Vet

Needed to get above the treetops...I mean, housetops this afternoon. Take a familiar path. Down the country lane, across the chopped-up hillside, up the sidewalk, and sail over the asphalt. Let the monks have their temples and monasteries. My meditation must burn bodily energy, emptying myself of previous thoughts' herbs, minerals and spices.

On previous jaunts, deer, turtles and rabbits have scampered away (if you haven't watched a turtle scamper, you're incomplete). I use my hiking muscle memory to pull hills and push over balds, the Appalachian Trail sewn into my striated DNA. I catch a few rays, too, the Sun being what it is around 13:30.

I saw pizza delivery boxes, plastic bottles, waxed paper cups and cigarette butts tossed into the curbs of cul-de-sacs. I looked for nothing.

I found a domestic animal walking quietly nearby. The word getting old in my vocabulary but the sight of one always refreshing. The cougar. On any other day, I'd talk. This day, I walked.

I walk, getting lost all the time, the bread crumbs and string I leave behind rarely helping me out. On this afternoon, I wanted the smell of trees in late summer, their dry, crackling leaves crunching underfoot, spider webs wrapping around my arms and legs, cougar-free. I saw a leafcup in bloom, two flies dancing in the air, their ritual like whirling dervishes floating with ease, the usual landmarks, untouched, thanks to Margaret Anne and her kids. No words. No commas. No pauses. No semicolons. A walk in the woods with J.R.R. Tolkien, A.A. Milne, Johnny Appleseed, James Fenimore Cooper, Sah-cah' gah-we-ah, and everyone else following raccoon and deer tracks.

Thank you, world, for letting this ol' veteran of hiking trails meditate on his feet. The world of our species' language enjoys silence, too. What was the house fly called before we invented houses?

I may never see that cougar again but I know we both found sounds in our silences. The echo of silence is stillness. Listen to its song!