Thursday, August 4, 2011

fjords and tails

A dragon awoke after one thousands years of sleep and burrowed it's way out of the rock that had fallen over the entrance to it's lair. She peaked out onto the night sky and the now glimmering sea of electric lights that sprinkled the valley and her once quiet fjord. The giant beast, as fierce as she was, felt frightened by what lay inside the city bathed in the artificial light. Instead of investigating her new reality she instead took to flight out past the towns and villages to a small unpopulated island off the coast that she remembered being a place of solace before her last sleep. She was among the beasts that lived, on average, fifty thousand years and the only one, that she knew of now, left alive on the continent. In the early days (her first three thousand years of life) there were others but slowly they left to other lands or perished at the hands of clever defenders and disease. For all their fierceness the dragons lose their sense of community because of their extended lives and of course because of their need for space and frequent conflict with human settlement. If a street dog gets angry with a human or passing car it will likely lose the fight and be killed or ejected from peaceful society. If a dragon loses its cool a village could be destroyed or worse. So even after a several hundred year slumber dragons will often seek a place of quiet reflection and undisturbed consciousness in order to pray and reconvene slowly with other living things, eating mostly fish and marine life under the cover of night on the new moon. If she is seen, she knows from past awakenings, she can forget peace and may even need to remit to forced hibernation, a sometimes necessary but painful task of resubmitting the body to sleep outside of it's biological need. This, to try again in another 100 years or more.

Once I met a dragon face to face on a night hike in the mountains just north of Yellowstone park to the West and North of Paradise Valley. The mutual surprise lead us to lock eyes for a long moment as the dragon in flight inspected my nearby camp. I was alone and heading to summit the mountain and stargaze until early morning and the dragon, presumably, was hunting on the new moon. The dragon moved on after our extended moment of contact and only looked back once after six or seven flaps of its enormous wings. I never saw her again though I still recognize our connection as essentially good. It was, I believe, a look of caring - one that forms a memory and a bond and says we will consider each other through time and pray for each others safe return. And I still do.

From time to time, I recognize that my internal rhythm does not flow by the hour or even the day as it is so scheduled and maintained in our ordered life. Rather I feel my life contained in segments of joys and the inevitable letting go. If these are end times I could say that life has been full but I suspect they are not. Instead there will be some kind of reckoning for all the terrible things that have come to pass though even these, seen in ordered space, are not so terrible. Reading a history of Thessaloniki, Greece, I realize my smallness in the factor though inside this beating heart I don't feel it this way. I feel it as a sleeping dragon - cold, quiet and mythical, romantic and organic, set aside from developed time with long inhales and even longer exhales. Then I wake and reach for my lover, sometimes forgetting who I will find but always happy to find at least some hope in those that lay beside me for a time. Hoping now that this extended breath does not fuck up the children in my life or their right to walk and camp in distant places.

There is something about being away for me that limits details. I could and probably should talk about the morning coffee or the evenings guests or the way the street lamps went dark after the lightening strike in that high mountain Albanian village. Or how the old man grazed his cattle through the trash heap or the lady who offered us fruit on the coast. Or my stomach illness from tainted water near the beach. Or the cat who made her way up the landing and spent the evening, until early morning, in the chair beside the veranda. It's in the details but maybe that's the devil in the details I am avoiding. My love.