TheBanyanTree: unloneliness

[Julie Anna Teague]

Ran in the cool, clear air last night, like no kind of July weather.
Hazeless blue sky and the setting sun so orange that it stained all the
tops of all the trees burnt orange like every tree was turning Autumn
from the top down--a very unusual phenomenon with sun and trees just so.

Ran under an electric line where a Mourning Dove sat calling out his
grief.  Ran right beneath him where he sat on the wire, maybe twenty
feet above my head, and yet his echoey trill sounded hills and valleys
away.  The loneliest sound, I thought, to sound so distant when he is
so close by.  As lonely as a train whistle which sounds miles away
even from a train yard.

I go all deeply thoughtful at the sound of that dove on that wire.  I am
the unloneliest of lone people.  I live so much in my head that I need
no sound coming in from the outside, not from televisions or radios,
even when I'm home alone.  Much to my husband's dismay, I can ride
in a car for hundreds of miles without saying a word.  I love silence
because I can hear the inner workings of my heart and my head more clearly.
Can hear my own in and out breath and my own heartbeat and be sure that
I am.  Twilight is the quietest time of the day and that is when I most
have the need to be outside or I feel restless crazy.  Certain sounds,
rather than breaking the silence, carry me further into it.  Like a
Mourning Dove. Like a train whistle.  Leaves rustling.  Coyote.  
Redwing Blackbird.

The dove makes me think of distances, wires and tracks stretching
out ahead and behind, hills rolling, rolling, rolling away in my
landscape within and without.  Distances I've traveled or would like
to travel, physically or metaphysically.  Makes me think of times when
I've felt so alive and peaceful in my complete aloneness.  Makes me want
to pack my shit, put on my boots, and go somewhere.  Or just keep running
until I regain some of that inner lonely space. Sometimes I think that is
exactly why I like running: because I am a lone-traveling soul on the
inside.

Julie