The Way of Flight

Erika flees south. But not for Palm Springs, that oasis of green golf courses where plump Northwestern snowbirds strut and old ladies ferry pomeranians about in baby strollers. It’s too… fake. No, she seeks the authentic California experience; the mythic, redemptive spirit of California. The Kerouac sort of San Fran, the Fante flavour LA. Or perhaps Santa Cruz, where polite, enlightened folk in moccasins stroll forest trails, chatting about the Tao and Kundalini Yoga.

She thinks about this as she sits in stale Seattle traffic. Clouds cling to the sky like dead moss. A few hours earlier, she awoke in the single bed of her old childhood room, dim even with the curtains open. Downstairs, cold porridge sat on the stove.

“Eat before you go,” her mother said. “I’ll warm it up.”

As Erika ate, her mother tried again: “You’ve only been home a month.”

“It was a mistake,” she answered.

“Leaving won’t make you feel better. Maybe if you saw Doctor Karlsson again, you’d --”

“No!” Erika’s voice squeaked like a spoiled child’s.

In Olympia, she leaves I-5 for Highway 101, which runs along the coast, quiet and curvy. She plays peek-a-boo with the ocean. Beneath the hum of wind and distant gull calls, the morning’s conversation beats like a broken record in a far-off room. Leaving won’t make you feel.… Erika flicks on the radio and finds a soft rock station. She isn’t sick -- she knows that much. She’s just been… unhealthy.

At a gas station south of a lazy little town called Lincoln City, she fills up, though her gauge shows half a tank left. Her gaze through the back window falls on a bruised banana lying next to rumpled grocery bags full of her clothes, books, and herbal tea collection. On a brown lawn beside the highway, she unravels the banana from the bottom before biting off and spitting out the black bits. A dense canopy of barren branches obscure any view of the ocean, but there’s a gap farther along. Erika saunters over and, sure enough: Peek-a-boo, Peaceful. Out over the water a cluster of clouds break apart. One thin sunbeam stumbles down to the water.

The Widow's Story

Once upon a time I made the most wondrous White Webs, oh osprey. They gleamed in the sunlight and in them I drank the finest life juices. I was the colour of no colour, oh osprey, I was pure. This colour of your feather, here, the black widow rested on a white tip. I loved my husband, though he was foolish and fat. We had many children. I was happy, oh osprey. I was happy.

Once upon a time, oh osprey, we spiders lived together. We made webs together and joked together and ate together. My community lived in a glade in a glen far to the east of here. There was a mountain to the south and hills to the north. The mountain was peaked with the colour of no colour, oh osprey. I have seen many since, ones larger and grander, yet that mountain I loved. The winds that came through the glen were soft and regular, and food was abundant. I was beautiful, oh osprey, I was known as the Queen.

She resumed her work and her story after a long moment's pause, threading layer after layer. But a few of my fellows grew jealous of me, oh opsrey. The Golden Orb-Weaver wanted to have the highest webs, the largest, the most dazzling. She plotted with the most dangerous and cruelest of us, who was called the Wolf or the Webless. He is sly and had many burrows in our land. His eyes are sharp, like yours, oh osprey, and every day he saw me high above him as he hunted.

She paused again, a thread hanging limp from my plumage. Have you ever spied the nest of a golden eagle, oh osprey, and coveted its shelter, the young it holds?

Yes.

Have you ever driven another eagle from her nest?

Yes.

So you know how it is, then. She busied herself once more. I do not resent the Webless or the Weaver, not anymore; I no longer hate them. I now understand that the Wolf is very lonely, and lonely beings do regrettable things. The Orb-Weaver is obsessed with beauty and therefore stupid. I pity them both.

The Webless one day spoke to my husband. He told him of a kill he'd made and dragged into his burrow. It is up the mountain, he said, hidden in a secret spot behind a copse, teeming with life. They would feast and then later they would hunt together. My husband agreed and the Wolf leaped away and waited for my husband, leaped away and waited, again and again. By the time they got to the copse, for there was a copse that hid a healthy spot to hunt, my poor husband was exhausted. Come, called the Wolf, soon we shall feast. He led him into his lair, where in the middle lay a very fat horsefly. Eat! he cried, and as my husband gorged his silly self the Wolf pounced upon him and sank his fangs into my husband's back and the Golden Orb-Weaver came out from where she had been hiding and wrapped him in a golden tomb. The Wolf then hitched him onto his back and carried him down the mountain to our glade. He called all of the other spiders to him. 'Here I have a present for our queen!' he called, and they all agreed it was a very fine capture, large and rich in smell. They dragged it up one of the tall pines from which hung my web and gifted it to me. A sac of gold, they said, a tribute fit for a Queen.

The Widow left her spinning and retreated into the nape of my neck. She curled up there and sat silent for a long time.

My husband was delicious, oh osprey. His was the sweetest life juice I have ever tasted. From that day on I was cursed with the hunger for my mate's blood. When I was done I asked who had prepared such a feast for me, and the others told me it was the Webless and the Weaver. How extraordinary, I thought, for those two I thought had little to offer. I was proud and I had eaten of my husband and so taken his foolishness into me. I asked the others to bring those two to me, so I could thank them. They were slow in coming, perhaps fearing a trap themselves. I sat in my center for two days, content, as the winds tore holes in my web. I did not wonder after my husband. Finally, the two tricksters came to me. They were very nervous, the Weaver winding along my web delicately, the Webless bumbling and getting stuck. I thanked them and then I begged for more. They agreed, slowly, and the next day brought me a fresh golden gift.

It was my son. I know all of this because the Webless told me, one night, as we sheltered from a storm together long after I he had fed me half my children. He had watched me, with malevalent and pointless delight, grow fat and lazy on the blood of my kin. My White Web fell into disrepair, and one day it broke altogether and I tumbled from it and lay in the leaves, too engorged to move or make another. No more presents came for me. I watched the Orb-Weaver thread a lustrous Golden Web where mine had been. I dragged my weight to a burrow of the Wolf and he, knowing I was too weak to fight, told me what he had done. Remorse did not drive him to explanation; he was a desultory being. I spent a year in grief for my husband and my children, living underground in old gopher holes and feeding off whatever I could chew. At some point I began weaving again, and made webs thick and labyrinthine. I caught ants and tunneling bugs; I learned how to live a new life, and I grew terrible and ferocious. I had entered into the dark and so darkness I became. When I reemerged into the daylight after many winters had passed, the Wolf did not recognize me. I pretended to be a stranger, and we spoke at length and I realized something else had shifted. He spoke to me very differently; I was alluring to him in my blackness, where before I was repugnant in my purity. I decided to use this as a weapon. It was only the second time he had told the story, again to me. I asked him where the children were of this Queen. Had they known? Yes, he replied, they had known, and they had fled his venom and none had cared to warn the mother. He also admitted to finding a taste for their blood and continuing to capture them for his own meals. I thanked him, and then spoke with other spiders, and told them the story. They came together and exiled the Wolf. Ever since, he has never had a home for long, and is now also known as the Wanderer.

That was the last day the spiders worked together; the story had seeped into their nerves. They had been there and watched their Queen be dethroned; they no longer trusted one another. They fought and squabbled and broke apart. The Orb-Weaver was queen of nothing – but I was not done with her.

I had found one of my lost children, who had heard the Wolf was gone and had returned to the glade. He was grown now, and much resembled his father. I pinned him, told him who I was and what had become of me, and as he shrieked I raped him and then I ate him. I grew pregnant with many children and on a moonless night, just before dawn, spewed my spiderlings into a drewdrop. As they kicked and drowned I drank the drop. That evening I gave birth a second time to a cluster of small spiders I called Dewdrops. I nursed them and fed them and told them stories of revenge; I made them sly like the Wolf and the Weaver. When they were old enough, I led them in the night up the tall pine the Wolf had dragged my husband up so long before. We found the tendril of the Golden Web and at dawn they invaded and the Weaver fled. Ever since, Drewdrop spiders have invaded the webs of Golden Orb-Weavers.

I was not finished, oh osprey, I was still filled with hate. I searched the hills for each of my children of the colour of no colour. The males I seduced and I gave birth to many new children, colourless and black. The ones the colour of no colour I ate. All colourless spiders I ate, until there were none left, only my black self and my black children. Some of the kinblood I consumed spread from my stomach through my organs and to my skin. There it marked me. There was a pause as she considered herself. I think it looks like a web with four attachments and one struggler in the middle. She emerged from my feathers and displayed her abdomen. What do you think, oh osprey?

It looks like an angel, I answered, without thinking.

What is an angel?

I don't know. And I didn't; I was as ignorant as she.

Anyway, my venom had grown strong. I taught my children to build thick webs in corners; I had lost the craft and taste for glittering White Webs. We multiplied across the lands and were feared.

That is how I became known as the Widow, oh osprey, and now I live with you here by the sea.

Osprey

I had fled to the bay for safety but the storm caught me there and killed me. My last experience was the waves sinking their cold molars into my plumage. They tossed and tousled me as the storm raged, and, when my breath and the breath of the gods had ceased, they smoothed my feathers back to perfection in the darkness. The tide left my body on a beach on the west side of the bay.

     I had died with thrice bad luck: dishonourable retreat, disorienting circumstances, and far from the open ocean. My Three Days of Grace began at dawn.

     I had several admirers that first day. Just after sunrise a golden dog bounded over to me. He had a goofy gait, his hind legs not quite sure the direction of his front legs. He sniffed along my left wing and my face as an old man hobbled down the steps of the seawall.

     “Thor!” the man called, “get outta there.” He shooed Thor away, gave my body a cursory glance, and moved on.

     This was the blueprint for the next three interactions. The fifth beach stroller stopped and crouched beside me. Her mother examined me from a distance.

     “It's beautiful,” said the croucher, whose name was Noemi. She had a slight build and was in her twenties. Her eyes and her hat were green. Underneath her black hair was cut haphazardly short. Her facial features blended from sharp to smooth in all the right ways and places to make a human handsome, but there was something a bit off about them: the angles skewed, perhaps, and the curves slightly too voluptious. Because of this and her habit of staring at people's noses as they talked and taking a very long time to answer, she was generally considered unsettling. To complement her unsettling of people, she didn't much like them.

     “Is it an eagle?” her mother asked.

     “It's an osprey.”

     Her mother edged closer. “I think it's an eagle—a young one.”

     “No,” Noemi continued, frustration creeping into her voice. “The only eagles on this coast are bald and golden.”

     “Exactly: a young bald eagle. That's sad.”

     “There's far too much white. A young bald eagle is all brown-black. There was one in the nest on Cedar Street this fall.”

     “I don't know.... Look at its feet.”

     “Mum—it's an osprey.”

     “Let's google it.”

     “Fine.”

     Noemi slid from the sand a small stick that wouldn't leave splinters in her hands. She called one of the dogs to her and threw the stick. They moved on.

Noemi returned that evening after the clouds had rolled across the bay and inland, clutching a thermos in one hand. It contained Alba Andina Malbec from Mendoza, Argentina. A smooth driftwood log lay a few feet to my left and on this she sat.

     "Hello, osprey," she said.

     Hello, Noemi, I wanted to reply.

     "The wind's died," she remarked.

     The wind is waiting.

     She was looking up at the stars now, at Orion's Belt and the Big Dipper and Sirius. To the north the city and the ski hills lit the sky and shrouded the stars. She imagined the world a thousand years before, when there was negligible light pollution, and on a clear night the heavens shone unadulterated. Countless stars illuminated her mind's eye; she felt a sense of peace and wonder and comfort. A tear trickled down her face and the illusion fled.

     She wrenched her gaze from above to view below: the cement wall and road dissolved, the rows of cabins grew into pines and oaks and willows. The beach curved up to meet the forest seamless. Noemi drank a little more and breathed short and shallow to keep herself from crying.

     "Here, osprey--for your companionship." She poured wine on my breast and walked away.

My pleasure.

On the second day she brought her painting supplies. When she found the place where I had lain empty, the breath caught in her throat and she trembled and then she walked on. My body sprawled two hundred yards to the south, near the tip of the bay. She had only brought blacks and whites and browns, which suited my former seat fine but I now lay on small rocks.

     After a time spent considering and staring from my body to the rocks to her canvas to her paints, she began. First, a background of browns and black dabbled sand flowed over her canvas. She then trekked back to the cabin to retrieve the blues and yellows and reds she needed for the rocks. She painted the rocks carefully, recrafting their wholeness and their brokenness, their individuality and their community. The last rock, blue-black with streakings of silver and red, took her an hour. She had painted them on the edges of the canvas, leaving a circle of sand for my body to rest on.

     After lunch she returned, although the food sat in her stomach and her fear weighed upon her. Her fear was an ominous, nameless, and haunting thing, but she conquered it and made the first bold black stroke of my wing. From there, it was simple. She reformed my figure in oils, remade me a sleek midnight sea traversed by a fleet of sails. I was brought to new life by her alchemy. As the sun set over the ocean, beyond the hills and the islands, she packed up and left.

     Thank you.

That night the tide stole upon me like a lover. It caressed my down and encompassed me within itself and transported me towards my home.

     Please, I wished, take me with you. Guide me to your currents. Let us drift together to the open ocean.

     It left me on the lip of the bay.

This was the third and final Day of Grace. I needed to traverse the labyrinth of islands to the south; I needed to get to my final place of rest before the next sunrise. I called to the tide as it ran away and begged it to return that night and carry me off.

     The sun rose pink and orange and misted. Noemi came soon after, wearing purple gardening gloves with grey padded palms. I felt her vicious intent and, for the first time, I feared her. She tied the smallest and wildest of the dogs to a log and let the others roam as she examined my fallen body like a surgeon.

     "Why have you not been eaten?" she asked. “Why are you untouched? Why are you still so perfect, osprey?”

     She grasped my longest pinion feather on my left wing and pulled.

     Stop! I wanted—needed—to cry out. Don't, Noemi! I must stay whole.

     My feather held firm. If I had had human breath I would have sighed, or laughed. I knew every feather of my body. I knew the weight and how to maneuver each in any wind; I knew which ones were healthy and I knew if there were weaknesses. She wasn't done. The wing had stretched out and the wind lifted it up on display. After a long moment Noemi eased it back to the sand and then, methodically, pulled on the next feather, and the next, testing. None gave way to her. She tested the other wing with the same result. After a quick fit of frustration that consisted of heavy breathing and a bug-eyed glare, she attacked my tail.

     Please. The wind was my voice, nipping her. She bundled deeper into her jacket. No, Noemi, no.

There was a feather on the left of my tail that was frayed. It was inconsequential in life and would have fallen out within a few days, but the rules of pergatory were different. She pulled, was thwarted, pulled, was thwarted, pulled... and my Grace was broken.

     She took her ragged treasure home and left me to the flies and the crows. I did not expect her to return: she had played her miserable part.

Noemi returned that evening, alone. Why did she seek my company? I had no choice but to accept hers, though I did so bitterly. Did she know what she had done? No, of course not. How had she touched me, sullied me so when others could not?

     She chased off the ravens and built a small fire nearby. She had brought three items. The feather was in her grasp; she twirled it, staring from it to the flames and back. Her thermos was with her, this time bearing a wine from Italy. Lastly, wrapped in brown paper, was her painting. What was her role? Was she the trickster: stealing my old salvation after creating me anew?

     No, her next act revealed her. She was the destroyer. The brown paper caught immediately and the whole contraption was ablaze within seconds. She had placed that apparition of my lost magnificence on the fire so gently. The oils bubbled and crackled and made a light so intense she had to turn away.

     Murderer. Demon.

That fourth night I begged the tide once more to take me home, though I knew I was lost. I had been caught between this world and another. There was no escape. I simply preferred the kissing nibbles of fish to the raking of crows and the shit of seagulls. I wanted to fade with some small dignity.

     The winds were my friends, once. The tide and I, we were strangers and it had other business. It approached me but did not touch, its probing fingers teasing. It knew my journey was over.

     After I mourned I drifted from my body, now a hive of maggots, to a beach that flowed into willows and pines. Countless stars illuminated an ocean that was perfectly still.

     I was not alone. A young girl with long black hair and staring green eyes watched me.

     Hello, Noemi, I said. My voice was the wind and it encompassed her and she heard me.

     “Hello,” she replied. “You're an angel.”

     I looked down at my body, tall and muscled and sexless. My hands were smooth and sharp, like her face. I stretched my wings and found them black bespeckled with white. Yes, I said.

     She took my hand and we walked along the beach. Though there was no wind but for my voice, the trees swayed. The water remained still. Cranes stood in the tidepools, ducks floated along and made no ripples. We walked along until we crested the bay and faced south. The islands disintegrated and we looked out into the endless ocean.

     I need my feather back.

     “I don't have it,” the girl replied, fidgeting.

     You do.

     It was in her hand the next instant. She glared at it guiltily. It was my turn to play a role I knew perfectly, though I couldn't remember learning it.

     “Here,” she said, trying to give it to me.

     Put it in the water, I told her.

     She did so. It floated there, the frayed feather that broke my grace. When she stood back it grew, white becoming brown, into a rowboat.

     Thank you. I knelt in the sand and put my long arms around her. She began crying; I held her for a long, long moment until she was through and my shoulder glistened. I stood and said again, Thank you, Noemi. Be wise.

     The rowboat, instead of rocking, eased more deeply into the water with my weight. I sat and faced her and bent my great wings forward until I could grasp one in each hand. They transformed into black and white oars, beautifully carved with feathers. I rowed once and knew that that was all I needed, so I shipped the oars in front of me and waited. Noemi and I watched one another as I drifted onwards until the she merged with the land and I with the ocean.

The next evening Noemi returned to the beach with her thermos. All that was left of the osprey was feathers and bones and beak.

Sandcastles II

I am the old man on the porch, encompassed by an unfathomable blue sky. Capped in a glory of white, the eastern mountains dapple their green toes in the far reaches of tranquil ocean waves. In the afternoon sunlight the dark brown dunes stretch on by the dozen, beaching speedboats, traversed by humans and crabs.

I sip water from a blue cup, doing my best to appreciate a gift too often taken for granted these days. The conversation has lulled, we older folks sinking into a familiar trance. The dream-world before us--hidden in plain sight among the bedlam of today's world--swiftly and stealthily crawls upon our porch unannounced but not unwelcome. Creeping among us, it steals our words and grants soft silence.

The youngest contingent of our family resides out on the beach, enjoying the ritual of a young tradition. In the early hours, when the moon coaxed the waters toward different shores, a remnant was revealed: a formless, water-scrubbed hump, understood only by the memory of yesterday's triumph. Upon this foundation, they are shovelling, carving, hands in a relentless pat against the sand: giving birth to a dragon. A fresh manifestation resurrected from ancient imaginations, the dragon is a being of toil, camaraderie, and craftsmanship. This titan of sandcastles is a physical testament to the spirit of labour and enjoyment; this crude etching in the sand a reflection of our proud, tumbling lives.

My days of working on the beach are over and gone. Four years ago I surpassed my last worldly hurdle by paying off my debt and this cabin, and I retired. In the same stroke I stopped building sandcastles with my grown kids and growing grandkids, a soothing task I loved. You may ask why? and I cannot answer. Perhaps because I was tired of fighting every day of my life. Perhaps because it brought balance, and I was returning to my centre. My final tide draws near.

The children are leaving the beach: filtering from the rising behemoth, splashing through the nearest tide-pool, toeing across the barnacle-encrusted rocks, sprinting through the hot soft sand, climbing up the grass, washing their feet in the kiddie pool, and ascending the stairs to meet the old man on the porch.

"Hey Grandpa!"

So It Is

The Stalwart is fiercer in this, the fifth day of our little Adventure. The Hesitation is briefer, the Courage more swiftly found: the Sand Planets molested, the Sand Societies demolished, naught but the Sand Nomads (the madmen, the drifters, the shamans, the Children of Understanding—all those who know the inner ways and believed the prophecy of the Fifth Apocalypse) are left to repopulate.

This morning Mitch the Cat sleeps in, so this midmorning he assaults his Present Self and twists his Future Selves for the choice of his Past Self. [My day is fucked] run the gist of his thoughts. [My day is fucked. My day is fucked. I am so tired now. My eyes fucking hurt. I’ll be sleepwalking about all day. My day is fucked.] And so it is.

The steps leading down to the Sand Planets are next to some sort of tall, cross-beamed Signal Structure, which lines up with the Mile Marker on the 49th parallel. Mitch wanders over into the Canadian motherland, where the humble cottages morph instantly into multi-million dollar homes before the shore disintegrates into loose dunes. He wander-wonders along as usual, with a definitively negative slight to his abstraction from reality. If you recall, his day is fucked.

At one point his stomach drags his legs up onto land, to a lonely hamburger hut. A few fellow wander-wonderers are enjoying the peace of the morning to pursue their pleasure amid slobbering grease and deep-fried potatoes. There’s a young couple chasing gulls with their small child, and Mitch is released from his great Burden for a few moments as he watches them frolic in the Dream of Life.

He avoids the old man today. He can find not even the Courage to stop and admire the steadfast task. Divided from the old man who is one with his work by a salty stream, he trudges past the spot where a…a Seal? is blooming in the remains of the Dragon (pounded flat by the innumerable tiny fists of the Armies of the Moon).

He climbs the clay cliffs to the south, writes his true name. He then stares at it in sad disgust and draws a line with his finger below, letting it crumble and fall away to the oblivion of Forgotten Things.

When he starts back the tide is in, the Seal eaten, and so he has to walk along the road, petulantly kicking gravel until it transforms to concrete. The old man is on his porch, but Mitch the Cat doesn’t draw the Courage to make eye acquaintance, and strides sullenly by.

the Prey of a Laughing Moon

The old man is building sandcastles again, bent over in the orange-grey sunlight slow-dance, digging, patting, sculpting. He’ll stand for a minute to energetically shovel sand into a snaking pile, kneel to pat, pat, pat, sit to sculpt with tear-envoking delicacy.

Mitch the Cat watches him from the distance of another sandbar, moves along, traverses to the old man’s sandbar farther down the coast, walks back, moves past, circles back, ever closer like a timid scavenger, until he’s five yards away, just shyly watching. For the sandcastle is a Thing of Beauty: a sprawling Dragon: arrested in writhing flight: massive, short wings outstretched, encircling his fat body, not bat-like but Angelic, each feather long, elegant, precise; the feet are scaled, clawed, as wide as my chest; the torso and tail lethargically rotund, bearing down this beast of the skies to the soft fatality of the Sand Planets; the head a roaring, stone-toothed masterpiece; eyes: sagging, furious; nostrils flared with spent fire; vertebral spikes made of broken clam shells. The old man moves with methodical chaos, perfecting a claw, drifting instinctively to the other side of the tail, where a hillside has collapsed like a complacent avalanche (all Sand Planet people smothered unwittingly by the indiscretion of God). He is one with his work.

If the old man notices Mitch the Cat, he doesn’t show it. He just keeps on digging, patting, sculpting away. The tide is only a sandbar away and soon Mitch goes to watch it creep up the dune: with rapid diligence it scurries the gullies, breasting the tiny ridges one by one.

[No wonder the ancient Taoists were obsessed with water] Mitch the Cat thinks. [How magnificent it is! How calm, how ferocious, how unstoppable!]

He moonwalks in retreat from the armies of the moon, until he senses, knows, that the Dragon is just behind him. With the slow-motion grace often identified with endangered pygmy three-toed sloths of some Panamanian island (and with a similar stoned, goofy expression to that distant cousin of ours’), he turns.

The old man is gone. Flown from his creature creation chained, he is climbing steps to the porch of the nearest cabin, a dilapidated blue structure that could once have been a quaint abode of a succession of small-town police chiefs out of some dreadful Midwestern life or perhaps the former roost and subsequent grave of some 70’s groovy porn guru.

He enters the sanctuary, returns with a beer, sits, stares directly out at Mitch and his precious Dragon.

The water stings Mitch the Cat’s sand-encrusted feet and he shivers and jumps and creeps away from the odd dream, skulking along the tide under a warrior moon laughing in the parallel retreat of the sun over the hills. Behind him, the armies of the moon eat the fearsome, beaten Dragon as its god watches on, sipping cold beer, the destruction his perverse entertainment.

Mitch the Cat Hesitates

Mitch the Cat hesitates.

His big toe, the Stalwart, is poised upon the threshold of Adventure. Below lie grains of sand like fallen Planets, magnificent in their ignored intricacy. Between the Stalwart and the foremost Planet space is eternal: minute as a universe, enormous as an atom, unfathomable to our petty understanding.

The Stalwart, while being of rather simple appearance, is a subtle being bearing the complexities of many Adventures. The Stalwart has met Fire and burned, Ice and froze, Comfort and relaxed, Hardship and struggled. Many times has it forgotten Truth for fact, become complacent and been reminded. Each time that it seems to choose poorly, it chooses wisely, for it seeks to learn. Hesitation is a thing learned, too, a choice itself, crafted of the ridiculous Fear that some Things are bad. For once upon a Moment the Stalwart was energetic as a young child, as exuberant as a new lover, as Adventuresome as God Herself. And the Stalwart remember this an Idea, but isn’t ready to remember the Act.

Behind the Stalwart are the other toes: the Grasper, long and pliant and eager; the Feeler, sensing, analyzing, aware; the Stabilizer, counterweighing the Stalwart; and lastly, the Runt, squat, useless, ugly. Each respectfully, eagerly awaits its time for action, its manifestation of Meaning.

And thus the Moment comes! swift as a peregrine diving, powerful as an elephant charging, subtle as a butterfly becoming. The Stalwart plunges forward and down through space eternal to meet the Adventure hidden within the folds of fallen Planets.

That is how Mitch the Cat steps onto the beach. He navigates the high tide line, wincing as he feels the barnacles, gasping when a rock slips. At the first tidepool he shudders, wades through quickly and placidly as he can, fearing the Splash. At the first sandbar, he tiptoes around shells, meanders about aimlessly, head down. This is his fourth day Mitch the Cat wander-wonders around on the beach, and he is yet to know whatever it is he is looking for here, let alone pursue it or achieve it. Maybe he is looking for Nothing, which is a wonderful Adventure, but not the one for him.

Courage isn’t a prevailing attribute of Mitch’s in this Moment, but once upon a Moment it was, and it certainly could be again. He’s just not ready to learn from Courage. Though he is oblivious to this Truth, head down, caught within the cage of his own overwhelming thoughts, he is learning quite a lot from Hesitation. You see, Hesitation causes his great Weariness, and he doesn’t realise this yet, but he will.

He starts in the early morning, as Hesitation is overcome by the Stalwart’s Courage. The tide is a couple sandbars out. He follows its patient progress, pacing, rambling on to himSelf silently, but sometimes out loud if there is no one around and he is feeling rather passionate about an Idea. These days the tide stops going out after about a mile, and that is Fact because there’s a big stone monolith that proves so. Mitch hasn’t actually measured the distance from road to monolith, but a kid told him it was “the Mile Marker”. [How could I measure it?] Mitch the Cat wonders, and then after a few seconds of wondering about that moves on to wondering about how anybody measures any large distance and so forth ever deeper into the abstract (the pointlessness of which I will save you from) until he hears or sees or remembers some other Thing to which he can create an Idea to wonder about. And so forth onwards to nowhere.

But before you click the little X to leave this blog and do your best to forget about its current pointlessness, I assure you that there is a Moment in which our dear fellow begins to wonder about some Idea of Meaning. It’s the same Moment he rediscovers his Courage, and it’s such an exciting Moment that I dearly wish to share it with you now, but if I did you just wouldn’t get it, because it wouldn’t have any Meaning for you like it has for me and for Mitch. So we all must be patient, then.

Anyway, where am I? Oh yes, I’m with Mitch. But where is he again?