Day 13: February 8
On the 13th day, the last day of writing the abyss behind me, there is the memory of a day I went herding in Mongolia. I went with a young herder named Ulaanaa.
He was 12.
We followed goats and sheep up green hills and valleys in Hovsgol.
A cool summer morning.
I was in Mongolia for goodness sake and all I had to do was be there.
Ulaanaa whistled.
The grass was soft with dew.
In a valley with a cluster of short gnarly trees, the goats went up on their hind legs to reach the branches and eat them.
Who I was in that moment. fully present. no past. no future. following curiosity and goats and sheep in a place where the sound of songs, a long history of them being sung, was so tactile, so close.
That sense of enoughness, that morning - I wish that for myself and everyone else, on the other side of the abyss.
Suddenly we came to a shallow hill, and we had the same thought, we put our jackets down, sat down on top of them and slid down.
Suddenly to do something quixotic, following the slope of a hill downward - I wish that for myself and everyone else, on the other side of the abyss.
imagine a girl appeared in a small community
no history no lineage
she appeared
maybe she was ten eleven twelve like that
she began to interact with the people of that place
imagine it was a village by the sea and there were places to wander in and the people watched each other and took note of each other
after a while, they might say about the girl
she has no history that we know of
no lineage that we know of
so we do not know
but we can sense, we have seen, we have talked to, we have been around and we can say this about who we sense she is
we mean essentially
without knowing
essentially we sense this
she loves to be left to her own devices
you see her walking on the side of the path into the wild lands
she loves to sit and listen to stories and songs, often you will see her with the elders, intent, also laughing
she is great company over a cup of tea. or a bowl of soup. you lose track of time sharing and talking with her.
she seems amenable, kind knowable but there is a part of her that is mystery - she suddenly will surprise you and maybe herself by doing something inexplicable like singing a song at midnight under a moonless sky or suddenly going with the horsemen into the shallow plains to find the white horse that went missing last week
and then she may be gone for a week after that with the witchwomen of santoria and when she comes back, she is as kind and amenable as ever but there is a new force in her walk or a dark sluice in her gaze
with some friends from our village and some friends we do not know - often she brings strangers who gift us with more songs! - she dances and speaks poems, at dawn or at night, by a stream, under a tree
we do not have words for this - you have to see it and be in presence of it to sense it for yourself
she does it for the doing of it
living for the love of what moves her
in our world respecting our ways
and not of our world
but belonging to the wild unspoken parts of ourselves
and herself
belonging to the stone stories and the wind songs and the tree memories and the river running
