Heart Beats

I lay on the blanched white memory of a lawn as a wind from a desert I've never seen cracks my lips and blurs my vision with a horde of conquering dust. My smile is blown from my face and is dragged kicking and screaming over the valley, bullied along by dirty clouds that push their way through the air, dancing to the rhythm of finger snapping flags. My body moves to a different song. The inner me strains at high notes that embarrass me when they crack and break and my body thumps out the bass line of my feet dragging through my daily routine. Despite a loving audience of family and friends, I fear that I am not a virtuoso at being me. I am perpetually nervous, afraid of lagging behind, losing the beat, singing a false note in the harmony I try to make of my life. I roll over and breathe deeply, my nose and cheeks stung by brittle stalks as I take the smells of the field deep into my body. I draw in the essence of the field, the fragrant straw that makes me see yellow even as I close my eyes. I mix it with the dark mustiness of earth still moist from winter past, churning it in the crucible of my lungs. I have lived as man. I have pushed and prodded, run around, run towards, run away, run down, lost and found, meant and missed. Yet when left alone, I ask myself, is this what I intended? Have I been the cause of my here and now? Would I take the blame? Could I take the credit? I roll around in the dusty grass like a half-mad neighbor to be politely avoided. I see myself as from above and ask how I should judge this person, the question left hanging in the air. I hear a whisper that comes from the ground beneath me. It tries not to laugh and its voice is soft yet I lie still and hear both the voice and the laughter. I have always been here, it says, not waiting, but being. A half-buried boulder joins in the conversation. It tells me of its journey, panting between breaths as it runs at breakneck speed, struggling to keep up with the centuries. I roll onto my back, grasping at handfuls of grass to keep from falling off the world, dizzy from the effort as I stare into the depths of the sky. Can I feel the mountain beneath me swell as enormous waves of rock move across the land, pushed along by the winds of time and inevitability? Where am I in this eternal moment of reality? Creation and destruction are like two heartbeats in the body of a god. And here I stand, clapping the dust from my palms, feeling my hands run over my body, brushing twigs from clothes. I tell myself that the jittery feeling in my knees is the extra cup of coffee I drank this morning. I close my eyes for one more moment of strangeness in an already peculiar morning. I strain to listen. One note, one instrument in an orchestra as big as the world, in a song as long as time.