NAMING BREEZES

Sometimes the late dry season's unrelenting heat and dryness are so energy-sapping that I get tilted into a kind of lethargy. However, other times it feels good getting out in it and feeling the robust forces at hand. I like feeling the full power and promise of sunlight energy that's just sailed through 93,000,000 miles of empty space to pound and sizzle my skin. I like feeling how the very air tries to suck me dry, crack my lips and crisp the moist folds of my lungs. I like watching myself passing from one moment to the other even when the body and common sense tell me I need to take it easy.

And then there are other times when I cash in on being a human able to be flexible and to choose, and to play. That's when I cloud-watch with dozing, panting dogs at my feet, and wait for breezes to stir.

Sometimes I name the breezes. One coming in from the side as I type these words I'm calling "Tit-Cooler," because I'm hunched over the keyboard with my flabby, old-man tits dangling, and that's where I feel it most. A while ago, "Fly-Chaser" turned over a leaf beside Katrina's head as she slept at my feet, and the leaf scared away a fly that'd been pestering her, walking around on her black, moist lips. The next breeze that comes along, I think I'll call "Rain-Bringer," because late-afternoon clouds back toward the east are gathering and turning slate-blue at their bottoms, and maybe if there's a breeze on the land named Rain-Bringer, the rain will know it's welcome.

But, here's what I really like about these super hot, dry times: Times like this, you see very clearly what a tenuous, unlikely spiritual presence you are among all these bumping-into-one-another, utterly impersonal coagulations of energy fields that quantum mechanics tells us about, and that focuses the mind. And then is when it's easiest to be glad for clouds and breezes, and at least the hope for rain.