follow

Aunt Leaf

Needing one, I invented her – - -
the great-great-aunt dark as hickory
called Shining-Leaf, or Drifting-Cloud
or The-Beauty-of-the-Night.

Dear aunt, I’d call into the leaves,
and she’d rise up, like an old log in a pool,
and whisper in a language only the two of us knew
the word that meant follow,

and we’d travel
cheerful as birds
out of the dusty town and into the trees
where she would change us both into something quicker – - -
two foxes with black feet,
two snakes green as ribbons,
two shimmering fish – - – and all day we’d travel.

At day’s end she’d leave me back at my own door
with the rest of my family,
who were kind, but solid as wood
and rarely wandered. While she,
old twist of feathers and birch bark,
would walk in circles wide as rain and then
float back

scattering the rags of twilight
on fluttering moth wings;

or she’d slouch from the barn like a gray opossum;

or she’d hang in the milky moonlight
burning like a medallion,

this bone dream, this friend I had to have,
this old woman made out of leaves.

- Mary Oliver

earthshine

November arrives
carried in on wind, driven by rain.
At the edge of the field I feel the lingering gusts
and the gravel crunch under my heels.
In the aperture of dawn
the lens is a mind wide-open to the movement of time
caught as blur --
a moon shine smudge of light.
The earth's shine
a gray glow
illuminating its own shadow.

lost

lullaby

work

My work is loving the world.

--Mary Oliver

ah! sunflower

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the travellers journey is done.
Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow:
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go. 

--William Blake

gasoline

marvel

...bring your marvel into yourself where it is anyway, your child you have too long tried to force upon the poor, assaulted objects of the world.
-Jason Sidwell

the ride

entering

...what happens next

Is undiminished for having happened once,

Twice, ten, a thousand times before.

Who cares if all the music that transpires

Is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus?

You are like a rich man entering heaven

Through the ear of a raindrop. Listen now again.

-Seamus Heaney, from The Rainstick

in honor, courtesy poetryeater

collection

the river knows your name

chain

A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings;
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose;
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

nostalgia #28

blue moon

portland

makers

this is colossal

behind the house

live

...having bowed to the inevitability of the dictum that we must eat to live, we should ignore it and live to eat...

-M.F.K. Fisher

Thanks, Chef.

scape

home

The first time I saw a snail was a revelation.  As with turtles I am fascinated by their seemingly ancient sageness, by their slow wandering through another time -- carrying their home in the world with them as they go.  

Thanks NPR

advice

...poetic advice for innocent and experienced travelers:

Thanks, Rob.

imaginary maps

Robert Smithson, Imaginary Maps, n.d.

a life well lived

urban wilderness?

Really?

...a new wilderness is developing. Cities are rapidly growing, becoming more complex, and rather than locking ourselves up in our protective boxes, what if we found a new way to to test ourselves in the throws [sic] of the urban wilderness? Rather than becoming intimately involved with nature, listening and understanding the landscape, we rediscover urbanity in a completely new way.

Here and here for more on this "fascinating design response to the development of the urban wilderness."

in the morning

Jeremy Lawton on lap steel:

it can't be you

light

It's just that I love this wash of morning light, it's softness, cleanness, coolness.  It feels like bedsheets or a breeze through the kitchen window...

walk

I met a hiker early in my trek last week who said that to walk the trail, especially alone, was to embark on a spiritual journey.  How could it be any less?  And maybe that is the most compelling reason for walking alone.  To be alone, in the quiet that is the inevitable result of stripping one's existence down to its most elemental form, opens up a big space, an enormous opportunity for one's attention.  It's the blessing of a mind liberated by feet that have been given the authority to do what they were designed to do.

As it is with all spiritual journeys, it's not like I chose the Appalachian Trail, but more like it chose me ... long before I accepted it.  I remember the first time we drove through the mountains of West Virginia and Virginia when I was a little kid.  Staring up at the steep green slopes from my backseat window, I wondered about the mystery beneath the trees, tried hard to imagine what it would be like to walk over the ground among them.  I don't know exactly when I first heard of the AT but I was thrilled by its potential to answer these mysteries.  Even after my hikes, I continue to be nothing short of amazed by the existence of this narrow corridor, a sacred footpath -- over 2000 connected miles of it, that belongs to anyone and everyone who would entertain the call to walk it, to live it.

It doesn't come easy for me.  It seems, for all kinds of reasons, that I am meant walk alone.  In addition, I am a mostly anxious person who lives in chronic fear of all sorts of real and imagined horrors.  Alone in the dark in the woods there is no escape from any of them, but in spite of excuses and plenty of sensible reasons to stay away, neither I, nor anyone else, can talk me out of it.  Something deep within me is in love with a place where I can still exist with so few requirements, requirements that have been reduced to the most essential and the most outside.  Like all love affairs it is impractical and unpredictable, capable of lifting the open-minded/hearted spirit to inconceivable highs and also of bringing it deeply low.  It is like living in a narrow universe of extreme elation and despair that I often want to leave, but at the same time, can't bring myself to do so. It's not that being there necessarily makes me happy.  It makes me feel, in spite of however temporary and small, that I am nothing more and nothing less than what I was meant to be.

I have been struggling with my "re-entry."  The return from that slender stretch of fundamental living is so abrupt and so dramatic and so immediately consuming.  After all that time in the outside world, I feel strangely fragile in all this atmosphere.  It is much more dense, louder, in this world and I just want to manage to bring some of that quiet with me.  It seems impossible to avoid the clutter of our trappings but I want somehow to reduce some of this life to that kind of essential -- shed the nagging worry over things like schedules and maintenance and repair and bills and laundry and...  In that quiet it is so much easier to identify what I need, versus what I want, and then to just pray about that.  It is a whole world of gratitude, not just a moment of thanks, but a constant lesson in simple gifts:  "I am a humble servant ... thank you for helping me over these rocks without breaking my neck ... for keeping me from falling in this stream ... for carrying me and my pack up this mountain ... for this dry night ... for shelter in this pouring rain ... thank you for this guidance ... for sending this friend ... for this open ridge top ... for this breeze, these trees, this bird's song, these clouds, this pure black sky, these stars ... for all of this love."  So maybe I am getting it, step by step, and carrying it back a little at a time.  At some point I may come back with the lessons fully learned ... with an understanding that my return to this world doesn't necessarily mean that I have to leave that one.