Sittinglistening

By Paul Ross

Gila Wilderness, NM

October 27, 2017

I sat there all night.

Well, mostly; I had to get up a few times to stay awake.

As I tucked my knees to my chin so to prop up my nodding head, I would gaze around my shrouded knee to see if it was time for another recording. Up all night, my sense of space collapsed with sense of time. Seeing little depth, only motion, but unable to move to give that motion dimensions, my sense of the world crumpled until its folds, usually gentle and expansive, steadily stacked to press me from all sides. And so I curled, sitting, bent to the weight of the nightly world.

I began to hear only that which was different.

Airplanes. Other low notes I could not identify, but still chewed on. They felt like the shifting and stretching of toots, or slow rolling stones, feet beneath the river’s surface, or un-namable unknowable deep things. Pressed by sleep and sound, pressed inward, in-pressed, impressed.

I got tired of exercising patience. I broke no walls, saw nor heard no ethereal perspective of the world. Transcended nada. The world was as it is, always was, will continue to be.