BEING THERE

Yesterday afternoon Echo and I went down mountain a bit to scavenge some wild cherry logs (I'm going to try making some cherrywood cutting boards out of some of them) that had been piled there by the landowner, a landscaper who is creating/cleaning up a garden or scaping someones land somewhere. I chainsawed and we carried and stacked sectioned logs amid the bamboo forest for a couple of hours until it would soon be getting too dark, so we called it quits; Echo drove the loaded car back home and I walked up.

Coming out of the tunnel under the highway as I have a few thousand times, thinking about something other than where I was, I was surprised once more by the way the mountains suddenly appear, spread out up there in a high horizon, the whole long chain of darkling snow-capped peaks textured with their spring robes, rising into the Prussian-blue sky that comes at dusk this time of year when the sky is clear, and as my eyes savored the sight, my lungs savored the air, the very cream of air, that comes sliding down from those forested slopes toward the Lake at evening, washing and filling me with the ki of mountainsides...

I just stopped and stood, seeing and breathing, exalting at this privilege, that I could walk here, breathe here, simply open my eyes to view these mountains, merely turn to see the Lake spread out like cooling silver in a dark surround...

And then go up home.