My Favorite Waste of Time
Every month or so, I come here to get my head back together. Lilies are gathered up and carried to the edge of a hill and thrown off. Perfect white blossoms shattering to the ground remind me so succinctly of you that it's painful to watch their fragile yellowed center break to bits.
Walking the hills, the purpled hills that you wished were yours, I feel at a closer peace to you than ever. Not one bit of me believes the doctors, the gurus who want to pump me full of drugs and try to "make" me feel better. No THING can make me feel better.
It's the tangibly physical that heals utterly. Mist on the ground, crushed beneath bare feet cooling burning toes. Loose, soft dirt; hard rocks under scrabble.
You loved the woodland; of course, you came to feed from it; to drag a buck back and lop it's head off for your pleasure. I choose to pay a quieter respect for the world.
Waste and you didn't want it in the first place. You believed that completely. Nothing ever went to waste around you.
So nothing I touch gets wasted; only me; the little injuries, the scratches, rolling down enormous green hills, contrasting with the bright red blister of my skin, mosquito bitten and burned by the sun.
We all have our secret pilgrimages; the little hiding places that we hope are far out of the way, the ones that we'd never want the world to know of. They're so necessary, so near religious for me, that I tell no one. But I keep no secrets from nature. Everything around me out there knows who I am. And it knows who and what I am.
I know the name of every root and berry hidden thick in the underbrush, under canopies of leaves; know which mushrooms are poisonous.
I feel it's necessary to do it. Because you'd want someone to continue to do what you dearly loved to do.
And I think I can remember how to point and shoot the gun you gave me before you died. I can still feel it's heft in my hands and the lurch of it against my shoulder; bruising me, learning me to pay attention to the little details.
You would have liked that, Rick, I think.
So I come with my flowers and throw them over the cliff. An offering to the spirits of destruction and chaos, to keep them at bay, so that I will be allowed this place for a longer time.
This is my new favorite way to spend time. Some would call it a waste. But anyone who would call it a waste never knew you.