A peregrination

         They passed a few bits of deer carcass, something they’d’ve never seen if they’d stayed true to the path. The nature sanctuary was apparently not as safe for animals as one might've believed. Samuel pointed to the lump of slightly rotted organs a few yards away.
         “This must have been recent. Something would’ve taken those, I imagine.”
         “Is this what you wanted to show me?”
         “Show you?”
         “Yeah, you said you wanted to show me something.”
         Samuel tried to remember having said that and there was something ticking at the back of his scalp that vague admitted to such request. But is it I? Is it active? Can it be said that I’ve got something, much less something to be showing to another? Can it be said that I’ve forgotten having asked her to follow me if I never recorded the event to begin with?
         “Oh, no it’s right up this way, around the bend.” She barely believed him, but was aimless enough not to ask questions. Having left behind the conventional purpose-driven mentality in her early youth, there was little left unimaginable, impermissible to one such as her. Tightening her scarf, she glanced through the twigs and rattling branches at the dim white area of the clouds that hid the sun. Under its influence she squinted, loosing track of Samuel who paid no attention to her. Lost in their respective thoughts, they lost each other and were neither the worse nor the better for it.
         A squirrel had refused to sleep the winter away, having smelled the fatal disease in his own body and having been driven mad by his neurological inability to comprehend his own impending death. Perhaps sadly, having no sense of self, it was the wood and rock around the little squirrel that seemed to his mind to be fearfully dying. It was the moss that grew black and had its little organs convulsing and struggling against the inevitable. It was tree and shrub that felt death on the wind. The squirrel could only mourn for the forest and lament the ill fortune of the sky. But before the condition or ailment or parasite, or whatever it was that intended to kill him, could collapse his whole body, he was the enterprising squirrel and had disproved Ben Franklin's old adage about American fecundity. Samuel saw him as he scattered the leaves with his desperate motions. Snow fell more fully from the branches that the squirrel perched on. Angela noticed the snow fall, but not from whence it came, assuming willfully the heavens to have sprung in clumps.
         Left over from this minor activity was the puzzle in Samuel’s mind as to whether it was actually possible for a squirrel’s breath to be shaking such quantities loose from the bowers or if some wind wasn’t involved. He paused to reflect. The squirrel did not. His own misty breath reminded Samuel of Heisenberg and the abstraction was enough to cloak the unanswerable aspects of his question in the veil esoteric satisfaction. He melted a little when he glanced back to see that Angela had not followed.

         In the substructure of the Beaumont Nature Preserve lives an unnamed god. The Pre-Columbian native tribes of the area, involved as they were with so many of the more fantastic gods of the land, paid no attention to this more modest geist of nature. His main visible feature consisted of an unimpressive stream simply sliding downhill, without much in the way of cascades or eddies. When the area flooded, it didn’t provide sustenance or inspiration for any great civilization. This god grows no great mountains, he brews no sweet nectar, he provides no service to man and he hides his graces whenever possible. When the seizmographs seek out his solidified dreams he is wise enough to stash them in his unplumbable heart. Based on the way things were going, he allowed great glaciers to deposit boulders throughout his body, to reduce the possibility of civilized development. There are no slow doe or fattened rabbits that would draw the attention of hungry men among his simple treasures.
         When the politics made a park on top of him possible he compromised on the invasion recognizing, in his ancient wisdom, the possibility that one day his hopes and aspects might play out as he lay awake, enacted by hanged-men, the puppets of the gods. That some forme of his dreams might take shape in the new ritual of some personal soul or souls was of an abiding interest. It’s crafting he took seriously, delicately.
         The soil was acidic and likely to stay that way. The old growth was modest and minded its own business. In the language of man it was boring; ignorable. The god of the Beuamont Nature Preserve is a hermit. He lives, like most minor gods, in the relatively hovel sized abodes created between the fibers of his domain. He spends most of his immeasurable time sleeping with one toe in the cool, mild stream. The hair of his body, head and face tangles out into the randy undergrowth, wrapping around the stems of the uncategorized little plant life that teems along his skin which is the dirt itself. His head is buried deep in the rocks and his dreams are the gases, ores, and gems that ruminate there and cold-brew out of the settling mash of matter. His arms are the trees, covering his head to protect his dreams from the winds of time.
This was the way of it.
         He woke from his meditative slumber on rare occasion and was forced by the wind to open his eyes on a barren world to which he barely belonged. This unnamed god played no part in the terrible wars and perverse conflagrations to which the pantheons had been attributed. He instead cultivated a steady portfolio of influence over the intricate. Coupling this with a primal notion lying at the root of his being, the Squirm of Life. He developed an aesthetic for no audience. During the short periods in which the god was awake he stretched his toes down into the mud of his very pre-primordial beginnings while simultaneously reaching the tips of his fingers and the top of his head toward a new layer of complexity which lay undiscovered, above, below, in front and/or behind the communal experience of reality.
         To the sight of other gods his activity seemed ridiculous. Every millennia or so he fluttered his eyes open, extended his body toward the past and the future. In doing so he pierced through a new veneer which had once been thought of as reality, then promptly curled back into his private dreams.
         His dreams have their own history, of which some has been written already. Some small monks have been lucky enough to glimpse the skein of his story through the spooling smoke of their flickering candles. Taken down in gulps, his is a world familiar only hopefully; the acts therein are modeled on the image of the worlds at the tips of toes and fingers as he stretches out in either direction in time and space. He be seeing the real world through his kaleidoscopic, transcendental, dimension-tunneling dream eyes. Of course, the story goes on forever in either direction and there is little to be said for the über-epic other than that it is unpalatable.

         “People are crazy and times are strange”. Angela couldn’t help a moment of indulgence, she was locked in tight, she was out of range. The cold drifted back in though as always and the black and white of her world started to seem poignant. Adding the dimension of motion, she made sense of the feelings she had by catching up to Samuel, who seemed to be waiting for her around the next bend. His eyes were grey as always and the creases of concentration on his brow even more evident. She mistook his generic obsessions for unrequited affection. His effort to meld sense and intuition had overtaken his face and particularly his eyes at the end of adolesence and the result was not unlike the intense gaze of a male in mating. She demurred. He ignored from ignorance, and they both continued walking toward the thing which he’d promised to show her, but had forgotten entirely about.