Sleepwalking

The surface of the earth has these trees like stubble of a two-day growth of a beard on a face of a man who just wants to let things be for a bit.  Sometimes he shaves. 

These days, a lot of days I walk through areas where there used to be forest.  Most times I don't wonder why or why not there are or are not trees.  And I don't feel any sense of sadness that they're gone.  I can already see the new-growth emerging.  It's a different landscape that necessitates a different way of seeing and moving.

Back when there had been forest, there had been days when I would try to feel lost even as I pretty much new that I would be able to suss out every slant of every incline that carried itself into the next all too well-known space, every group of trees with their indicative postures and alignments of bends and twists and branch-cast configurations; nevertheless, for lack of any better way to bring some disorientation into my life, because at the time it was a pretty straightforward sort of existence back in the days when there were trees, I would try to confuse myself, try to feel like I didn't know where I was going, but I always knew where I was going, until the day I didn't.

It was a cloudy late autumn day, so the sun was up there in a pasty sort of vagueness and I went up a hill blind-stepping, sleepwalking, not worrying, not facilitating any sense of awareness beyond the acknowledgement of placing my feet one footfall at a time upon what I would have told myself were well-worn spaces.  I was looking at trees that I had looked at hundreds of times but still trying to see something there that I may not have seen any other time, like believing that trees could change, and maybe they do, and I would look at the branches and wonder if there was something there to see beyond what I had already seen, and many times I saw something different but not usually what I thought I wanted to see.

And then I went over a ridge, down and around and looked at the sky that was slowly darkening and had a sinking feeling that if I ever did in fact get lost in a moment like that the sun wouldn't be any help at all because it was everywhere and nowhere and offered no clue at all about direction.

And I took a step and looked up at a tree that seemed to be a tree that I had never seen before.  Ever.  I walked around it and wondered at its magnificent strangeness, and then felt a sinking feeling of thinking that maybe this was a tree that I had never seen, but how could that be, I thought, this forest was not so big, I had been walking within it for years...

And then I saw myself standing there as if from a mile above myself, and placed a landscape around me, with paths and roads that were paths and roads that I knew were somewhere near, and I assured myself that I could walk in any direction and find my way back to somewhere if I could in fact keep myself walking in a straight line.

I started walking in a straight line.  It was not long before I got back to familiar space.  But I have never found that tree again.