Sage Mountain I'm gonna burn some sage today. I’ve got a bundle sitting across the room the color of land skirting the dry mountain. I’ve heard the dust never stops building up. I read that in a book by Annie Dillard. She wrote that if you stand still the earth buries you, ready or not. Which is untrue - it would take so long you’d be beyond ready for it. I guess she means it just happens, no stopping it. By walking around and moving about we get the dust off us - that’s clearly her point. I know so few people who are really moving though, myself the worst of them. You can’t watch a mountain erode but its technically happening all the time. And we’re all already dead and so forth. Like Rilke said about pregnant mothers, how they carry two deaths with them, their own and their baby’s. The point I’m trying to make is that you will be buried by the earth, by the dust no matter what - but especially if you do nothing. Mountains do nothing and that’s why nobody respects them. They’ll never have vacation time or any 401k-match programs. Maybe that’s my point, I take it back, change it. My new point is you should never try to be like a mountain, all tall and silent and eroding, your bottom half firmly planted in the earth and your top half getting skin cancer and all that, or covered in snow, or whatever. I don’t really care about mountains anymore, I’m over it. Be like the sage that burns in a new studio apartment, filled with boxes brown and taped shut. The mattress is on the floor for now but soon we’ll raise it up and begin sleeping the proper way. We practice our deaths every night, don’t we? Heaven is probably just dreaming that never ends, no alarm or daylight to wake us. But for now burn the sage and uncork the wine, though you’ll have to find the wine-opener. It’s in one of the boxes marked kitchen.

Of course, the sage was in a box marked first things. And so the wine-opener should have been in there as well. But we can’t be perfect my love. Does love keep the dust away? It might, but its really just a striving for perfection and I’ve already explained you can’t be perfect. Mountains are the perfect example of imperfection. They’ve done nothing in my opinion, everything’s been done for them and they get all the glory. But they’re constantly dying and eroding, technically right before our eyes. I guess they’re also growing too, right before our eyes. Now I’m imagining all of these people watching mountains, as if that’s how people spend their time. We do all love watching things build and grow and fall apart. Birds live there and other animals. And people sometimes too live on mountains and the dust fills their lungs and covers their paths and soon they go to sleep with the birds and the other animals. 

I’ve only just woken up. I brewed coffee, a recent thing I’ve been doing since I bought a coffee maker. Also I’ve been adding cream and sugar to my coffee, which is also a recent thing. Black coffee is only really good with a sweet thing to eat with it. And I don't feel like eating today, not a sweet thing or any thing. I’d like to spend my entire day not eating and listening to music and drinking coffee and thinking about dust and mountains. I should be applying for jobs because the one I have I do not like. I want precisely what the mountains don’t have, the vacation time and so on but add to it a banker’s schedule. How banks used to be. How mountains used to be, too - getting weekends off. The birds and other animals used to head to the beaches, they knew the score. Can’t be on the mountain all seven days of the week, it’s exhausting. Gives the lazy mountain more time to do nothing but grow and erode and have a boozy brunch with friends.

Goes without saying that me talking about sage and the actual burning of sage are both metaphors, the drawings of lines in the sand. The welcoming of change, the hope for better days or the best of those past good days made constant. In other words, either its nostalgia or a ridiculous hope for something that’s never happened. Could be a vague hope for things you never imagined, better than you could have imagined. The bad days not so bad and the good days better than ones you’ve experienced. Sage burning and the opening of boxes in a new apartment. The sound of tape being ripped from cardboard and the conversation that comes from seeing things you own and adore or find funny. Making snap judgments on where things ought to be placed. Stacking the now folded cardboard near the door. Wine stained tongues and the smell of a burning, cleansing herb. Unopened boxes surround the mattress, which is covered with folded sheets and pillows and towels and candle holders. It’s getting late, so we practice death again.  ¶ 11:01 AM