Snippet of Anagama #2

It was evening. I had been unable to get to sleep as I had wanted to prior to my 12 am to 6 am shift with Jon, so with the last hour of my rest time I decided to get up and wander through the forest.  As I quietly left the nearly empty cabin of my sleepy comrades, I was immediately struck by the brightness of the moon that was high in the sky, outshining the stars around it. 

I hesitated a moment, and then walked back into the cabin to turn the outside light off, getting onto the nearby picnic table and lying down face up, letting my eyes adjust.  Georgia O'Keefe's painting Lawrence Tree is an insult to the beauty I saw.  The trees, with their leaves fully opened were black, the sky behind being a bright navy blue, with the stars not obscured by the moon shining through. The air was laden with moisture, and as such it picked up the rays of moonlight that shafted through the forest, so crisp it felt as though I could reach out and shatter them with a touch.  The fractal nature of existence pressed upon me; the world is a dazzling explosion of detail and intricacy, fanning out from all points, and collapsing inward from everywhere simultaneously. 

I imagined the perspective of the ant crawling along my leg, and let my perception expand to encompass the table I lay back upon, further to the rough trees around me, and for a moment I zoomed into its crevices, an endless, living, breathing, mountain range.  Upward from there the immense number of leaves moving in the wind of the evening, each current shifting and changing from each surface of the leaf to another.  The leaves from all the trees in the forest melding together into yet another fractal shape; an endless silhouette against the stars beyond, far far beyond.  I was small, so small in the forest, on the planet, in the universe, but so much a part of the system. I was an anomaly of animation upon the surface of a spherical rock, caught in the gravity well of a massive, yet astronomically small star, lost in the outer part of a still-larger galaxy. I was then a tiny voice among the millions in this country, a single creature silently contributing my part to the ecosystem which so verdantly surrounded me. I then came back to where I was, surrounded by old growth trees, quietly respirating in the night. 

Humbled, I shed my shoes and proceeded into the forest - where I live now, rarely do I get the opportunity to walk barefooted - stalking quietly as I had learned, eventually I came upon two other classmates, quietly enjoying a cigarette and each other's company. Startled at my sudden, soundless arrival, they declined my invitation to travel down to the water, and I continued onward into the forest happily alone.  

Again I was suddenly struck by the beauty of the night, as moonlight reached the lower trees in a small open space, created by the death of a very old tree, who remained majestic in its final recline.  I stood silently for a while, slowly letting the film in my mind develop, before moving on, slow and steady through the nearly pitch black forest. 

Through the trees the blue of the lake's surface became slowly more visible, as did movement before it.  I froze, attention snapped on the silhouette 30 feet ahead of me.  A mother and a fawn paced as carefully as I had along the shore of the lake. Recalling the distress of a mother deer I once encountered while painting in the forest behind the house in Connecticut, I halted my progress and watched the two slowly depart, before once again turning back to the cabin.

The light of the cabin was on, as my shift partner had awoken, preparing for the night's work.