Choices

This morning as I walked through the glow of fog and distant smoke, I was aware of each step as a choice. Shall I stay straight and climb steadily through the eucalyptus grove to the ridge, or veer right, and up to the sandstone rock formation? I wasn’t up for a long hike, just a short, contemplative foray into the strangeness, and I opted to turn back at the first junction. I chose to view the amber haze as mysterious and moody, and I saw myself as an unidentified woman in an old, sepia-toned photograph, her fate unknown.

Yesterday I got together with a couple of friends from the honorable alliance of tomboys. I know that sounds juvenile, but the truth is, almost every woman I know really just wants to be like a twelve-year-old boy, exploring and having adventures outside, making discoveries, coming home tired and dirty and content. In our playing-hooky, Tom Sawyer, beachcomber, treasure-hunting, story-talking frame of mind, we scrambled up a narrow sandy trail and across the railroad tracks to a secret club house, where two of us (not me) climbed a ladder and sat on the roof. The roof-people told the ground-sitters that there was a nest up there, filled with tiny pale blue eggs, and I wish I could have seen it, but I’m not much of a climber and I stayed below. I was rewarded with a great v-formation of pelicans soaring by, and bare black branches etched against the bittersweet sky, and the reassuring rumble of the train passing through. We mused about the weather and our favorite things to eat, and time was an invention which we mostly chose to ignore, but it was almost noon, and someone had a commitment, so we gathered ourselves and walked back along the railroad tracks (a little like the boys in “Stand By Me”) and I felt absurdly happy.

How much do perceptions create outcomes? Shall I succumb to the sadness, or select the intrepid optimist mode? I get to choose.