many years have past and many miles have grown between us, but that day still brings a smile to my face. i spoke with jeremy last night over a crackling phone line from my little nest in reykjavik. he reminded me of the holiday at my gran's farm in arcata, and the wild day we discovered the unknowable nature of the silent pine sometime in july of 1974. we had spent the entire summer taking long walks along the banks of rivers and creek beds, between the trembling grasses that sprawled across each plotted acre of land, and under the trees that seemed sometimes to be watching us as we wandered beneath, our heads alive with dreams and schemes. sometimes late in the afternoon the sun slanted down into the mossy yard belonging to old cailan burns' house, and warmed the wooden fence that marked the properties edge. we liked to sneak through the warming fence and take the opportunity to slide across that lawn, the wet grass joyfully sliding between our toes. it was a guilty and fleeting pleasure. i remember the one tree in cailan's yard, a graceful pine. it had pointed leaves which grew along green switches that radiated from the bow and made a tree that looked like a giant old buddha in repose. we would lean back over the fence and fall into deep silence in the presence of this wonderous green giant. it was one particularly strange afternoon that this trance led us deeper across the sprawling lawn, beyond our special woody friend to a vibration that was emanating from a point somewhere beyond the property line. we had never dared to take such liberties of trespassing as this, but we had no say in our drifting movements. it was as if a giant humming magnet was pulling us toward the source of the sweetest sound in the entire cosmos, maybe even the sound of the source itself. it was not only a sound, but the deepest heart-feeling imaginable. pins and needles crackled around my body until i seemed to grow outwards and upwards over the mountain. i felt gigantic! it, me, us, whatever could be used to describe this infinite joy and joining was somehow happening simultaneously with a sensation of the those sweet blades of grass under foot as we strode mindless toward the boundary fence on the western side of old cailan's plot. being a thousand feet tall and this little boy all at once was madness! i could feel the atoms under foot crackling and throwing sparks, and the atoms inside those flowering and growing vastly minute! my eyes were set on a tower of softest light that shone down into the valley beyond, but i saw it from above and inside and felt it everywhere. mindless, i forgot about everything, jeremy and i - i can only assume had become one moving, streaming flower of color and sound! over the fence we leapt with grace and ease as we began to sing the song of a beautiful bird, an echo returning and phasing and layering and droning. it became one with the sound that filled our gigantic being and the stars that were not yet shining in the sky all joined in and seemed to dance about us and carry us on way to here!
here, as if by metamorphosis, and in a snapping instant we were bodied again and sitting at the foot of the rolling hill. the graceful pine arching it back was sitting before us and trembling in the warming breeze. my head was a melting satellite, and i could feel the rise and fall of the breathing breath that passed between the pores of every leaf of our friend the ponderosa pine.
here, as if by metamorphosis, and in a snapping instant we were bodied again and sitting at the foot of the rolling hill. the graceful pine arching it back was sitting before us and trembling in the warming breeze. my head was a melting satellite, and i could feel the rise and fall of the breathing breath that passed between the pores of every leaf of our friend the ponderosa pine.