New Year with Ghosts

Each post emerges

like a separate gray soul

on the snowy road. 

On the last day of 2012, I went for a long run. A light snow fell. Milky banks of fog shifted across the landscape. Along the sides of the rutted roads, old fenceposts and signposts materialized one by one, like memories stepping forward from my subconscious. Beyond the border of the road, the horizon was a cloudy sea, marked by underwater dunes and mesas. In the distance, the Dome reminded me of the volcanic rock that rises out of Morro Bay in Northern California, where I spent so much of my life. 

I often miss the Pacific Ocean. But has it ever left me? Have any of the faces, seas or skylines I knew in the past really left me? I thought once again of how this ancient lakebed acts like a canvas for the imagination, how its shapes and sounds evoke remembered beauty or pain at every shift of the seasons, at every turn of the light. 

According to a Chinese superstition, ghosts of the past shouldn't be mentioned on New Year's Day. We should look forward to the future, focusing our thoughts on the coming months. But I don't fear these ghosts, or regret them anymore. I live with them comfortably now -- much more comfortably than I did when I was younger. I greet them like old companions on the road, like the old wooden corral posts that I've come to know so well.