"Squatting here, I feel the dirt beneath my feet. I remember the ground-sensing methods of the archaeologists, tune my senses to moisture, heat, sound. Still damp from winter rains, the dirt cools the soles of my feet. Under this surface soil are alternate layers: sediments carried down by the creeks from the Berkeley Hills, then San Francisco Bay mud carried from the drainage of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, layer after layer of sediments from the hills, then bay muds again dating back thousands of years. Seeing the vast impermanence of time and space, insight can open. From this big view, there is no way to live in opposition to other things; there's only the challenge to rest in what's here — a continuous coming and going, arising and dissolving.
"Breathing in, I am filled with scent: of mint, of excrement, factory fumes, of my own sweat. Unaccountably, I am filled with a sense of completeness, that for this moment, nothing else is needed. What is here feels like fundamental ground — wide and peaceful. Deeply familiar. I recognize it as home. I give myself a pinch. Because of course I've been fuming and sniffing, struggling with discomforts, and all the while I've been right in this place with that stillness, a hidden possibility, here all along. I was already home?
"Through the stillness comes a whistle of a train, a double hoot, then a long warble — loud, louder. At some imperceptible moment, it arrives and passes, softening until it disappears into the ongoing hum. I rest on my haunches in the dirt of this garden plot — now H and Willow (once H and Dover); in the Ocean View neighborhood of Berkeley, California; on the outskirts of what was, for forty-five hundred years, a village built on a shellmound and before that, marshland, mudflats, and bay. From this corner, where I am training myself to be a guardian, I hunker down and listen to the waning call of the train no longer audible to human ear."
