walk one
It is countless by now. The number of times I have stepped over these roots. They lay at the base of a grand Guanacaste tree I walk past almost everyday. The cadence of my walk is only slightly broken by the disruption of the path. My thoughts barely interrupted by the need for more careful placement of footing. As usual I am barefoot and alone on these trails. The solitude strengthens the walk. My thoughts fall back into the rhythm of my stride. There is something poetic in how the light weaves its way through the trees. The contrasts of light and shade paint endless portraits of nature, and human.
There is always something poetic here.
“Her womb” I say out loud. It is a way of giving life to the poem I am working on. The “her” is the ocean. The ocean that I walk to every morning. My “rational disordering” is tearing apart the simple perceptions of land, sea and sky. Rimbaud says that poets rationally disorder their senses to reach alternative perspectives that give birth to poetry. It is hard to argue with such an assessment, but sometimes it’s best to leave one’s senses behind and follow the poem. Mine is leading me to the shore. There is a statement there that beckons. After a short walk past the tennis courts and the new spaceship houses that are under construction, I am at the top of the trail that leads to the beach.
I say “Morning” to the blue water.
I pause, taking in that indiscernible line that lays between sea and sky. Such a journey of contemplation involves both past and present. For on the horizon hangs that veil that divides what has been and what remains to be known, the realms of infinity. I head down. The sand comforts my feet. It is low tide, the blowhole is silent this morning, the rock formations are basking in the sun. The tiny rock crabs are using the exposed rocks as their morning buffet. I head north walking along the suture that joins the terra with the seas of the world.
I find my cadence again, softly ignoring the few humans that I encounter along the way. The last fingers of the waves touch my feet, Although disordered, the rhythm of the crashing waves have a pulse.
There is a dance here.
My footfalls, my breathing, the sound of the waves folding into each other, over and over again. I am a minuscule part of this, but I am here. I am in a space, I paw through my thoughts. Walking draws you to a center, the nonessential and obligatory parts of everyday living fall away, you become in a sense more naked and lighter with each step. It is the temple one enters if they so choose. Breezes, sky, waves, horizon, all fall into you, and that oneness can drag you back across the eons to when we crawled from these waters, leaving our mother’s womb.
At the north end of the beach, where one cannot walk any further, I rest in the shade of the cliff, watching nature’s movie. Egrets, kites, vultures, pelicans, and frigates grace the sky. The tireless waves beckon my thoughts, they reach for the poetry inside of me. I feel closer to the earth now. I am close to the womb. I have been on this walk more than a thousand times, but lately something beckons to give it a voice in someway. To create a poem.
Emerson said, “All the good of nature is the soul’s, and may be had, if paid for in nature’s lawful coin, that is, by labor which the heart and the head allow.” I will labor with heart and head to give this walk a voice, a canvas, a color, a place that can be touched, if only by me.
The poet walks on.