When I pull things out of the dumpster or from piles by the side of the road, the accumulation of time and energy in the objects feels exotic, enchanting to me. In pulling out such collections of junk and ogling over them as many folks would over gold and silver, folks are generally amused.
I offer this window into my world: if we were visiting Mars and found a pile of such stuff plopped in the middle of a vast red plain, would those objects feel like junk? I think we would pore over them as holy relics, looking for all possible clues to the kind of life that went there. And most of those conclusions would be just stories, because we just barely could know the whys and the hows and the whens. And so we just make it up. We are story tellers.
So it was with this shingle.
A retired cedar shingle.
A shingle is a protection from the storms, the sun, the wind.
It is that which is between us and the heavens.
As we lie in our beds at night
the shingle is over us.
As we walk down paths
the shingle is over us.
As we lay down in the earth
the shingle is over us.
As we ride into space
the shingle is over us.
