Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Westering 02: So Quiet Sequoia
One by Crescent Meadow in the Sierras



I am set in, what John Muir called, “the gem of the Sierra”: Crescent Meadow. An ancient pond literally gone to seed, it is an open grassy area surrounded by forest. But that is quite the understatement. For in that forest stands a legion of Sequoia trees encircling the silent pasture with their unvoiced grandeur. Only the wind speaks that primeval tongue.

I am literally sitting on a bump in a living log, a knurl of a Sequoia trunk. And I feel like some insignificant insect lost within the furrows of its bark. This thing is big. But then again I’m thinking appropriately big thoughts. Like the unity of consciousness and everything is energy.

But Sequoias don’t think big thoughts. They are simply big. Staring across the meadow, I look at the full stature of one, its rounded top capping off its straight reddish heights like the highest ascender of the numeral one. It doesn’t think unity; it lives it. It doesn’t need a third eye or a sixth sense; it is simply one with one.

That is the one word it speaks to us in a language we have so tragically misplaced. But here, one may find it one day.

~Son Rivers 2008



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