The Sidewinder Sleeps This Night

I spend most of my time trying to make things feel meaningful, probably like most people. I've planted vegetables in pots that I'm keeping on the front porch, and some evenings, when I have time to breathe, I sit on the porch swing and listen to the same bird who sits on the neighbor's rain gutter and calls for his mate. When she comes, she brings the sunset. I keep remembering, though, that I'll be in Madison this summer. Who will water my plants?

It often seems like life is a series of mis-steps that never lead anywhere. We are dancing with the mountains and the rivers and the winds that blow. And we barely even notice. I don't know that anything will ever stay besides the sense that nothing stays, not even the Earth's rotation around the sun. Not even our sun.

And this afternoon, between rushing from one thing to the next, I felt something. I looked up at the sky, bubbling with storm clouds that only drizzled water, rumbling with the sun slowly falling down the blue. It felt like the world was a massive lens, seeing through me, and I was only a speck of dust in that great eye. But then I felt my feet, and my footing, and the knowing that I had to be someplace. So I moved on.

I got home today and had some quiet. Then I made some noise. Remembering that, though everything falls apart, the temporary-ness is what makes words, phrases, voices, people, places, and lives.



















"This here is the place I will be staying.
There isn't a number. you can call the pay phone.
Let it ring a long, long, long, long time.
If I don't pick up, hang up, call back, let it ring some more.
If I don't pick up, pick up... the sidewinder sleeps, sleeps, sleeps in a coil

Call me when you try to wake her up. call me when you try to wake her."
R.E.M. - The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight


Listening to Automatic for the People makes me feel solid.