Lately I’ve been interested in meditation.  I’ve been reading a little about it, and trying my hand at sitting still, but it’s hard.  I’m accustomed to throwing my attention far away, to follow distant threads on the internet, in a book, or in a show.  It’s easy to follow a recipe, to follow a route up a hill or through the forest and it feels good.  But what about right now, simply being?  To follow the route inside?  I know that sometimes I take a walk or a ride to find myself, to reach a state of peace, but I’m also interested in the reverse, to start here to reach there.

When I’m sitting still I can feel my mind racing, I can feel it accelerate like a car engine in neutral, wanting to do something fast.  I can feel time passing; it feels like the slider bar on an mp3 playing, a burning fuse, a tire rolling on a road.  I can feel tension floating under my scalp, sadness in the back of my head.  I try to bring everything back to now; breathing brings it back.   My breath is like a pendulum but different at every tick.  On the inhale I look inside, and on the exhale I bring up what I find, remembering to not get lost, to follow the air up back to the present.

A few days ago I sat on the beach for a few hours, looking inside and staring at the waves.  There was a small harbor seal lying on the sand; it was strange.  A man was walking two  labs, slinging a sandy tennis ball for them with a scooper, and the ball rolled right up to the seal and the dogs were wagging their tails and sniffing him as he barked with fright and pulled himself through the sand with his flippers, trying to get back into the water.  The man yelled at his dogs but they were too interested and he ran up to them as the seal swam away.  I was sitting feeling emulsified with the sand water and sun.  I was sitting with my eyes closed and my sunglasses on.  I was staring at the horizon, wishing I would see a whale.  An ownerless dog sniffing driftwood came to see me; I petted his back and he sat down beside me and stuck out his tongue and we stared at the sea together.  He was so calm.  He stuck out his paw to shake.  Some kids walked by, looking self-conscious and conscious of me.  I found myself crying but it was nice.  Who knew if you just stood still and thought about nothing you would cry?  It’s as if some long compressed pain just floats to the top and it feels good to let it out.

Finally I saw a whale on the ocean.  Or I saw its breath, a column of mist.  I watched it breathe eight times over twenty minutes as it swam north and the kids walked by again and I wanted to get up and leave before they got there so they wouldn’t think I was weird, but stayed as a personal challenge.

On Sunday I drove up into Trinity County, into the Alps on a dirt road where I saw no one, fourteen miles on a single lane road bouncing over rocks to a trail head with parking for one car at Green Mountain.  I walked up over a peak through a burnt forest and it was creepy, I didn’t know where I was or where I was going, only what I’d seen on the map, which didn’t prepare me for where I was.  There was orange peel fungus growing out of the loose dirt in the trail, it looked like dried apricot in acorn bowls.  The trail was unpleasantly steep as I climbed up over a ridge, then dropped down lower than I’d climbed, down to a saddle below the peak where a little spring emitted from the side of the hill, only to be reabsorbed a few feet later.  A Western Tanager watched me from the top of a pine as I checked my legs for ticks for the hundredth time and wondered the thought that I kept wondering but couldn’t answer:  where am I?

Lately I’ve been mired in a funk.  My stomach has been boiling with stress and everything seems lackluster.

I’ve been trying to make myself feel better.  I went to the Humboldt County Library and applied for a library card.  The library is modern and beautiful, on a rise above the bay near the Manila Bridge.  I wandered the stacks feeling kind of funny–everybody seemed to know what they were doing except me.  I tried to pretend I knew where everything was when truly I was a newb.

On the second floor I found something called the Humboldt Room. A little old lady library volunteer asked if I’d like to come in.  I didn’t really know if I wanted to come in or not, but tried to act like maybe I did.  She directed me to sign the register, then turned me loose in a dark wood paneled room full of books.

I’d been wondering about local history, thinking I should read a few books, then found myself hanging out in the library’s special collection of non-circulating historical documents.  There were shelves of yearbooks for all of the local schools, crazy old maps, newspapers from the time of the gold rush.  There were silver haired scholars sitting with magnifying glasses at a long table, poring over scrolls.  I found the section on local biology, zeroed in on local birds, and unearthed a treasure:  The Atlas of the Breeding Birds of Humboldt County produced by the Redwood Audobon Society.

I sat at the long table with my tome.  It was incredibly geeky.  They’d divided up the county into sectors, and birders had counted species for four years with an emphasis on breeding pairs.  For each species recorded in Humboldt, there was a two page essay with distribution and random facts.  I turned to the Short-Eared Owl, and read something similar to:

Everybody remembers their first Short-Eared Owl.  They may not remember the place or the time, but they remember the feeling. For this owl is more than a simple Strigiforme, it is a graceful, lethal energy.

I was eating it up.  I paged through the countless indulgent birder non-fictions.  There were too many to digest, but no worries, I’ll be back–I think I’ve found a new favorite place.  And just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, it did:  two little biddies were gossiping about history, each trying to one up the other, when one asked, Well, do you know the story of how Loleta got its name?  As a matter of fact I don’t!  Well, it’s quite vulgar.  I’ve read that it’s a colloquialism in the local Indian dialect for let us have intercourse!

As I watched them chortle in the Humboldt Room I couldn’t help but giggle a little bit myself.

According to our calculations, we need 3 cubic yards of top soil for our new garden boxes.  What’s a cubic yard look like?  I had no idea.  So we made a few calls, found a good deal and drove over to pick it up.

When the wizened garden lady at the nursery heard we needed 3 yards, she said “What type of car do you have?”  A mini truck.  To which she responded, “Dirt is heavy, you hear?” and walked off shaking her head at the pair of rural amateurs.

So we bought a yard and the cashier said, “Okay, the tractor will meet you in the back.”  I couldn’t help but exclaim, “The tractor!?”  And she nodded, as if to say hell yeah, of course we have a tractor.

I watched in awe as the tractor besieged the twenty foot pile of top soil.  The scooper went in part way, then the tractor popped a wheelie and the rear wheels spun and diesel fumes billowed as more soil went in.  Then it lifted its payload in victory and approached my Taco.

I told the driver everything:  Look, I have no idea what I’m doing.  I don’t know what my truck can handle.  Can you help?  He smiled and nodded.

The scoop lowered and a shower of dirt and rocks hit the bed.  My truck bounced up and down.  It looked so little, and there was so much dirt.  We barely got a scoop in before my rear suspension was slammed.  The driver said, “Eh, that’s about it.  How far you going?”  From McKinleyville to Eureka.  “Ah, okay.  Should be alright…”

My car had converted into a half lowrider.  The rear leaf springs were totally flat.  Help.

I was going to drive the 20 miles or so on surface streets only, but Beth convinced me to hit the highway and we were underway, bouncing and swaying like a waterbed teeter totter.  I lost a fair number of hit points, but we made it home without incident.

Today I single-handedly unloaded the dirt with our new wheelbarrow.  It was tough work, but novel.  There I was, swinging a shovel, hauling a barrow, getting dirty.  Moving mass around.  Changing the landscape.  Hauling earth!

Then I went back to get the other half and did it all again.  One cubic yard out of three.