Abstract Introvert Living Outside In Desert Dawn Vignette

The week before the peacock cries had haunted the night like the voices of hurt children and the Colorado River Toads had bleated like lambs in the first heavy rains of the Monsoon season. He’d broken his streak of sleeping outside in just clothes or a sleeping bag for 29 nights in a row and slept in a tent he’d found in the high grass of a wide wash by the local traffic light that occasionally became a river. After the first round of rains subsided he left the tent by the side of a well traveled dirt road where someone else would claim it. He traveled light, he liked walking and thinking. Even more than thinking he liked musing.

After these most recent heavy rains there had been a biblical plague of insects and he’d been overrun in his sleeping bags by hundreds of polka dot scorpions and Sonoran tarantulas. During that whole thing he’d just lain there and rode it out and let the waves of large terrifying bugs pass over him while he remained as calm as possible though he did get briefly agitated while keeping some of the creepy crawly creatures from actually entering the sleeping bag.

When it was over he felt he had achieved passage through a kind of initiatory right into a new phase of spiritual development as a bard rogue druid warrior priest. He didn’t tell other people about it but he could tell that the ravens and the coyotes all knew.

After all that there were many very clear days and nights. He spent the days hiking in the mountains and then headed back down into the plains and low hills to the southwest on the way to the reservation. He’d been having very enjoyable dreams and had been enjoying waking up slowly and musing to himself about that which interested him in the mornings. After several clear nights in a row during which he’d slept deeply after days spent in activity, one day very early in the morning he drifted into a particularly enjoyable state of drowsy cosmic daydream.

Fusion of stars, he thought aimlessly. Phosphorescent carbon stardust living on starlight and water. Minerals in soil and stone. Fusion of language. How words mean things. The fusion of the essential syntax of language and our essential consciousness of the world. Further fusions of simile and metaphor.

If the essence of nature can be expressed in language then nature is in some way essentially linguistic. Nature has syntax. The simplest example of naturally occuring syntax being human language itself. In terms of pure reason we cannot tell if syntax is a perceptual category whose shape imposes itself on our conceptualizations of our sense impressions and lived experiences and has limits beyond which we can neither observe nor even think. Or not, I really can’t tell. Ah but I like to muse to myself so what of it.

Vast celestial furnaces of elemental organic chemistry and lifegiving light! He sang inside himself. I need to get up and pee, I need to get coffee, I need to get my bowels moving and take a shit. I will get up and pee and walk to get my bowels moving then get coffee to get my bowels moving and sit on the concrete on the southeast-facing side of the gas station and drink coffee as I enjoy the merciful light of the early morning sun. Then I will fire off some social media shitposts as I take my morning shit in the gas station bathroom.

So I’ve got all that figured out, but I don’t want to get up just this second.

The merciful early morning sun would become a cruel and terrible master by about 10:30 AM. But he could stay cozy in his sleeping bag for a minute or ten more. He let out a long sigh and stretched out reaching his arms out and arching his back like a cat and groaning in a way that made it sound like he was exerting a great effort but he groaned that way because it felt so good to do when stretching in the morning after sleeping all night after hiking a long way the day before. He mused to himself further.

The lifegiving stars whose ashes of carbon form the substance bodies of the living. On whose light plants feed and form the bases of the food webs forming global ecosystems and such. And that is but the body. What of the soul? The soul is the form of forms, and the relation of soul to soul among individuals takes the exact same form as the relation of the individual soul to the soul of the world or universe, in the exact same shape as its first experience of its awareness of itself in the incarnate fullness of the material cosmos in all its infinitely intricately interwoven becoming whose soul is more infinite still. Or not, who can tell, don’t overthink it.

This has been the usual lately. Getting up in the morning contemplating the nature of language and numbers in terms of whether or not they are the nature of nature. Pondering the fusion of stars, the radiance of light, the diffusion of carbon, phosphorous and water, the emergence of amino acids and ribose and the development of higher thought in the recently evolved complex organism known as the human. His dreamy meditations upon awakening, ideas of the fusion of matter and diffusion of energy, the hydrogen fusion of the stars and the carbon dust essential to organic matter, the idea that if language can describe the nature of the universe then the universe must be linguistic in nature… these things are who he truly is when he wakes up feeling free in his mind which is a very precious thing that he could only buy with poverty and not money. He is in an area west of the Tucson mountains outside of Tucson Arizona. He has lived out doors out of two small bags for a couple of years now. He thinks about the souls of things. Saguaros and birds. The soul of the world.

The mourning doves sang who who who and in the distance farm roosters crowed and dogs barked. The sun finally began to peek over the peaks of the mountains to the east and he got up to go to the bathroom. After a nice long morning piss he packed up his sleeping bag snapped it to the bottom of his backpack and headed out to the road to walk to the gas station, admiring the plants and pondering photosynthesis along the way. The peacocks would cry again that night but he would not be afraid. He had been initiated. As a properly initiated bard rogue druid warrior priest he walked to the gas station to get his coffee.