Hiking at Burrito Canyon

All night tossing in bed, the heat pushing the ceiling down on me, I defined my connection to God: a divinity who grows in the not-seen, like the furniture that recedes from a dark bedroom, present by its absence. That comfort, so practical in daylight, becomes the boundless ease on which the soul surrenders all its gravity, and floats upward in the night to those invisible arms.

Meister Eckhardt found divinity in “the simple ground, the quiet desert.” My dark is granular, star ash and the remains of youth lying like dust upon my pillow. My fossilized childhood curled like a worm in my praying head, as I stretch out upon the white expanse I make repentance on, this starless orphanage.

So like my father in his absence, so immaterial as to make the soul swallow its own dry spit, and howl. This is our path, a counsel of stone leading us west along an ascent over the smoldering valleys below. My car is parked somewhere in the vague brown quilt of earth, a glint of steel among the blue-green foliage, like some abandoned shell I evolved from, to be this spectral walking stick on his way to God.