Sidestepping poo

This follows a brief exchange with a certain scarab.. this fellow I have an inside to, but not much do I know of him... Anyhow, the precocious kid that I hear-tell he was I thought he'd like this story.

First Steven just came down stairs and his hair is slicked and stuck down against his skull and the aroma of him smells like someone perfumed a flower garden.

He went, "I found some hair gel."
I go, "I see that."
He poked his crunchy locks and was like, "My hair feels stale."

Anyhoo, In the olden days which was approximately 10 minutes ago in my mind's years I was riding my bike out Africa Road to god knows where, I have no idea what I was doing, where I was going. Remember those days of no destination and no plan? So I was riding out past Yarnell's farm and there was a church close by back then... it might still be there, but it was on the left about 100 yards past the barn, and in the back of it there was a rock the size and shape of a baby rhino, I could perch atop it like onea those birds you see on their backs.

It was a time and place when I could take a sandwich and a book and feel at ease enough in the world to wander onto private property and sit wherever I pleased.

It was close to evening in September, after school. Why was I alone... it seems I was often alone, not because I was lonely, even though I was; though not because I didn't have friends, but for other reasons. But it seems to me now that it was because I craved solitude even then.

That day I looked out at the pasture that ran behind the church and the sky was grey-blue and yellow, the sun warm in the west and pouring it's luster on the final hours of the day ~ The richest greens and browns I'd ever seen were in the woods to my right. There was a creek closeby I couldn't see, but the sheep that wandered there sang their bleating which could be heard like an obscure chorus underneath the din of the combine and cars whirring by on the road.

Off in the distance there was another sound coming through that I recognized. I knew this sound like I'd always known it, and that in some way I was born knowing it. Like how I knew the sound of the churchbells from the college on Sundays, and the sound of the Howard's dinnerbell and my mother's voice. It triggered something in my deepest core, my heart ached with an excitement and yearning, feeling of glory and reverence ~ and this assurance... that was of cycles and wildness and freedom of the natural world, and that in all the mad rush of the life of the motorized, electrical, noisome, lawnmower-y doodads and gadgets that even under and over all that, there was a... silence, if you paid attention, a low hush... and then, the waves on the air reaching your ears: Hear it? The sounds of the migrating Canadian Geese.


Crowfoot, Blackfoot warrior and orator:
"What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset."