The silence of the foothills & the woods lay like a brooding cloak about my soul. I was walking around in the hills of the Angeles National Forest. The rains have started. The earth sleeps. It dreams of summer. I skulked & kicked at pine needles. The black shadows seemed immovable as the weight of neglect that overhung the nearby city of San Bernardino. Vague ancestral dreads stirred at the back of my mind; for I had been born in the pine woods & thirty years of roaming the wastelands of the world had not erased their shadows. I shuddered at the old tales of witches & goblins. I waxed maudlin. This morning on NPR, they reported that Adolf Hitlers art was auctioned recently. Neo- Nazi ‘believers’ came out in droves. Barbarity. Ignorance. Hate. I think Goethe wrote in ‘Faust’ that “Such was I once, before dark ways I sought and with fell words a curse on living wrought.” This particular passage reminded me of a poem by W.H. Auden.

 ’A psychopathic god’ I and the public know- what all schoolchildren learn,

those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.

As I walked through the darkened treeline & noticed the small, shy creatures scurrying away at my intrusion into their world, I thought on the insanity of humankind. Why are some consumed with such a lust for control? Why is there such a drive for power over others? Is is because these individuals feel a lack of control over themselves and so they compensate outwardly? I think history has proven that it ends up as nothing in the end. Times are tough. My long days have just become longer. Like everyone, financial woes are knocking me down. I will be working two jobs for awhile to get back on track. I could return to the hospital as an RN & fall back into the madness & misery. I would be making a comfortable living. That would seem the easy choice…. driven & motivated solely by money. I can’t. I won’t. Sometimes, it’s too hard. To watch people whither & fall into the dark places… is too much for me right now. Thanks for reading & checking in over the last year. I peer through the pines & see a hawk winging its way across a granite outcropping. It soars above the pettiness of man. I feel childish as I envy the hawk & its freedom. Thinking… Thanks to Brian Fick for the image. Skate- Ozzie

posted Dec 2010