Strange Days

morning launch

today

Today we woke up to the noise and vibration of a launch from Vandenberg about ten minutes before eight. It was an Atlas rocket carrying a military weather satellite, not that I knew this at the time. I ran outside and saw cows on a green hilltop grazing peacefully in silhouette against the sky and the curling white curve of  contrail cloud above. The deep rumbling of the rocket continued for a long while. It seemed a strange way to begin the morning, and  I spent much of the day in a strange frame of mind, tending to some business, puttering with plants, taking a break once to sip hot chocolate in the sun.  I was brooding a lot, but too blurry to come to any conclusions, and there was a familiar sort of sadness hovering at the edge of things, ready to weigh me down if I let it.

Late in the afternoon I went to the beach with Monte hoping to clear my head. The beach was moody and wild, and I was walking into the wind listening on my iPod to a song by Johnny Flynn called  The Lady Is Risen.  I don't know exactly what this song means, but I love it.  It stirs me up and felt just right for a strange day and a seashore walk:

"She loves full and true, as a fighting bequest /She was given her earth by a sea come to rest/And the children she bore loved this truly too much/Calloused pride come to die in our hands as we touch/And so soften me now, let me take as it's given/For the wind's started up and the lady is risen."

As I said, I don't know what it means, but those are beautiful lyrics...don't you think? In fact, I felt irrationally happy all of a sudden. (Dare I say risen?)  

The air was salty, the ocean gleaming silver, and a grateful sense of alive-ness and exhilaration filled me like breath.Then I saw a pair of vultures circling, swooping low toward the beach,  gliding above the cliffs and returning again and again, and I realized only when I was a few steps away from it that a sea lion lay dying on the sand.  The poor creature lifted its head, let out a cry, and looked at me with doomed, vacant eyes as the vultures eagerly awaited its death."

You know life isn't always like the end of your novels/All things might wind up but they always unravel..."

So sang the song. And so it goes, a plot not neatly tied together, a grand procession of contradictions, euphoria and heartbreak rolling in like waves.

I walked back to where Monte was surfing, and Tavis, a young neighbor of ours, had gone out also, and I watched them both in their own ways dancing, Tavis doing frisky skateboard maneuvers: reverses in the air, exuberant turns, full of youthful energy, and ol' Monte, capable and steady.