credo

My friend from Asia has powers and magic, he plucks a blue leaf from the young blue-gum
And gazing upon it, gathering and quieting
The God in his mind, creates an ocean more real than the ocean, the salt
the actual
Appalling presence, the power of the waters.
He believes that nothing is real except as we make it. I humbler have found
   in my blood
Bred west of Caucasus a harder mysticism.
Multitude stands in my mind but I think that the ocean in the bone vault is
   only
The bone vault's ocean: out there is the ocean's;
The water is the water, the cliff is the rock, come shocks and flashes of
   reality. The mind
Passes, the eye closes, the spirit is a passage;
The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the
   heart-breaking beauty
Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.

     -Robinson Jeffers,  from The Wild God of the World circa 1928


(the above photo is of a new surf-friend, kevin...  the poem, from another california treasure.  california yields lovely new people and places each day now, dissolving all of the pretentious otherness and cynicism i brought here with me 6 months ago... the warmth of the sun melts things like worry and fear, replaces tension with anticipation.  i shed my previous identity as a hermit and find myself surrounded by the multitudes, so many of them just as human as all humans.)