Machine: Away!

I ran very fast today without a reason. But really, running away is sensible. If you sit too long, stand. If you stand too long, run away.

 I strolled up the ridge away from home, and when I was out of sight, remembered a good song and started running. I have never run so fast. My body leaned in front of my legs and I almost fell down into the yellow grass. I kicked up reddish, Oklahoma dirt. I pumped my arms and gritted my teeth and plunged my feet forward again and again and again until I found myself at an opening in the forest. The forest was dark and the air inside heavy, but I knew it pretty well so I knew how to get to the stream. Halfway across was the peak of meaninglessness, and my anger picked up on it. I picked up a fragment of a waterlogged branch, tested its weight and vulnerability, and then threw it full force into a nearby tree. It jolted as if dying and shattered and scattered. I continued onward.

Next came the faults and swords of sentiment. I had played in these woods as a young child and splashed around in the streams daily, not wondering about how it was done, just doing it. When I saw it I realized just how much it had changed. Floods defaced the stones and the sandbars I had long ago memorized; erosion had done away with trees and littered the streambed with bits of wood and leaves. I tried to live in it again, bring back the joys I used to feel by simply having fun in complexion with the world’s beauty. But I couldn’t, and I didn’t understand why. I sat on the sand and everything. I even clambered up a diagonal tree. Why couldn’t I just be happy? The indoors gave me a maddening fever for escape, but the escape itself wasn’t medicinal. I was an unconscious pantheist at the hands of wilderness. Indoors, I was a pantheist within the wilderness of my own soul. It was one of two globes that may differ in size but still hold nothing at all. After a while, I turned my eyes to the concrete cave where the stream ran through and under the gravel machine belt. The machine gave a sharp pounding noise at constant intervals and was a bit annoying, but I had to revisit the cave. Sparrow Cave, as we used to call it. I ventured over debris to reach it. There was a downed tree with a fork chiseled into it from breakage, where a nest of mulch and sticks was stuck. There were rocks and suspicious stretches of wet dirt. It wasn’t hard getting over it all, but the obstacles were monumental because they were ugly. When I reached the cave I didn’t peer in first like you probably thought a normal person would, but I looked back at the creek and saw it was mottled and widely shaved by the floods. It was tangled up in unwanted messes. And still the machine overhead pounded on, like a masked heartbeat, and I started to conceive my little vision.

The model of my soul was clearly being exemplified, or at least my mind pulled detail together and thought so as a result. The beautiful stream was my lost creative finesse, all the laughter and mud pies I had made just for the sake of enjoying things. Now it was whitewashed by floods and reeled over by disaster. And the machine, though essentially it only carried gravel, had stolen the stream’s resources and tides for mad consumption. The machine had sucked the stream dry and turned it into impenetrable rocks. Through this lovely, beautiful spot in nature, blind economy treaded without mercy. It was gravel, it was bland, and it spat sticks and stones out on the streambed as if the whole world was intended just for a dumping site.

Gravel can be equated to media, gluttony, screens, and dazzling faces we fall in love with just to get an ends out of wooing. Dearest me, I was scared. But it wasn’t over. The curse had fallen but the blessing was rising up. I walked homeward. Home, home, home, the place I had escaped from. This is the funniest paradox. Home has walls, yes, but it also has doors. This obviously meant that I was neither meant to stay inside or go outside, or better yet, was meant to both stay inside and go outside. I was supposed to have something with me wherever I was. Home was where I belonged. Out there was where I could go if I wanted to and bring home with me.

My mother was cooking sandwiches. And I walked in and started writing.