Mistral Point

It is a promontory 12 miles from where I live. Each Thursday morning l get up at five, catch two buses so I can get there by seven. As I walk from the bus stop it feels like I'm approaching hallowed ground. I slow down. I take my time. I meander through the various paths that lead there. Sometimes I take paths closest to the ocean, passing by the rock pool for example. Other times I take paths closer to the road with the joggers and dog walkers. There are other days I do a mixture of both. Still, on occasion, I stray from the already made paths to create my own on the grass.

Wintertime there are days when I arrive just as the sun is rising from the horizon at sea. There is something to the intense sphere of light. Hot white at the centre mellowing outwards to bright yellow golds. This intensity betrays its reality as a massive fireball of nuclear fusion floating in the vastness of not so empty space. Rays of light emanating from the core captured by my phone's image sensor confirm its star quality. Unlike others seen in the darkness of night, this one's day time light does not flicker. The play of conical impressions as light hits the water's surface appear to be ultrasound images of babies inside mothers' wombs — apt metaphors for possibilities birthed by new days.

Where the golden rays peek above the promontory, light softly diffuses sideways with an embarrassment of riches in hues of orange intermingled with greenish blueish hues layered across the bottom to top and back. The silhouette burns through memories of other lives: a Bedouin with acute eyes that can read the desert sands; the Amazigh, people who are free; Fremen of Arrakis, desert planet. The crisp clarity, the howling winds call me. A dry soul is best.

Sometimes clouds line up on the far horizon like when one has their life's options lined up like ducks in a row. The optionality of thin lines to hold back vagaries, stochasticity of being alive. A fluid beacon of meaning conjured within the fertile chaos of entropic becoming.

A storm brewing can be beautiful. It's a blessing to be able to hold one's self in its eye where it is tranquil, still. Distributed violence unavoidable on the peripheries. Acts of deconstruction in service of creation. When the centre holds, peace in the empire reigns.

Sometimes a hole in the sky opens up to shower blessings on anyone below awake enough to receive. This engenders feelings of levity that overtake me. I long to be taken up. Fall upwards. Ascend lightly, effortlessly, into endless beauty. Weightless. Light as light. Bearing the unbearable lightness of being.

Scale matters. Sometimes not. Invariant fractal forms make it tricky to discern a mountain from a molehill. An eventity (event & identity) seemingly so small can sometimes hurt me much. Something tremendously eventful can slide like water over a duck's back. Given enough aeons of time, any single happening can be rendered utterly irrelevant in the scheme of things. Or is it? Schemes falter, break, crumble when reality rears its beautiful asymmetric head.

Things can feel rough to a fragile human buffeted by nature's majestic grandeur. It may seem like anger when nature expresses its vivacious self—raw, absolute, full of power. With being total and unflinching beyond the usual struggles comes joy in surrender to the sublime.

Biological shapes of spaces, gaps, interstices are etched in the rock through unimaginable geological time. There is stability, a maturity of form that only time spent in a time long enough for it to matter can achieve. Structures borne of natural struggles, weatherings of landscapes over time, could bring sustainable, sustain a stable, suss the stain and be life able niche of habitation.

We all leave traces. Where we walked. Where we talked. Where we burned fires. Where we shared. Not only us but everything. Plants, animals, lichens, moss, fungi. There are traces everywhere waiting for us to recognise. Waiting for us to acknowledge. For us to read. Find meaning. Continue the conversation. Our environments made us possible. We change our environments. Our environments change us. An endless dance of tit for tat, chit chat, qualia of the quotidian.

Life born where things collect yet remain dynamic. Loose semi-permeable coupling to the bigger systems that contain it. Warm pools bubbling for millennia. Steeping. Pulled forward by more complex, higher definition futures. The futures will judge us. Ultimately. Perhaps the same way we now too easily judge those who came before.

Gifts bestowed to those who enter the arena to exercise agency. Not just struggles but mutual learnings. Living together. Conviviality. Everyone learning how to be in shared worlds. Worlds that change with every action, non-action, chance, catalytic perturbations. A libation as we live off the dead bones of ancestors. Respect that which is not ours to have. Only to learn from, connect to. That is all.

Ground, set my feet confidently on land. Have a living relationship with it, with those who came before, with those still here, and those still to come. This is home under the vast sky abutted by the temperamental ocean. I am at peace here, with myself, with others, with everything. The total silence of being.