Connected

From a ridge top at dusk, a deer and a coyote looking down at me, looking up at them. I’m walking in their world, in a wild, I don’t want to interrupt their wanderings, I don’t want to intrude, I’m the outsider, I keep my distance, as they do too. I’m looking for a spot to stop in the forest, where I can sit, in solitude and nature’s silence, where the mood is relaxed. I find it, at the top of steep descent among ponderosa pine trees and needles. I look up to the sky. I see a tassel-eared squirrel in the branches of a tree. I sit down and lie back into the slope. I lounge while observing the patterns of the needles above me, against the fluffy white clouds in an otherwise blue sky. Then the wind comes. I hear it above me, I see it in the movement of the tree branches, I feel a coolness across my body.  I am connected.