Water

Riding home the other night I wanted to be a river and so I was a river. And the place where that wanting happened was right where I saw the mysterious owl a while back. I was wondering if those two moments are connected.

All I can think of is it's a spot where the network of roads and paths meets a much older network of creeks and rivers - one made by the restlessness of my human family, the other by the restlessness of water. And since we're mostly water maybe there is just one restlessness? It won't stop wriggling. We rely on that restlessness to ferry oxygen and whatnot around the network of creeks and rivers inside us.

(Sure we have a heart to move that stuff around and the world doesn't. The thing that moves water around the world is heat and gravity, which is to say everything in the universe. So the world's heart is everything in the universe, including us.)

What I wrote the other day and then deleted was that when I was a river I wanted to pour myself into the world's wounds. It seemed too grandiose a thing to write just like that. But fuck it: rivers have grandiose feelings: that's just how it is: they just pour themselves endlessly into the mother ocean: deal with it. Don't pretend they have tiny feelings about work and mortgages and renovations and waiting for tradies, cos they don't.

Anyway it just seemed a natural thing. The wounds were there. Why not pour yourself out and into them? Why not?

When I was a mountain the stuff just oozed out of me. It seeped out of the high places and ran down rocks and poured itself out into the world like a giddy cyclist crossing from the road to the river path, guarded by the memory of an owl.

Later it was 2014 so I was at work. I was staring at a big steel garbage skip and then I was the steel, full of old crap like broken chairs and bent racks and such. All I felt was homesickness, a dull aching want to be ore again back beneath the soil. Down there we felt the pull of two suns. One we'd never seen but was rumoured to be way out somewhere beyond our home. It was hard to imagine but that's what the old stories said; now I was steel I saw it every day, so I'd have something to say when I got back home, that was for sure. The other was its child: the molten core of the living earth. It kept us warm. X