It's an interesting feeling to be here. Especially nights. The stars, and just the location in general are constant reminders of some of my earliest, and most cherished memories. My first plane flight, now these many years later is just a shadowy sense of impressions, a bright window, what feels like a too dark plane interior; chairs that appear too large in memory, but now that I have traveled in them during my adulthood, I know they are far too small. My mother's face - hard to believe that she was about my age then. My first time in the saddle, on a horse named Cutter. The tram into the mountains. Later, but still in my early youth, walks around the block at night with my cousin Jamie and our fathers while I snapped her suspenders and played like the child I was, the stars overhead so brilliant and so close I felt that I could just reach up and pluck them from the sky, or live amongst them like le Petit Prince.
Being here is like having my life come full circle; my earliest memories of life, some of my fondest memories of a life that has been well lived, pedal to the floor, and here I find myself, beneath those same stars. Every cactus I see reminds me of discovering the nature or cacti spines in my grandmother's garden. A trip through the scrub brush and blowing sand reminds me of hiking out to the sanitarium and getting trapped by rattlesnakes. So many memories here, so very well worn, and now I am steeped in them like a strong tea. Today, standing outside a sand colored building waiting for a class on Arabic I received a call from the same cousin whose suspenders I snapped, who I pen-palled for years, who I haven't seen in over a decade, and who today began her return to the United States, her deployment finished just as mine begins.
The night sky has so often been a friend to me. It seems not that long ago that I would sit on a boat lunch with my family in Wisconsin and track the satellites across the sky. Even more recently, and more wonderful were the nights spent with my family on the shores of Assateague Island watching meteor showers as we lay in the sand, the rush of the waves hissing across the beach. There, too, I'd wake up early with my dad and arrive at the ocean just as the dawn crested the horizon, steadily erasing the stars in the East as it pushed the candied pink sky before it; sandpipers ran with the waves, stabbing their beaks into the strand and feasting on crabs; sharks' fins slice through the water alarmingly close to where I had frolicked in the surf just a day before, and jellyfish dry out where they washed up during the night tides...So many memories beneath the sky; and so much hope held within.
The Wolfmoon rose a few nights ago which had special significance to me as well. I had just written a haiku about the moon and lovers far apart, and then the Wolfmoon swells to fullness, the brightest moon of the year according to legend. There is also the wolf connection - for me they are the noblest of creatures, looking intelligently at the world through their human eyes, silently laughing at us two legged creatures and our follies. They know that the seasons will always turn, the moon will always rise, and as they range far and wide they, and they alone are truly free.
Now this is the law of the jungle, as old and as true as the sky,
And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree trunk, the law runneth forward and back;
For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.
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