Emergent

There's something deliciously chthonic about pulling oneself out of a crack in the earth other than that one entered by. It's as if one were an earth being unearthing oneself. This may be what moles and prairie dogs feel, but, in addition, squeezing through into the light is also like a resurrection, a refusal to stay dead. Ecce Pluto.

Looking down into the chasm

These reflections were occasioned by today's boulder cave scrabblings at Purgatory Chasm. Each cavity and fissure under the tumbled rock having been explored long since and regularly (witness the water bottles down there), there's still the physical challenge, and the ever-fresh pleasure of being hidden in the realm of darkness.Looking down into the chasm

There's the additional pleasure of descending out of sight down one hole and then, having crawled through cave-bottom dust in and out of several 'rooms', emerging from some narrow crack or openingquite far away and then calling out to the person watching the original adit that you're 'Over here.' Tom Sawyer would have enjoyed that line.

So different from running, cave-crawling is a slow and studied shifting of limbss and redistribution of weight, as well as care about the head. The payoff  is not the large vista as of Boston from the Cambridge shore but the darkness of interiority, very still, as natural in its way as the forest around the great gash simply being there without complaint or comment.

You who started to play  the game of waiting at the opening I'd gone into to see if I would come out, welcome to the ancient practice to looking down into the earth for surprises, as well as up to the skies.