Prompt Entry Six

Water, is taught by thirst.
Land -- by the Oceans passed.
Transport -- by throe --
Peace -- by its battles told --
Love, by Memorial Mold --
Birds, by the Snow.
--Emily Dickinson

I’ve been thinking lately how I’m intrigued by opposites. How feelings can occur simultaneously, like sadness and joy. How diametric concepts can define one another, like peace and war. And how colors complement one another on a painter’s wheel, like green and red.

I’ve spent my life hovered against the east coast. So, in my mind, the west is opposite. Massachusetts, Maryland, New York, and Florida have been my homes, and I’ve visited every state along the east coast. Somehow this makes me feel out of balance. I’ve never lived more than 300 feet above sea level, so I desire the height of mountains. My landscape is dense with green, so I desire earth that is red. I know the taste of the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, so I thirst for the Pacific. I’m not alone in my thoughts to head west. It’s a well-worn cliché. My best friend had wanderlust for the west and settled briefly in Arizona. It was then she discovered she had to live near water to be happy. Rather than move back to Florida, she moved to Pittsburgh, and in her apartment that overlooks the three rivers, she’ll reminisce of Sedona, but will never live out there again. My fantasy of out west has always been conflicted. I grew up with a pull to the west because my father moved there alone when I was young. I think of California and the west as a place that seduced my father. It is a place that seduces me, too.

Strange that it is where land is dry that I would be drawn to feel quenched. When I took a trip last year to Denver for work, I took the only free time that week, nine hours, to find mountains or at least red landscape. A snowstorm caused me to drive south on route 25 instead of north. In the distance I saw a cluster of red rocks. At first they were like all things that we keep at a distance. The large spaces between that cause indifference. As the rocks grew before me, I was magnetized to them. I spent the day on the paths as if protected by the orange-red rocks. They seemed to reach and point toward the sky. With the exception of wind that whispered and whistled, all was quiet. In the silence, I felt fathered. Like when what is not spoken speaks the loudest and our thoughts echo back with wisdom.

I plan to head west more to experience the environment more fully, beginning this summer. In Pueblo traditions, the direction of east represents the mind, and the direction of the west represents the physical. Maybe I just need to transform what has been in my mind for so long and make it physical.