In one Yosemite dawn along the Merced River I met test tube twins from London who said they were teased at school that they had no souls.
Crescendos of white granite gathered in the gold given by the sun's rise. These twins now young women, gazed up from their wading in this River of Mercy. I saw their eyes animate this home they were being given.
A place where the minutiae of their test tubed zygotic zeal swelled over filling this valley like great waterfalls surging into river.
And in return this morning of immense valley flowed into them sketching indelible song lines in notes of fir, sequoia, ponderosa, aspen and red wood shaping a soul scape that opens like a colossal caress that says you can always come home here no matter how darkly dwindled or far away you've gone.
This valley becomes an ancestral call to gather. The place you come to inherit. I have seen the levity of your birthright float up from the dull and the dismal pit and lift your gaze upward.
I have seen you all coming home from the fray: The twins, burlesque fire spitting hoola hoopers, a guy in a faux leopard coat with head phones dancing to his Half Dome muse, a San Francisco fire fighter, a ghetto kid labeled as a disorder to his school, an ex CIA agent, a guy who cleans the church, roller derby queens from Liverpool, Chief Tenaya's children, Desert Storm veteran from Missouri, ex NYC model with her two boys, from China a grand daughter taking her grand father, descendent of Oregon Trail pioneer, great great grandson of a Buffalo soldier.
You all bow or nod or just stand there still and eventually have to shuffle back on the bus eyes shimmering with a lake mirroring this pursuance of a soul.
Yo-So-Mighty; Notes from a Bus Driver