I’ve logged more experience than most with simplicity and the complexity you discover inside simplicity, minimalism and asocial behavior, endurance and landscape.
Here is the truth: I think some deep wisdom inside me (a) sensed the stress, (b) was terrified for me, and (c) gave me something new and hard to focus on in order to prevent me from lapsing into a despair coma — and also to keep me from having a jelly jar of wine in my hand.
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(Dedicated to the United Mine Workers Union) I was changing horses in the middle of the stream when a current of coalmining ghosts pulled me into a dream. For days and weeks and seconds and hours of being in their souls, I was gently laid before a golden throne. From the throne rose a cast-iron robot in a suit of pinstrip minerbones. On his left finger there were diamonds and on his right thumb was a fingernail gold. I’m sorry but I can’t explain more because suddenly the monster spoke and I was frozen from his breath, it was so meanly harsh, cruel, cold. As I was thawing out next to my dead horse the whisperings, anger, fear and pain of 10 thousand petrified miners was the heat that saved my life. And this time I heard a voice and listened, because this voice spoke through the mouth of a 123-year-old dead coalminer’s wife. Her rough and workworn hands said everything need be said. She covered me with 2 worn quilts built a fire and returned to her husband who was 123 years, half petrified, dead.
Michael Rigsby