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. 

Empty House

Abandoned A-frame,

between your shattered rafters

winged ghosts come to rest. 

This is one of the many empty dwellings here on Blanca Flats. "It's always the women who want to leave," our real estate agent told us when we bought our own A-frame about two miles from this one. "They miss their families; they miss the shops." This house was built for a family who lived here for awhile before the wife declared that she couldn't take the isolation. Behind the house is an old moving van that yawns open, as if the family stopped in the very process of moving their belongings into the house. Doves and pigeons have taken up residence in the van and in the house. If you walk around the property, which I've done before, the house seems to explode in an agitated whir of wings. 

Ghosts

Blanca Flats has never felt haunted to me in any way. This spiky, drought resistant ecosystem is alive with spirits -- wind, clouds, mountains, stones -- and with coyotes, snakes, mice, rabbitbrush and prickly pear. But ghosts?

I haven't felt any. Only the ghosts of my own memory. Sometimes they cross my inner vision in a continuous parade, sullen and relentless. Every mistake I've ever made, every regret I've ever cradled in my thoughts, every act of cowardice, every act of neglect. Steeped in solitude, this life forces a constant confrontation with the past.

The wind is an indifferent listener.

The massif is engaged in its own endless transformation.

Photo by Eric Havelock-Bailie