The morning fog thickened and swirled. I pulled my knit hat down more snugly and zipped up my fleece jacket. I decided to take a cross-country shortcut home, up and over the steep grassy hill between Coyote and Sacate canyons. The remnants of a road soon vanished, and I trudged through foxtails, yellow grass, and branchy stalks of mustard. I could see the hazy silhouette of an animal watching me in the distant haze, almost motionless, small pointy ears alert, probably a coyote. I meandered upward toward the ridge, where I hoped to stand and get a better sense of how to drop down into Sacate.
I have no affinity for finding my way. I zigzagged unsteadily, stopping now and then to pull out barbed burrs poking through my socks, and to rest my calves, which were complaining a little on the climb. It is impossible to get lost on this route, but there are logical paths down or convoluted ones. I tend toward the convoluted. Also, the ground is uneven, with holes to stumble into, and it’s easy to trip. I was glad to have my walking stick.
The fog had set a blanket of quiet over everything. There was no birdsong, no wind, just vapors and stillness, but not peaceful, rather, a sense of something pending. And quite possibly that pending-ness was simply the feeling I’d brought with me, a manifestation of my own anxiety. I turned to an audiobook I had loaded on my phone. On Consolation. That’s what I seek. Consolation, wisdom, some light forward. “When the world is in crisis, where do we look for comfort?” This book (by Michael Ignatieff) purports to find solace in dark times by considering the thoughts of various artists, writers, and thinkers through the ages who stood on the brink of despair and in some way transcended. “The challenge of consolation in our times,” he has written, “is to endure tragedy, even when we cannot hope to find a meaning for it, and to continue living in hope.”
