The Taste of Dust
“There are things we live among, and to know them / is to know ourselves.” (George Oppen)
In an attempt to know the things I live among, in an attempt to know myself, I must first ask: What things do I live among?
And so I seek to activate my senses.
I hear the Pinyon Jay cackling, a mating song, floating from Piñon to Piñon. I see snow on the Sangre de Cristos slinking into spring. I feel gust after gust after gust… after gust. I smell the sage preparing for a pungent summer. I taste the dust strewn across my front teeth, and I smile.
I live among the Pinyon and the Piñon, the snow and the wind, the mountains, sage and dirt. And I learn to see how the blue tinted Jay balances on the swaying dark green Pine like I’m trying to find my footing in a new place, a new vocation. Even as the wind blows, shaking my Airstream with a rattle reminiscent of things falling apart, I see there is a way to let the breeze take you. Why work against it when you could glide upon it?
But to know myself is to ask why I’m disoriented in the first place. For seventeen years I held a job, which for a time I thought of as a calling, and maybe it was, and it had a rhythm to it, however convoluted, but I knew what I was doing in the sense that I believed I was called to it and in the sense that I was trained and educated and mentored. And I was good at it.
Now I taste the dust of what used to be and some days I notice the texture wedged in a molar and I wonder how it blew in there. And then I taste the fresh pulled shot in an americano as I prepare to sit with a congregant to discuss the ways of Jesus, like maybe why he writes in the dirt when a group of men want to kill a woman they’ve been spying on. And over steam we’d ask: How would Jesus handle the oligarchs of today as they pile up rocks and riches to take out those with their backs against the wall?
Instead, today, I perused the property in search of stones hefty enough to reduce the amount of concrete we’ll pour in a form to house a kiva. Gathering rock after rock to build a foundation is maybe what those men should have done. And it is what I am doing now, which is not so much fighting for those who are being crushed or finding Jesus present among those on the margins or scouring the Scriptures for some direction on how to navigate an erupting nation-state, but one more rock is in the trench on which we’ll build a stem wall, on which we’ll stack earthen bricks, on which we’ll build a home and maybe, for the first time in decades, feel at home.
Home enough to hear the Pinyon Jay laughing and see the snow glow on the blood of Christ and feel the wind blow it away and smell the sage on my fingertips and taste the dirt in my teeth, and I will smile because I know myself even when I don’t know what I am doing.
