Dig

Yesterday the excavator was here all day, and all day I was trying to get some work done but could not--my lawn pulled wide open, the workman calling me back again and again to look at this, to look at that, telling me what he was going to do next, what he guessed would be the right fix. It was mesmerizing, this whole underground system of dry wells and pipe pathways and those mysterious subterranean workings of my house laid bare for me to examine. The rocks and the roots. A little while ago I looked out and saw a grackle locked in a frantic tug-of-war with one of those roots that had surfaced and not been buried again at the end of the day. Whatever was pulling from within the Earth won; the grackle flew off, I would almost say flew off looking dismayed.

There is under my lawn a stacked stone holding tank that someone had constructed decades ago. The excavator pulled away a couple of feet of dirt to show it to me, how it rested there like the unguessed-at doorway to a temple or a tomb. How did he find it? Maybe he's a dowser, and that's what led him to this line of work in the first place.

I had most of the day to contemplate this concealed world--the utility men had also been out earlier in the week, and so other parts of my yard were marked with little flags like ley lines, yellow ones tracing where the gas pipes traveled, blue ones marking the water. So much that is right there, and so perfectly hidden from us. Because we see imperfectly? It occurs to me that this is not so different from the shamanic world its practitioners have described to me, a parallel and invisible place that runs right alongside ours, like a harmony being sung at a slightly higher remove along the treble clef. This gives me the basis for my own theory of the music of the spheres: the whole subterranean system of the world is the bass clef, those higher concerns of the spiritual world are the grace notes and dog-pitch octave trills way at the top of the page and me, well, I'm sort of tootling along in the neighborhood of middle C, a few steps up, a few steps down, trying to make any sort of music with my limited range and these plodding, quarter-note feet.