Rising and Setting; Atlas
'Rising and Setting' was written the morning after spending the night in my hammock in the Oregon Cascades. I had started the hike in at about 10pm when the sun was setting, and by the time I found two trees that looked suitable to sleep between, it had been dark for a few hours. I woke up with the sun and it lit the mountains around me on fire, leaving me really no choice but to think and write about the otherworldly - and yet intensely of this world - experience. Following this, 'Atlas' was inspired by a friend, climber, teacher, and enigma who seems to have lived a thousand lives through his Native ancestors, experiences, and modes of being. Both pieces are open ended observations of phenomena, and I hope provoke a subjective air of wonder and rumination.
Rising and Setting
There is something so astoundingly beautiful about the sun that rises over the mountains and sets beyond the sea.
Why is this?
Why is this so monumental? So intensely emphasized? So universally celebrated, so widely written about, so symbolic? A life force and a provider without a heartbeat, neither maternal nor paternal.
There is something sobering about the sun setting over the ocean; it’s an ending I suppose. A breath of fresh air, a moment of relief, the absence of light. The death of a day, the death of mundanity. The capitalist closes his eyes as we all do at the end of the day, but the poet wakes up. One dreams with his eyes closed, the other with eyes unblinking, both breathing in simultaneously, the respective exhale flowing out of a single nose. The death of the sun is symbolic in every love poem, painful moment, every exhalation of breath; it’s death.
And then darkness. An absence of light. I am stuck with myself, with my own mind. If I sit down in the dirt during the day, I can see the rocks, the leaves and sticks, the earth crumble and slide through my fingers if I make a fist around it. But, if I sit in the darkness, my eyes tend to be useless, I can see an enormous amount of nothing.
And this is why the capitalist sleeps. He doesn’t see, nor does he care to look. Darkness is darkness, what more can there be? Profit will never rise from nothing. But the artist? the poet, the thinker, the lover? She gazes into the darkness, as soon as he puts to sleep the mind of some learned part of herself, some well-known survival technique. He can then gaze, not around, but rather inward. And this is how she can see, even without light.
The light brings unimaginable beauty to this world, the sun makes it possible for life on this little planet to exist! But to look into the darkness with fear? It is even more imperative to look into the darkness when you’re afraid, to explore the unknown entities that reside in the absence of the light. Both concrete and abstract.
A silent forest at night; an unexplored feeling.
The purpose I think is not to rid myself of fear, that, I feel, should never be the purpose. No, but maybe the purpose is to lean into this fear with curiosity, into the darkness and question it. Roga tota, we must question it all. Because, ultimately, why does the sun die at the end of this day that man has placed words on, and why do we love to watch this death? Is it the promise, the certainty of the sun being born once again? Bleeding out and upwards from the mountains at dawn? Or is it the promise of darkness, of a moment alone, an exhalation of breath? I believe it depends on who you ask.
And so, the sun rises once again, allowing my eyes to see but my mind to dim. The promise of a new day, a new life, a new beginning. It’s cyclical and it’s certain. Light brings me certainty, and with it, comfortability. Things lit up are certain, tangible.
But what if I let the sun rest, and sit with myself in a perfect, abstract, and uncertain darkness.
Who would I be?
Atlas
He holds the weight of the world in his eyes.
If you look closely, you can see the peaks of mountains,
standing steady, jutting out from the abyss.
As abysmal as the death of a fawn,
as beautiful and earth shattering as the birth of a daughter
in the dreams of a woman who cannot carry one.
No cause without effect,
No cause without affect.
A silver blade redirecting a beam of the sun.
Hands without arms carefully twisting pristine steel,
leading a frustrated cat on a cruel and futile chase.
And his eyes hold the weight of the world.
If you saw them you’d know.
Quiet eyes, not silent.
On the steady mountains, a millennium lies buried,
bones strewn, no longer visible.
But if you saw them you’d know.
The locusts have come and gone,
The last teacher’s breath has been drawn,
and I sit here, cross-legged in a land leached of life.
A small fire at my feet, but I feel no warmer.
My arms to the sky, I stretch weak muscle, as it’s all I have left,
and my skin splits as my fingertips kiss,
and my bones know the wind once more.
The coyotes in the canyon that once sang for me
Have since moved on, and now that they’re gone,
I cry for their song
That too knew the wind long ago.
His eyes watch the weight of the world
A blank face, novocain
scattered teeth, tattered skin
borrowed bones and beaten dogs.
Curious eyes turned feral
but the world is much too busy to stop and speak gently
so, the feral stay feral.
And the world chugs on, operating on borrowed bones
and not planning on returning them to the library once two weeks have passed.
I feel him in the mountains, under the litter of leaves, past worms tangled in miles of mycelium.
Still further, under the trees holding hands where we cannot see,
below clay, beneath rivers of life and deserts of death;
He lies buried.
Bones piled in the heart of the mountain, hundreds, thousands, all of them his.
He’s died many deaths in this life, digging a new grave for every new sun.
Burying himself in the heart of bleeding mountains,
though they bleed cold and blue, not hot and red.
He holds the weight of the world in his eyes,
At the peak of the earth,
The westernmost front of this land,
I watch him slowly stand as she takes his gentle hand
And the heavens fall down to earth.
