Settling In

After a few days of relative stillness (besides a short and incredibly cold walk and some morning/evening stretches), I was aching for movement. I had set my alarm to get up in time to make it to breakfast, but unfortunately I've lived in cities and under a highway far too long for the gentle sound affects of wind chimes and a slow-rolling tide to do anything but put me into a deeper sleep. I should have known, since it's the same sounds I use to fall asleep in the first place, but I didn't want to use a harsh sound with such thin walls, not knowing the sleeping patterns of my fellow residents.

Having missed morning meditation and breakfast, and having written four or five poems last night, I decided to spend the morning with myself, relaxing and enjoying the solitude. I took a shower and, after fumbling through a not very intuitive yoga app, ditched the prompts and pushed myself through vinyasa, followed by mild twist, core, and inversions. I drank some Vega Protein & Greens and read from a book I borrowed from the extensive library here, and by lunch time I was anxious to move again. My brain was wandering and unable to focus. The lines of poems were coming, slowly, but they were muddled and disjointed. I needed to clear my head.

I grabbed a map packet, which didn't offer much guidance, and took to the streets to see Johnson, Vermont, and empty my head of all the presumptions its been building and carrying like wet logs for a fire. Pavement turned to ice and back, then dirt road to ice and back, as the hills climbed and scenery became more epic and the road a bit more difficult. I met a woman who came from her long driveway in a pickup who announced she was just picking up her mail, a courtesy, and later pulled up and asked if I would like a ride. I kept on walking and after a few more turns in the road, headed back towards campus. The sun was starting to set, the wind to pick up, and the snow was certainly falling. I was surprisingly warm but my legs, which don't typically feel temperature, started to feel strange again the fabric of the pants I chose. Sure, I relieved myself in the shaded cove behind a snow bank, but I was careful not to get any snow on me. I felt my legs, which were dry, and kept walking. By now, I had found myself in someone's back yard, following a road that turned into a driveway, and was stumbling in the snow down a steep hill into a graveyard.

The graveyard was surprisingly modern, with gravestones of people who had lived long and hopefully fulfilling lives, space on the gravestones for their loved ones, some whose names were already, ahem, cryptically engraved. The snow, merely dusted over from a few days ago, was frozen with the tracks of large animals, possible a snowshoe hare and a moose, as well as large dog tracks, human tracks, cross country skis, and bicycle tires.

I had long since turned off my headphones, enjoying the paced breaks in silence caused by my footsteps and nylon-covered arms swinging with my gait. As I stepped from the graveyard, I heard the first familiar sounds of society: what appeared to be a woman pleading for her safety. Next, of course, came the cars and trucks rushing by on the road, perhaps anxious to get home before the storm picked up. I damned them to stop, but by the time the last of them did, I couldn't hear the voice any longer to determine its source or its intent. The wind picked up, the cars came again, and as I stepped onto the main road, I noticed the ringing in my ears, which had somehow disappeared for that brief hour and a half frozen chunk of time. What could I do, anyway?