Chapter 1 

There are layers and layers to that Earth. Slice it in thin wafers and you’d discover all kinds of interesting new things. A big rotating rock with nests of pure beauty. And sea-wash from one end to the other until it freezes up at the poles. A man could climb over that rock for fifty lifetimes and still not know it all. And that didn’t include the cities and towns, the highways and shopping malls. I had never learned how to insert that thing in my heart and let it lodge there. I took it for granted and then sort of resented the damn thing when I knew what death was and how encased we are by its pressures. Everything sort of pushed in to keep things low and rooted and I didn’t like it. But then you venture out a bit and you realize you can’t do it yourself and a lot of it is lost so you imagine, maybe the worst, maybe a frightful imagining but there it is and so you slink to the familiar territory and start to hate the whole thing.

But I lost that hate in the new configuration and tried to fit that ball into my heart and said, “Earth enter me like a pleasant object captured by the surprised eye.” And it sat there rotating in that slow, uneventful, dutiful way as if signaling, “I’m trapped too, be predictable as I am.” But I fixed on it because I experienced vertigo when I looked elsewhere, into the dark that took my mind and stretched it long and silent and frightfully so I looked and looked at that Earth and never let it out of sight.

Slowly I began to learn to disengage and leave off that mark.

David Eide
January 24, 2014