Tuesday, July 13, 2010

It is a quiet 3 AM of the soul, here in my home town, on the day past the new moon, seventy degree F and ever so quiet. The early hours Tuesday are among the quietest of the week, not much to do, not much to say. People are recovering form the weekend, get bed early on a Monday night. There are no festivals on a Monday. No crickets in early July. No mocking birds singing through the night in Western New York. The night train came through hours ago. The skunk patrol has left the neighborhood to explore trash night in the east side of town, the deer are absent. Nothing about but a small breeze and the sound of a window fan at some distance. This is an odd time for a bout of insomnia. It seems that the quiet has commanded me awake, it is acting like a fire alarm, it allows me to hear the panic in my deepest dreams.
But now that I am awake, I find it comforting. No paradigm's are shifting at this late hour. Everything is constant. One minute is much like the others. I know the sky is moving past and into the west, but it will be some time before I notice, I know that the ground is a mantle floating on a sea of lava, but for the geological moment, it is steady as a rock. One can almost hear some life form evolving, and if one listens closely, one can hear metal oxidizing before your very ears. Paint is slowly falling off the houses, the trees are resporating.
The worry is , course, that this is not the bedrock of existence, but the inflection, the boat at the bottom of the trough, or the roller coaster at the top of the first hill.