I watch Honey now, she's changing... She's been changing all along. Life is just a long series of changes, and possibly transformations. Honey's days of running, and skipping across the desert, almost like a bird touching the ground, have passed. She will never experience that again. Now she walks slowly and prefers to stay in my footsteps.
If she explores ahead, she may go down one path and I'll choose another. Then Honey will have to backtrack to catch up with me. In her genes she knows that she can no longer expend that extra energy. So she follows dutifully and quietly at my heels.
Watching Honey age is a painful but enlightening experience, Because in her, in my dear Honey, I see myself. I feel things now in a rather alarming fashion - in pains that I have never experienced before. Once I had a body like the young Honey. It was the body of the young John. I also ran across the desert and my feet barely touched the ground. My body never said no, never said tired, never said pain; that is over for me as it is over for Honey.
But unlike Honey I choose not to go down the path of limitation, of progressive decline of changing behaviors, the new behaviors becoming ever limited in scope. If I listen to the messages of pain and begin to restrict my movements and activities in response to my body saying "No don't go there, No I'm tired, No don't do that" I’ll do what Honey is doing. Honey without thought follows the path of limitation. Her body says "be careful take it easy" and she obeys. The human mind, my mind, is different in one sense, I can tell my body what to do; I can override its genetic program, the one that slowly shuts down activity and spirals ever more rapidly toward death.
It is not because I fear death that I choose not to allow my body dictate to me. It is because I know that the natural progression can be changed through the simple act of will. "Yes I WILL take that step, I WILL except my pain as a messenger, as a gentle friend, as a new level of consciousness". I find these changes to be an interesting new sensation of awareness and fullness in my body. Because the pain shows me so many new places that I never knew existed. It helps in the visualization of my skeletal and muscular structure; like a light being shown into a dark corner. These new sensations light up areas of my body awareness which until this point had been totally unconscious.
The Sun is about to rise over the rocks. It's journey South into Winter progressing day by day. Will Honey and I be here to witness the winter solstice? Will we be here to watch the Sun reverse its course and begin to climb again towards the North and arch higher and higher across the sky? Will we see its rays becoming ever more intense and vivifying until they begin to bake the desert?
Now a cooler wind is blowing down from the mountains. October, more clouds in the air. Not a single bird singing this morning,. The mating season, that great pull of life to reproduce and expand itself is over. The Earth is going back to rest, the plants going back to rest, the birds moving further South to more abundant climes, to warmer winds.
The Blue Jays remain but they are silent now. Their last feeding frenzy of the Fall when the pinion pines opened their cones and exposed the tender seeds within is over. And now a Jay comes by to take a look at my strange presence in the middle of his world. He doesn't say a word. He doesn't cry in alarm. He just looks. We share this fall/ winter approaching landscape in silence.
Ahhhh the sun, peaking its burning corner above the rocks.