I'm too spent to write...

Venus is just sparkling, dancing, pearling, bejeweling the western sky tonight. Before I go, and I will not go very far this evening, I must say that I am fully spent in body, mind and spirit. A good and friendly ghostly spent, but if I were a ghost I don't think I'd feel the heat-burn in my quads and big toes born of an early rise, the sudden emergence (in some cases re-emergence) of 6 or 7 projects, more snow shoveling, and another wondrous hike up into the bonzai forest. It is 9:34 and I laugh as I think "already." Was a time when 9:34 was, as my friend Sal and I used to say, "Early days, early days." And I'm sure it will be again, but in this winter of creamy snows and early darks (w/no lights to deceive), the social jones quenched in an avalanche of meditation, reading, pacing, writing, talking to myself, dancing in my shadow, building and massaging fires, cooking meals spread out across massive counters, hunching and slowly unfurling under two layers of covers while watching movies (tonight: Whale Dreamers), converting toxins into magic endorphins, and dreaming, both lucidly and in sleep, about people and animals who then show up on cue, I am "being my spentness." So, I will not write tonight about the coyote who followed me along the rim of the Rio Grande Gorge last evening, fumble-legged in the deep snow, as the slushy half moon rose over the spider silk weavings of blueberry clouds against a cracked turquoise turned indigo sky. Nope. And how I ran along the now packed down old stagecoach road up and down the swales, my nose hairs freezing and my mustache hardening, my ankle, 4 months after the ligament damage, finally holding my bouncing body and feeling stretchy, ready, maybe, for hoops. And that I looked back and the coyote still followed, now sidestepping and keeping its head down. Nope, not going to write about that trickster following 20 steps behind, huffing in the thin air, letting out an occasional muted trumpet of despair, or pleasure, like a woman I recently slumbered with who sent warm chills through my body every hour on the hour when she turned over and coo-sighed. No, I'm too tired to write about the vastness and stillness of the dusk out here, how it feels like being part of the skin of a drum, and carries a taut effortless weight to the center and zephyrs from the points of the hips to the heart in a revolving triangle, oh man, oh man. It's too much, too much. The surface of the snow unbroken and sparkly, undulating, the stuff of dreams, the filling of every cookie that ever existed, and the mattress of all gods. I can't do it. It's everything I've ever craved. I mean, look at me:



I love it so much I have to take my clothes off and "feel" it. :-)

That's me and the bonzai trees with the sacred mountain behind me over the pueblo (the sun is already down).

Off to bed and the other world.