Iglesia…………..Episode Six

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(Last weeks episode)

Chapter Two

His young hard, coffee colored body was covered in a gleam of light sweat as he ran. Lungs pumping, legs pistoning up and down, his arms thrusting out for balance or pulling in to put on a burst of speed. Inside, the blazing star of raw youth burned and powered him. He didn’t notice that he felt no separation from the jungle. Running through jungles was what young men were made to do. It was one of their less destructive evolutionary functions.

He wore just shorts and sneakers and his sneakers created the drumbeat he ran to and his heart matched it.

The world he lived in then usually had three colors, blue green and brown. But when he was running there were only green and brown, of course there were hundreds of shades of green under the canopy of the jungle…and several different colors of brown, from tree trunks to the shifting colors of the dirt on the game tracks that he ran, as well as the different shades of brown of the many small rivers and streams he jumped over like ….NOW… or waded quickly through on his journey avoiding as much of the jungles bio-diveristy as he could. Then out into the sunlight for a quick dip in the pool that the village worked on keeping clear of predators…. and on good days, Mom’s banana pancakes before school.

That part of himself is where his mind always went when he was doing this kind of meditation. The memory was a clear essence of himself. In the meditation, his Mom always made the banana pancakes. And it was always before his village had gotten busted.

When he came out of the trance state he was almost always disappointed. This time was no exception, as instead of being back in the village he was  “utilizing native vegetation as camouflage.” In other words, he was sitting in a fucking bush.

Larrea tridentata.

A Creosote Bush.

And the temp reading on his heads up showed 120.

And the clock told him he had four more hours before they moved out.

Good times in the Arizona desert.

He subvocalized the command for his helmet to do a 360 video scan, stopping when he got to his partner to check his vitals. His partner, of course, was also sitting in a fucking bush. He did a weapons check, a suit temperature optimization to compensate for the new angle of the sun, took a sip of water and slowed his breathing and his heartbeat and began to sink back into meditation. An ancient yoga technique handed down through the ages in the warrior tradition and taught to him by the meditation master at The Center…a man named Ralph. He would have to remember to mention in his report that the esoteric technique that Ralph taught worked very well even when you were sitting in a fucking bush.

If you had been standing ten feet away, you would have never known he was there.