Past & Present & Pipe Repair
Days here on the mesa creep by, measured out in the growth of alfalfa, the movement of water, the repair of pipes and cutting of willows, small distances run, a child’s naps, lines cast into the reservoir, and afternoon beers. And there is quiet all about. The kind of wild quiet that is actually a stillness woven with the high barking reports of prairie dogs, or a sudden gusting hush through tree limbs, or the crackle of grasshoppers in flight, or the rhythmic rustling of crows wings overhead. And I admit I can’t remember when I had quiet enough to hear a birds wings. There’s space for a person to think up here, and I’ve often found myself thinking out loud in a running dialogue covering subjects like past wrongs and current worries and how much it hurts when fingers are crunched in the fence post driver. It’s odd to suddenly become aware of your own voice in the tangle of the country’s sounds: encouraging through a sweaty task or exasperatedly reprimanding for using the four wheeler to pull three full sections of irrigation pipe from the line instead of just the one intended. It’s not uncommon for me, given enough silence and time, to think about the kind of person I am and weigh my history against the the proposed remaining balance of my life. Sometimes aloud, and sometimes internally. My mind has a tendency to fill with the mistakes I made as a child and young adult (and increasingly middle aged man) and wonder if they can somehow be diminished by future good. So I sit, with work-gloved hands crossed at the wrist, and look out across the back 40 from under the brim of my brined baseball cap, and ponder. Wiser folks than I have suggested a person should strive to live in the present moment. They say what is past is past, and what is in the future is unwritten, and that true happiness can only be achieved by being with the world in this very moment. But I feel that the past is always with us, marked on our bodies or on the land, distinct as scars. Marked in our brain as a jumble of neural pathways that fire electric when the present world offers up a scent or a vista or a circumstance that we’ve known before. So isn’t the past always a part of the present moment? And shouldn’t it be weighed with as much concern? Isn’t that, after all, how we learn? And why not think of the future? Why not forecast a better self into the days to come? Why not dream up a robust ever-after of happiness and fortune? Shouldn’t all these things be considered when approaching the world as it lays out there in the fields and forests and mountains and plains and cities beyond? But then you’re startled back into the day by the sound of a crow’s wings overhead, or your own voice asking silly questions. The irrigation pipe isn’t fixing itself. The child isn’t laying himself down for a nap. The body isn’t benefiting from miles un-run. The beer is still waiting to give up its refreshing solace. So self reflection is subsumed by the necessities that make these mesa days creep by. And maybe that’s what the wiser folks meant to say. Maybe not.