Mountain

Mountain

Some days I think I am becoming a mountain.  Not a sharp, snow-capped jab at the sky, but one of those golden-pelted hills that lingers in the fog of early morning.  Firstly, my feet have become sealed to the soil.  Secondly, what rises in me is porous and mineral as limestone.  Thirdly, there is something out in the distance, some vantage point or imaginary horizon that I am always looking towards.

I first discovered my metamorphosis when I was at my son’s soccer game in San Rafael at the base of Mount Tamalpais.  Looking out at the comets of their blue shirts, the whir of their machine legs.  I could feel something molten.  Plates shifting.  The sweat and chill of earthquake weather.

But days swallow each other like predators.  And time shimmies by like a scrimshaw of clouds. First one shape forming, and then the next. 

What I arrived at was this mountain stance.  The view.  The single arthritic oak crowning my peak reaching for something it doesn’t understand.  And the idea that somewhere, in the stratum, under tons of soil, in the tumult of stones and bugs and burrowed animals there is a secret space. Call it a lake or a cavern filled with that cold elixir of now.