We hike quietly through remnant forest, inhaling musky green of night. Pitch-black Eucalyptus tower above; dark sentinels against the ambient light and ocean fog sifting through the trees. Tiny animals scitter as our eyes adjust to the dusky uneven footpath. The trail is met my new paths and spirals up the mountain until finally a few radiant glimmerings mark the end of a trailhead. It is here the first barely audible bass tones murmur from the promontory above us; vibrations relative to our heartbeats after walking steadily uphill in the darkness.

How familiar would it be for dreaming ancesters to discover this ageless reverie and celebration, as we gather under celestial markers and move our souls to trance-like resonance? This reliquary copse floats above a virtual ocean of whispering city lights.... The ancestors, peerng through leaves might say we are the magic illuminations of another age, exultants of rythym across traditions, time, continents, conferring around a Techno-primordial rhythms to welcome seeds of  ascendence, surrounded by precedent, the perennial.

We dance as the Vernal Equinox lifts the darkling cloak of winter to the bright season of sun.

The Castle Crags rock formation rises up above the Shasta-Trinity National Forest to summon me in fragments of dreamtime and daylight alike. Monumental granite spires  pierce through snow clouds to the very edge of icy winter constellations. I exhale frosty breath.

Dawn comes and the roots of mountains form in my mind. Childhood with my siblings on the elevated vistas of New Mexico; fascination with the wash of weather and time across mesas once the bottom of a vast tropical ocean. We ascended plateaus to sit on lofty outcrops. Mighty brown hawks gliding by at eye level on heat thermals against the endless canopy of deep blue. Ghosts of the landscape; the Navajo, Zuni, and Anasazi that walked before us, as magnificent indigo-black thunderstorms coalesced, rumbled and advanced across distant horizons. On the way home we let the awkward flight of gravity and inertia take us bounding down shale encrusted hillsides into sandy arroyos twisting through the scrub of desert. There we  found ebony flint shards of arrowheads and fossilized spiral sections of tawny nautili shells impressed in stone, the cool shadows of stratified rock encased in time.

Time moves geologically across our hearts and minds, our physical existence weathering choices and experience. We rise and fall in our individual eternities. A volcanic moment changes the landscape and then rivers carve away the embedded obsidian quartz. The ancient corridors of underground rivers and streams feed our passions and deposit soil rich sediment on amber-lit shores. We emerge from darkness onto boulder-strewn escarpments, archival accent marks on sandstone elevations. Cerulean memory bound like calcite and moonlight to stone upon which we carve our history, this Earth.

The infinite known and unknown stands in relief next to the Castle Crags. Existence. It is a place that imbues my soul with the other, a consecration of impermanence, and the poetry of boundless time. When I first saw this massive tableau it appeared to me an evocative, allusive 11th century Chinese landscape painting, subtly shifting and arising out of a forest blanketed in cloud. It is now a phantom in the atmosphere of my imagination, a part of my soul. Its lingering beauty fills me with mysterious joy.

Fourteen

Look, and it can't be seen.
Listen, and it can't be heard.
Reach, and it can't be grasped.
Above, it isn't bright.
Below, it isn't dark.
Seamless, unnamable,
it returns to the realm of nothing.
Form that includes all forms,
image without an image,
subtle, beyond all conception.
Approach it and there is no beginning; follow it and there is no end.
You can't know it, but you can be it, at ease in your own life.
Just realize where you come from: this is the essence of wisdom.

Lao Tzu
From the Tao Te Tsing
(Translation by Stephen Mitchell)