordial splendor. The blessings of ancient Oaks shading me and myriad forms of life from the burning mid day summer sun, the scent of the Oak a heady perfume matched only by wet Redwoods. Manzanita, Lichen, giant Ferns, fleeing Lizards, Turkey Vultures waiting, ever waiting, silently, knowingly patient, fixtures set upon limbs of dead trees. The enduring archetypal sound of Owls hooting in Redwood groves so dense that even at high noon daylight filters to the Forest floor weakly, creating a never world of ever twilight, transporting the listener back thousands of years, to the sounds and sights our ancestors experienced when living under the towering intertwined branches of the worlds primeval forests. Forest's that covered whole lands. This wildland relic of pre-Columbian California is within hiking distance of the Valley and University most responsible for the shattering of old ways of communication and conducting business as usual. The technology and limitless amounts of capital controlled by a very few individuals, that very force which has made whole industry's obsolete is within hearing at the trailheads but fast disappears as the sojourner makes his way into the wilderness.
The sylvan setting and gentle riparian sounds are rarely disturbed by the hubbub of the neo-Nabobs setting the course of 22nd Century California ten miles down the mountain. The insatiable appetite of a few hundred individuals set out to acquire ever more billions with no regard for the democracy that nurtured them is for me a more frightening reality of destruction than the real chance of an encounter with a wild Pig, Coyote or Mountain Lion. In such an encounter, the beasts of the field and forest act as they must to a human interloper within their world- the injury caused by a chance battle more understandable than enduring the crushed markets caused by the creative destruction of the beast of prey known as the Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist. The wonderful reality is that the all embracing largeness of the wilderness of this True California evens the playing field for all. The Mountain Lion doesn't much wait upon ceremony and has a real disregard to the size, location and variety of bank accounts and investments. The neo-Nabob is on equal terms with every other child of nature in the wilderness and benefits more from the utter disregard that that very wilderness, my new love, holds us all in. That disregard frees them if only for the moment from self imposed rules. There is nothing as humbling and yet little that is more grounding, or that which can right side over the top ego's than a vista through ancient Oaks across deep forested canyons full of Mountain Lions, Coyotes, Foxes, on a perfection made eternal spring of a True California summer day. To not fall madly, profoundly in love at such a moment is simply to be dead to the world It is an all consuming love I wish everyone to encounter!
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