Marveling mood

A couple of years ago I was walking around after dark. I was in this marveling mood, just looking at everything like it was brand new and never seen before.

I'm telling this because I'm at the same place now that I was a couple of years ago, when I was in that marveling mood.

I came to an intersection in a residential neighborhood. Just stop signs, no street lights, so it was quiet and dark enough that I could indulge my urge to linger in the shadows.

It was an intersection, like I said, with four corners and four houses, with a yard in each corner. It was the northeast corner yard, a front yard, that captured my attention.

It was like a miniature landscape with all of the normal small things that you'd recognize, but being there and looking at all of it shifted my perspective so that everything became scaled up to an immensity, as if for a tiny awareness which dwelt there.

There was a tree, with gnarly roots that went in and out of the ground, and if you looked closely, it was like terrain. Like a jagged row of miniature cliffs were held up by those roots, with intricate structures within and without, forming a system of runnels and rivulets that followed the growth of the lesser root branches, and those branches were like river valleys that sloped up as hills onto fertile banks that gave way to fresh ground where a forest of grass and flowers and weeds grew amongst the tiny detritus of loamy, broken off, almost dried things that you'd find at the base of a well established, well aged tree. Broken acorn boulders and volumes of bark shards and immense sheltering canopies of mushrooms that grew as huddled masses against the root slopes, forming natural front porches for a community of root dwellers.

Once I'd realized all of that, I really began to sink into the unreality of it. I stared and stared at that complex of roots and the associated structures, and the grass and flower forests, and it felt like, it felt to me like I had shrunk down to the size of an ant, and that I was there, inside that miniature environment, which had become full size to me. So much detail that I'd never noticed before became real, real, real. Like the Antman movie, but this was years before that movie. It's a good comparison though.

While I was down there inside of it, immersed in the unreality of it, I felt this unspeakable longing. This unendurable melancholy. This comfortable grief which was the structure of this miniature universe, and all things here were built upon that grief and imbedded in it, just like the planet earth is imbedded in the spacetime of our universe, with all that we know being built up naturally from that. It was a tiny universe, and sadness was the fabric of reality. But it was oh so comfortable, and I longed to stay there, forever.

I can describe the experience, but I'll never know if my description is enough, because I'll never really be able to know if you've felt these same feelings. This weird, strange, alien feeling of longing inside of an infinite matrix of sadness, but oh so, oh so comfortable, and buried in it. Covered up with it, forever and ever.

This of course is part of the dream feeling, what I'm describing here, that I've gone on and on about, so many times before.