Zone

photo by joeball

“Wherever you go, there you are,” say the Buddhists (or was that George Carlin?); “You’re never lost as long as you have nowhere to go,” was how some wag around the fire put it.

And why would you have any other destination in mind, anyway, when everything a person could need is right at hand: all the beer you can drink, so many marijuana cigarettes you have to smoke two at a time, a toasty fire whose banked-up coals warm your slowly-spinning body from bottom to top, conversations in every direction to dip into and sometimes nervously back away from, all presented way out in the apparent middle of nowhere under a sky filled with shy constellations peaking out between painterly clouds and not a raindrop in sight.

Of course, at some level, we’re all lost, always, all the time, wandering through a meaningless accidental Universe absurdly in search of some sort of meaning, but if it is possible to find oneself, it’s more than likely to happen in circumstances such as these: in a place that feels familiar but new, wondering how you got there and relying on the kindness of well-known strangers to lead you away, needing nothing else for the time being other than what’s in arm’s reach.

A riparian zone is defined as the area of interface between land and a river or stream; perhaps it’s in such buffers where the secrets of existence are to be found: the moving patch where rubber meets the road (or gravel); the white-hot point at which fire clings to wood; those fleeting moments when words ignite laughter; or an evening whose limbs stretch out in both directions, transitioning smoothly from summer to winter, a perfect autumn instant balanced between the billions of colors behind and the infinite grey-scale ahead.

And even though, I’ve seen it before, I still believe in wormholes and magic carpets; how else can we get so lost and still find ourselves home?