PRESENT

Presently I'm sitting on my back porch, my dog Barry nearby. He's playing with an empty water bottle which, to him, seems alive. I sometimes feel envious of the simplicity of a dog's life, despite their total dependence on us. Other than that, life always appears to be "now" to a dog; whereas to me - us? - staying in the present takes concentration, effort, prayer - something. It ain't natural, and oh do I wish it was.

I sit on the porch with my coffee and my dog and look directly into the trees of the forest that rests right here in front of me, literally steps from my back door. On some days the forest comforts me, like a big, godly blanket of living green, nature mothering me and anyone else who wants.

And other days the forest seems huge and ominous and creepy and encroaching, as if I'm trespassing with my little man-made house and coffee and occasional cigarette. Times like this I am small, too small, and feel threatened by an enveloping mass of living organism here long, long before me.

Today I'm simply aware of it all - neither here nor there, not in it or of it, just beside it.

Barry gets up now, and almost leaps to the edge because he hears something I don't. A rustling in the green, a scent of a deer. Something.

Now a train barrels by, a half-mile across a ridge yet here enough to hear loud and clear, its muscle propelling it forward on rails big enough to hold one-hundred tractor trucks. The engineer blasts the whistle that's got to send closer neighbors into their ceilings, no matter how used to it they are.

I'm maybe just now getting used to living, I don't know. Always, almost always... being here, on this earth, seems alien to me, as if there's somewhere else I've been or am going and know it so well it's in my bone marrow, yet where it is, or when it was, or what will be, I do not know.