Final weekend of quail season. Not a bad spot to spend it if you're a geographic claustrophobe. Few too many trees for my liking, though...
Not many birds on this piece of ground, if I'm honest, but I had it all to myself, and the dogs could stretch out and run. That's worth something, I suppose. At this point it's not about numbers, anyway. Never is, really.
The dogs found enough to be satisfied. I missed enough to get frustrated and hurl invectives into the unsympathetic sky, hit just enough to keep me going. So it goes, as Vonnegut says. I am finding that time does indeed speed up as you get older, and days and moments such as this seem more finite, more part of a larger whole rather than simply being a moment for the moment's sake. There is an arc to what I am doing, what I am, and I guess I'm beginning to realize my place on that arc.
But it's not a bummer. Far from it. True, some things that once mattered greatly to me no longer interest me at all, and dreams once fervently held have been slowly replaced with a new reality that is neither better nor worse, but simply what is. But that's just life. We are fluid, all of us, from birth to death, and right now my viscosity is still sitting at about a 10W30. I'm still OK, still flowing forward, albeit a little more slowly and in a slightly different path than what I once thought I'd take. And that's something to be grateful for.
And I'm grateful that days like this still matter, still have meaning, even though I do not know what, exactly, that meaning is in the grand scheme of things. But then again I'm beginning to suspect there is no truly understandable or graspable meaning in anything, any experience, any reality, other than what we choose to take from it.
The dogs and I walk the lonely hills because that is still a part of what I am, what I've become to this point. I have not left it behind. My enjoyment and interest in these moments have survived that long distillation process that transforms what we were into what we are, and will of course continue to distill us into what we will be, right up to the moment we hit the bottom of the arc.
So I will continue to chase the dogs and the birds on these long walks; hitting, missing, cursing, thinking, and trying to find vague answers to vague questions I don't have the foggiest idea how to pose in the first place.
Restlessness is a good thing. Can't wait for next year.
