A Start at the Draft Introduction for "Bathed In Abrasion: Poems of Mid-Life and Erosion"

Introduction for Bathed In Abrasion

Around the age of thirty five, people tend to notice that they are not the same as they had been. They sense the world is a moving and a shifting place. Things that they were able to attain earlier in life require a lot more focus and attention once they cross this age line. By this age folks have experienced multiple losses in their lives, a few deaths, several career upsets, and establishment and reestablishment of major relationships.

Life becomes less stable in our perceptions because we learn to notice things from a higher vantage point. When we have aged to this place in life, we have a whole series of years – thirty five to be exact – that we can compare to and against. The vantage point of age helps us to interpret cause and effect in a whole new way.

There will be outliers for this, as with every other theory and truth. There are always people that are on the curve of an idea or issue. But, just look around you. Things slow down and take more time when you get older.

I know that I saw some shifts in perception, because at thirty five my parents were much older and the slowing down I experienced was partially built on top of the slowing down that they experienced.

It was around this age that I began to have an affinity toward certain geologic landscapes in life. I returned to a fascination with alluvial fans, and escarpments. I found the way rock changed from one form to another also peaked my interest. How one thing could start out as wood and then turn to rock amazed me. That rivers changed their shape over centuries was provocative. One thing lead to another and I knew I was in those things somehow.

I started to feel the shifts and changes in the natural world as somehow emblematic and iconic of the life I was living. I felt I could live into things I was seeing, as a way of finding and understanding my personal meaning. I could feel how the changing course of rivers held my cells in some kind of regard. I knew that the alluviating debris that is sloughed off a mountainside bespoke my own condition of giving away what was in my me. I sensed that mountains being made low and valleys being filled was not just a principle of geologic time, but was close to the meaning of all things and the sort of change that space/time would visit upon them. Dimensions and states are constantly being altered and I could feel that dance of change in my soul, in my every cell.

I had spent a lot of time in the wild. All my life. It was not unusual for everything in me to reach out and participate in the universe at large – that feeling of being content and blissed out by nature. But, I noticed a shift. Erosion, entropy, and abrasion were things that began to resonate with my me – the whole of my cell body, mind, soul.

I found decay not so unusual. The way a tree slowly unburdens itself by becoming the earth on which it lay was sort of quant. The protuberance of fiddleheads from leaf matter, the growth of fungus on tree rot seemed to have a selective sense of practicality and design. That things fell apart started to become an intuited reality and comfort.

[B]     +     +     +

Something in me turned around forty. I started digesting the Civil War for breakfast. It was if I could not get enough. Somehow, the turning of one part of a thing against another part of that same thing was understandable. Reminded me of cancer. Having been in hospice since I was thirty six that made sense. Watching people in groups since I was twenty also gave me reason to believe that Civil War might just be a usual way for people to grow as an organism – a culling of the herd mindset. It just seemed natural. Not necessarily glorious, but natural.

The two were linked. I had not made the connection, though. I saw how atrophy of will and purpose may lead men to kill that which is also themselves. I knew that there were things that took over organisms that set them on processes and cycles that seemed in contradiction to growth and homeostasis.  But, watching how things fall apart in the woods, and seeing those boys decomposing on the battlefield may have been the greatest neural pathway that I was able to light up. Couldn’t escape decay, couldn’t escape death, and couldn’t escape unravelling social order. And then, I made the connection.

The connection came in my writing. I began to see the geologic landscape with battle overlays. I could sense a charge over a bluff that was outlined with crenulations of alleviated matter and debris. I listened to the talk that must have gone on in the countless tents and heard the winding of rivers through a lowland descent – busting the ambling and side-winding banks when a flood was forced upon the basin.

All of the sudden the phlox and lavender were not just perennial plants but sentinels of remembrance that pushed themselves out of the ground in response to the aeons of death and decay that had nourished their very roots. Nature was a vibrant retelling of the story of living and dying.

Regardless of how I feel about it, things wear away.