Breathless: Spending Everything and Wasting Nothing

Today's post is a response to the GBE2 prompt Breathless.

I have lived my life in a wind tunnel, barely able to keep my toes buried in the sod. Punched in the stomach, my whole self poured out onto my life, my chest is heaving; I am slick with sweat. I gasp open-mouthed at purple lupines, raspberries, loosestrife and write love poems to gulls.

All my days I am falling, arms open, into the tent of southwest sky, unafraid of the bite of mountains as I land. I never land.

Aglitter in the flowers and birdbaths of a sunken garden, the iridescence of a beetle, there is a chimerical evidence of otherworldly splendor.

I am tidepooling for the treasure of creation. My hands overflow with aliens shaped like stars, with life in the form of a mat of cells that suck at the bottom of rocks, gelatinous and orange.

Photo Credit: Bronwyn Gordon

I am nestled in the curve of a grassy hill studded with oak, dissecting owl pellets and gathering buckeyes. I am watching quails and laughing at the antics of Douglas Squirrels.

Photo Credit: Bronwyn Gordon

I am engrossed with the world, driven to distraction. Breathless, the wind has been knocked right out of me by the sight of it all. So much unnecessary beauty. Lavish, costly, extravagant beauty. The world spends everything and wastes nothing.

Photo Credit: Gary Offenbacher

Would that I could live a life so bold. Always out of breath, spending the entirety of my soul upon the purpose of my life without misuse, dropping blossoms as I age, leaves as I die, building the soil of my community. Entirely used up, I would lie aged on the soil, white as Indian pipe; a saprophyte, a ghost.

My body would, within in a day, be forest loam–a place where springy mosses grow and people catch their breath, and hush, and pray.