AT SUNSET
Words and Music by Jim Robbins
At sunset, strolling under the oaks,
we heard the rustling of grass
as though a snake were slithering
toward us. But no, the wings
of dragonflies were rustling
as their bodies looped
above the dwindling stream
in twilight. We rested a moment
on a rock as thirty gleaming bodies
wove through the air a foot or so
above the water, and we strained
our eyes to glimpse sapphire and turquoise
and ruby red. The other world
didn't matter anymore. The creek
and the oaks and the grasses
were alive with song.
An owl winged, mothlike, to a nearby oak,
perched above us, turned its flat,
oval face and peered silently
a long time.
Ithuriel's Spears, Fiesta Flowers, Fiddleneck
Unexpectedly during meditation one day recently, I remembered creeping over Kaiser Pass, edging along the treacherous, single-lane road that requires drivers to hug the cliffside to let other cars pass. Feeling adventurous, I ignored the turn-off to Mono Hot Springs and came unexpectedly upon a small lake, no more than a pond really, where tules were flourishing next to the road. Across the lake a rock formation rose like the grandest, most formidable cathedral on earth. The place seemed eerily familiar, so I parked the car and stretched my legs. Suddenly, as I gazed at the lakeshore, I noticed a blue dragonfly, which transported me back to a moment in my childhood over forty years before. All of my stress fell away, and, like forty years earlier, I experienced pure being in a timeless paradise.
As a child, I usually didn’t associate experiences with specific geographic locations, so I didn't know the name of the lake or its relationship to other places. I’m still surprised when childhood memories unexpectedly flood back to me after I encounter a creek or river or lake that I once haunted for a few hours. My father, in his never-ending quest for a divine fishing hole, had ended up at Ward Lake, a drive from Fresno of over three hours, early one summer morning. We must have left home during the wee hours because I woke up as he was parking the car, not long after sunrise. The first thing I encountered as I was dashing to the shore was a sapphire dragonfly hovering in the tules.
Like all children, I had dreams that I believed were going to come true. Almost all, of course, have since disappeared. As I stood gazing at the dark lake as a child and as a man, I wondered uneasily why we choose not to stay in such timeless places. I concluded as a child that human society must offer something better. As a man, I was no longer sure. A place like Ward Lake puts a lot into perspective.
The quiet lake and the huge trees and the massive rocks gave me the uneasy feeling that most of what we think and feel and believe and dream about is little more than noise, yet we play the same tune over and over in our heads as if the world depends on it. At Ward Lake the tune vanished, and for a moment I felt terrified. I longed to return to a place where I could hear the noisy tunes of human society. At that moment, the tree trunk that I was standing on reminded me only of death and chaos. I had a bizarre desire to clean up the humus and the fallen branches, to pull the dead, water-logged trees out of the dark water. I sighed as I stared at the awesome rock rising high over the lake, its reflection extending deep into the water. I couldn’t imagine a way of making the rock less intimidating, of making it something that I as a human being could subdue.
I laughed at myself a little, realizing that I was experiencing an irrational desire to manage an ecosystem that contained its own inherent order. I wanted to recreate the place in the image of humanity, to restart the tune that I understood so well. Yet in the quiet, something inside of me said no, let it go, and once again I returned to a peaceful state of simply being. It seemed easy, as if all I ever had to do was make a conscious choice to let go of the fear of losing my personality, but I suspected that I wouldn’t be able to maintain that feeling for long.
The lake and the massive rocks and trees were imbued with a life that did not need humanity at all, which inexplicably troubled me. I strolled back to the tules where the blue dragonflies hovered and bobbed here and there. I remained still, conscious of my breath, letting go of the noise in my head, contemplating the otherness, as if I were meditating with my eyes open.
I remembered encountering dragonflies all the time when I was a child, sapphire and ruby red and shimmering green, and it occurred to me that I had not encountered one in many years. Suddenly I missed them terribly. Where had they gone? Were their populations decimated by cultivation and pesticides and urbanization or was I just visiting the wrong places? I felt a profound sense of loss as I gazed at a blue dragonfly hovering nearby. I wanted to snatch it and hold onto it. Then I remembered that my father had died a few years after our trip to Ward Lake.
Once again, a sense of chaos and death and the unknown overwhelmed me. I felt like a Puritan at Plymouth Rock facing the dark forests of an unchartered continent. I wanted to cut down the trees and level the ground and create a safe, comforting, glitzy civilization where suffering and death could be hidden away. I wanted a city to spring up on the hill.
Yet the sense of timelessness again enveloped me. I felt renewed, like a child again, like my father was still fishing somewhere by the lake. I wanted him to remain there in the brilliant sunshine, dwarfed by the magnificent trees and rocks, his shining line deep in the dark lake. Of course, I knew he wasn’t there, but because in my mind there had been no passage of time, he was there, his body a still shadow in the dark water, the lake more sublime because of it.
My watch snapped me back to reality. I had to head home to avoid driving the perilous single-lane road in the dark back to Fresno. I shook my head, suddenly feeling queasy, as if my inescapable need for human order was a chronic illness that always eventually blocks my connection with the timelessness within nature. I wanted to silence the noise in my mind for good and just listen to the quiet lapping of the water and feel the sunshine and the breeze.
After I nearly died from celiac disease, I have experienced many intense memories of nature, like the one above, during meditation. For instance, if I wanted to, I could wander the trail down to the suspension bridge in the San Joaquin River Gorge in my imagination, envisioning every species of flower that blooms each spring along that trail. I could smell the scent of some flowers dominating the air along certain stretches of the trail and remember slowly inhaling their faint, rejuvenating breath at different times of day as they experience either sunshine or shade.
Or I might remember the dragonflies I have known as if they were the most brilliant jewels I have ever witnessed. There was a long period in our marriage during which trips to Watt’s Valley in the evenings brought us closer together, no matter what was happening in our personal lives. We were barely scraping by, and I was miserable due to my chronic illness, but we both found some peace there after we lost our fear and shifted our consciousness to the vibrations of nature and nearly always encountered one living jewel after another.
In Watt’s Valley, we identified all the birds and flowers as the seasons came and went. We became so intimately connected with the foothill ecosystem that we knew where each species of flower sprouted from one year to the next. We knew all the birds that migrated through during the different seasons as well, including our favorites, the brilliant spring birds, orioles and tanagers and swallows and lazuli buntings. We saw wild pigs and wild turkeys and bobcats and coyotes and newts and frogs and turtles and snakes. One night we saw one pygmy owl after another on the road, their big eyes flashing before they suddenly leapt erratically out of our path. We never saw pygmy owls on that road again. Besides my family, this is what I remember most vividly during my meditations.
In the song “At Sunset,” I focus on how at first while in nature you often experience fear. You worry about snakes and predators, but usually there is a moment, if you are out among the trees and grasses long enough, that a shift occurs and you can perceive the mystery of the ordinary creatures within the natural world. Dramas and irrational desires begin to seem strange and eventually vanish from your mind, and you recognize how extraordinary are even the most common forms of life.
The owl mentioned in the song peers at my wife and me for a long time as if seeing the magic and mystery within us, which made it seem even more magical and mysterious and precious to us.
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