Catalunya is an arid place, particularly this time of year. Mid-summer, the chart of sunup and sundown tracks the volume of breeze to stillness, the world’s big breath, maps the rise and fall of temperature which rarely varies from day to day, and over all or under all the heavy mass of heat that never threatens rain, that watches us all wandering from home to work to home again, from beach to plaza to rambla to bed.

Fields of heather reach from the tarmac east, unbroken by even a single tree, rarely by a road, knee-high unbowed flowers that reach the sea. An inlet, in reality: behind you see a ridgeline rising, and on the ridges snow; past the ridges, over there to the north, Iceland’s 66th parallel, a frosty whisper south of the Arctic Circle.

I saw, as we flew in, the sparse houses huddled in the even sparser green, huddled near the shore where the demands of weather are not impossible to satisfy, the incursion of ice not quite a glacial burial, and the overlay of lava not too frequent, so that somehow, somehow, through experience and (equally important) sheer persistence, these humans just like you and just like me chiseled a foothold into the stone and tundra, so here they stayed, and here they remain, twelve-hundred years of history, speaking a language left them by the Vikings, composed in blood-lines and written out in lines of these faces.

The rustle of the river over the hill and behind the trees is constant, time’s current, and fills the emptying vessel of the day with sound. I am walking barefoot up the road from friend Bruce’s hilltown home toward the community of dancers, whose annual retreat here is part exploration, part homecoming: everyone arrives ready to listen, ready to speak, the conversations made of movement and trajectory, and geometry and the (morphing) architectures of bone and sinew, intention and opportunity, lift and release.

Thirty years of summers as we entered our middle years, our parents becoming grandparents, and our children, adults: their growth as imperceptible in the moment as the changing girth of trees, and as startling in retrospect as the forest that replaces thready saplings and threadbare underbrush.

We’ve grown every which way. At first in the same direction, though now, as each one finds their feet, in a more cavalier flight of seed and leaves, the roots in some shared soil (which one? where?) and reaching for the same sun (that one, there) but to the east and to the west. That’s the nature of Being, and the nature of beings. Take flight!

I found myself refracted on Brackley Beach, Prince Edward Island.

The lines connecting this landmark to that begin to fill in. I am the spider who, having cast a first thread into the wind, having that thread carried by the wind to a neighboring tree limb or ledge, adds with patience effort those radial spokes that construct his web. Then the outward spiral begins, and the zig-zag connection of this strand to that. Welcome to my lair! (don’t get stuck)

Not suggesting that the beauty in the eye of the beholder is anything but subjective, nor that the lenses and optics, rods and cones, and strands of nerve are tuned similarly from one pair of miraculous orbs to the next. We have colorblindness to thank for the physical proof of an old adage.

However, I do believe our amazing sensors and possible extra-sensors comprise a “What’s Out There” kit that takes in the last wavelet of light that rushes in our direction; that warmth doesn’t stop at the surface of the skin (hold your fingers up before a bulb to reveal your beautiful transparency); that the slow tide or mad rush of Things is fully taken in, is physically seen, whether we register them or not. In fact, we are probably engaged in a moment-by-moment triage effort to weed out what is vital – will that creature bite me, or that storm electrocute me? will that truck run me over? – from what is simply the noise of living, a bird in the bush, a little rain over the city, the constancy of human transit.

What is around that bend in the road, the one than climbs out of sight through the gap made by two obscuring hills? It is narrower than the main highway; it is little used; it may lead nowhere… but obviously, it leads somewhere.

What’s out there, beyond that horizon? It’s a line drawn in the water that is erased as you approach, only to be redrawn a mile further out to sea. Some people left, never to return. It may be a water grave… but obviously (to me, obvious) there is land somewhere.

There was a graceful fall of land on the street where we lived, from the top of the block, north toward the south, bowing in the direction of the lake. If you looked at a contour map, you would see roads shaped by shoreline, connected to others that radiated away like rays from a child’s drawing of the sun, that gradually straightened and conformed to the surrounding grids of houses.

A couple of days ago, I chose to ride to town by way of the river, where a cycling and pedestrian path runs a ribbon, downstream toward the sea.

Usually, when I am in the middle of some list of accomplishment – all too common lately – I take the shorter route, the backstreets past the park, bisecting the rail trail, within earshot of the Catholic school whose children are invariably running about and shouting at their play, through the sidewalk back alley and over to State Street. That day, the geese were louder than the grade-school kids, the sun was out and warming my heart if not my hands, and… you know, it is -downhill- to the river, and I roll there without even pressing on the pedals.