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From an old observatory on the side of Cowles Mountain, waiting for the sun to rise on the day before the winter solstice, my mind was taken up imagining the sentience of things not human – of animals, trees, rocks, mountains, oceans and the earth itself.
If not for the clouds on the horizon when the sun rose this day, a small peak in the distance would have divided the sun into two lights – one north and one south – an appearance created by the tilt and turn of the earth. To see the daylight come on such days is to witness the emergence of a different solar system. To see it, one must climb the mountain in darkness to a certain place on the mountain side to wait for the light to come. The cosmogenesis lasts only a few seconds. Then the two lights arc and merge into one.
Some say that reality is ongoing cosmogenesis. Heraclites said something like that: we cannot step twice into the same river. Still, when one sees the two suns arc and merge, it is not hard to imagine that the cosmosgenesis is brief and that in a few celestial seconds all will merge into one, and, just as Parmenides said, in spite of appearance, all is one, even now – not just the sun, but animals, trees, rocks, mountains, oceans and the earth.
The merging of the suns, the tilt and turn of the earth, the cosmogenetic arc that binds us all in life, and the dreams of one waiting in darkness on Cowles Mountain: there is one sentience.
Summer has a fury that even the coldest winter storm cannot match, a tireless fury of long hot days and rainless months, of the sun and its wake of fire.
Autumn is like a second summer here in southern California, a milder summer, a lesser fury. While the temperature drops, the chaparral burns and warm Santa Ana winds spread the flames across the coastal mesas and foothills. High in the mountains, ferns in the meadows turn yellow, gold, red, and then brown, as the earth releases the heat of summer.
The furies of summer and fall and the wake of fire: bound up, as they are in modernity with chance and necessity in a phantom order, yet imply great moment beyond. While the setting sun reddened the sky over the Pacific this late September evening, a rainbow stretched out in the clouds northeast of Cowles mountain unperturbed by the fury of departing summer. And then came darkness.
There was day and there was night, summer and fall, and there were spectres of fury and ease in the sky.
My wife and I climbed Cowles Mountain to watch the sun go down over the Pacific a few days ago.
We were not alone there. Others had come to the top of the mountain to watch the sun go down. Everyone acted nonchalant, but nervousness evident in the motions of their bodies and eyes revealed that each had come for a reason, if one can call it a reason. Each came to touch the stone at the top of the mountain. Each came to watch the sun leave. Many come every day. Others come early in the morning to watch the sun return. Each gazes over the land and to the ocean beyond and into the sky above. Each touches the stone.
The layer of fog along the coast was so thick that the sun faded from view before it descended to the horizon. It happens that way sometimes. The evening wind was cold, even though the time is August. The sky was gray and starless. We descended the mountain by flashlight. The night haze blurred the rocks and contours of the trail. The side of the mountain was quiet except for the sound of our careful feet. The others had left by other paths. Each wandered back into the city that surrounds the base of the mountain.
What happens on Cowles Mountain is resistance to time. What happens in the city is evolution. What happens on Cowles is a returning and a starting over.
Lost Borders 
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