My two companions and me implies that my companions are maybe of the two-legged kind, and possibly witty, charming and chatty. But, no, because this is me. My morning companions are of the 4-legged kind. One cat, One dog. They are quiet, but eager, and intent on sniffing around. The other cat who is accompanying us falls behind. I don't know where she is. So it is just us three; my two companions and me.

They are, for all intents and purposes, focused on their own impulses, so I consider as I often do when I walk with them about how wandering in the woods never gets old or mundane or boring. I wonder why that is? Walking on the bittersweet dead and gone, as the new nature struggles to know itself after the old has departed, and becomes the ground that lies under and behind and before me; me tumbling forward balanced by two unusually large toes adapted to step without falling into the next moment, the previous one over in a micro-second, barely acknowledged or even noticed (is that a sin? It probably ought to be). But I'm always welcome here, forever a visitor being held to the planet by this unexplainable force, but always enveloped, always made to feel at-home. At least in my mind I am. But I'm free to come or go. And you know, it's quiet here. It's quiet and it's lovely. And that never gets old.

I am struck by the smell of soil today. I am trying to describe it in my mind and I suppose it is sweet, as it is often said to be, but it also hits me in a pleasant sort of bitter way, like coffee grounds. I try to breathe it in deeper, but have you noticed you can only smell to a certain point and then it fades? You have to take another deep inhale, it doesn't stay in your nose. I guess it travels so fast, through the nerves to your brain... but, what.. it just dissipates? Why can't it stay there as we adjust to it and try to think of words to try to describe it? I don't get how that works. It's there and then it's gone. I don't have time to access my understanding of it. It's like this with everything. And I think I'm probably better able to heed it today than when I was younger. It's like a game, I know that now, so it's not so hard on me anymore. The words hiding behind a stump or fence post, peeking out but not allowing me to see it in it's full regale. But it used to hurt me. I used to feel abandoned or tricked. It would put me into some sort of creative abyss. A funk. Probably called a block in another world. I don't adhere to those ideas anymore. They are somebody else's and really don't fit with my experience now. I'm aware of my own ordinariness. Recognizing my impermanence is a liberation that disconnects me from hubris or feeling exceptional (there is a paradox to this. You may recognize it, too), or that I was born with some sort of extracurricular discernment.

It was also the attachment to the notion that I must say it to know it that used to hold my heart in clutches of blue. I don't dare to assume it's mine to say or to know anymore. I'm visiting here. I'm sniffing around. There may be no description in a language that exists or that I can convey, but it's there anyway. Behind the scenes of what I sense anyway, whether I am here or not. It's all a poem. Without words. I must now always realize that it's there while it's going and I may never have access to what's behind the veil. But while I am here I can walk in it anyway and breathe it deeply while I wander. Savor it with my senses as slips away. It doesn't have to be any more than that. That's just the way it is, this life.