Bound each to each

& a missive this morning from India ending love love love. to Varkala, up to Rahjastan, to Bombay, & back to Delhi before her plane comes home. & this morning Willa & I will head up Guenella Pass to find a suitable trail (suitably empty of people), & we will linger upon the soapstone banks of the creek, the morning sun falling in glaring sheets over the small ripples of the clear-brown water, the cooling underbreeze in eddies off its roiling surface. I will put my head under, & she will wade & take gaping bites at the current, & she will again lean her heft against me when I am prone on the ancient bridge of two by fours. I will hear snapping twigs & falling pinecones, I will search the far reach of tangled wood & dappled dawn for shapes familiar, remembering the contours of the cougar I spied last week, its velvet body a thing of sprung grace, illuminated by headlights in the otherwise black of passing twilight. fear attends to every run, to every hike, & each step I take is an acceptance & a release. my greatest fear in life the cougar, plain & simple, & our encounters various & graciously distanced. that I rise & go into a wilderness that renders me such is a wonder, & a wonder I embrace. what Kerala is proving for her I find in facsimile in natural solitude: a piety without name, a simplicity without ornamentation, a virtue of no language, an Edenic joy. love love love. our little lives are simple, after all.

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