geomancer of my own fertile ground

Back in California, the sun shines in through the winter sky and warms me through the days and abandons me at night. The stars shine clear in the sky and fill the midnight blue with points of illumination, dreams to follow through the infinite of time and space to an unforeseen end. Fruit dangles low on branches taxed by the new, fleshy weights - shiny wax of oranges and thin-skinned pale green apples. Damp bricks of deep red lie in their sandy bed and grow their mossy surface through patient weeks and months on end. Ansel Adams' black and white Yosemite now lies between me and where I was, buried deep in mountains that many died while trying to cross to get here. Me? I took the train, and watched the rolling hills of Iowa pass by, strolled around the Omaha station where it was 65 degrees in late November, read the labels of rail cars full of corn syrup (5000 gallons of corn syrup... say it with me, 5000 gallons of corn syrup), saw the cloudy fractured ice forming on the banks of Utah desert creeks, and at no time feared for my life. I didn't have to haul my cart, family, and oxen up a cliff to continue westward. I didn't have to eat my companions (all or in part) to survive. I didn't have to bring 100 lbs. of bacon with me from Missouri, but if I had that wouldn't have been all that bad... I just moved around the train from time to time, conversed with my fellow travelers, and felt like I was on a long journey to discover my home. I left behind love and snow wherever I went, hoping they would both remain white and pure in my absence but smiling at the unstoppable grey entropy of winters in the developed world. Upon my return, white will yeield to green then to red, brown, and eventually nothing before the white comes back upon it all. Who am I to challenge the seasons? Who am I to ask for a moment in time to be held aside for me, plucked gently from the incessant sweet stream of everything and cradled in my hand while everything else continues turning, spinning, spreading, cooling, and dimming? Who am I? I'm my evolving sense of self, shaped forever by all the places I go and by the very idea that I am shaped forever. I'm a preparer of warm feasts in houses defiant to these seasons, I'm a valence electron that wants to jump to your shell so we can be a great molecule, I'm a tired son, I'm a cancer scare survivor, I'm a comet at it's closest point to earth wondering when I can get away again from all these primates and their nuclear weapons, I'm a dancer for myself only when I'm not dancing for others, I'm a friend who's slowly understanding, I'm a proponent of peace even as I feel our electronic paper theoretical walls cracking inwards, I'm a lover of many things looking to see if one sweet love is enough, I'm in need of a bit of salvation but I'm still trying to save myself. Thanks to all the friends out there, may you keep on keepin' on with your own struggles and joys...