“Ancestral Structures on the Trailing Edge” Released in Emergence Magazine (Audio & Text)

THE LAST BREATH before dawn. A moment of undefined edges slipping between dark and light, when it seems one might step through time and space merged.

From the crest of Virginia’s Blue Ridge I look over what, at the close of night, appears to be a vast, wind-silenced sea. Fog bound. Mist covered. Soon . . . slant light details land contouring beneath diffusing vapor; contours bound only by the dawn horizon. These lithic swells of the Piedmont—the foot of the mountains—extend eastward toward the tidewater coastal plain, toward Chesapeake Bay, toward the Atlantic Ocean beyond.

The first time I stood at such an overlook in Shenandoah National Park, a child of eight or nine beholding mist-becoming-earth, I thought eternity resided here. An existence that had to exceed human breadth. In later years I learned other scales of time and the ticks by which it is measured.