fly

This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.

-Rumi

fruits of my labor

a state of texas

the banks of the colorado

love

The Buddha says everything is temporary and that our attachment to that which we do not own -- our desire for permanence when all is transient -- is the cause for our suffering. But we love, so sometimes the best we can do is fall into grief and try to be grateful for all the color and shape that loving, and loss, give to living.

my mind's got a mind of its own

hunger moon

The last full moon of February
stalks the fields; barbed wire casts a shadow.
Rising slowly, a beam moved toward the west
stealthily changing position

until now, in the small hours, across the snow
it advances on my pillow
to wake me, not rudely like the sun
but with the cocked gun of silence.

I am alone in a vast room
where a vain woman once slept.
The moon, in pale buckskins, crouches
on guard beside her bed.

Slowly the light wanes, the snow will melt
and all the fences thrum in the spring breeze
but not until that sleeper, trapped
in my body, turns and turns.
--Jane Cooper

field notes

gray ceiling that has to be studied for evidence of variation
in the frozen mud, a honeycomb of tracks from men, beasts and machines -- a temporary fossil record of all that has recently preceeded me
swelling magnolia buds
cold air holding only the faintest scents of animal musk, a shovel-full of earth and somehow, the idea of clover
crows, crows, crows and killdeer
sap dripping into buckets
geese crowded into thin moving currents
cubist trees in ice

road

way

...The patterns moonlight makes

Are chancier, and dreams, well, dreams

Will have their way with you, their way

With you, will have their way. 

-Robert Hass, from First Things at the Last Minute

indelible

Sometimes the simple and ineffable impression of a thing makes it impossible to relegate it into a time.  It is destined to become nothing more, nothing less, than all time. 

pancho and lefty

Livin on the road my friend, is gonna keep you free and clean
Now you wear your skin like iron
Your breath as hard as kerosene

wanderations from friends II

...but if Mohammed won't go to the mountain:

Merci MAel!  Je te remercie d'avoir porté les montagnes a moi.

wanderations from friends

Thanks John.

nomad

the journey

... It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do --

determined to save

the only life you could save. 

~ Mary Oliver, from The Journey

collection

I can't resist picking these things up ... and trying to get inside of them.  Lord knows I have enough of this stuff lying around, but every pattern, texture, arc, loop, and crevice is like stumbling upon yet another world.

field notes

sparrow chip-hopping over brush in front of my feet
hollow knocking of downy woodpecker
rising shriek of pileated woodpecker
crows dropping their messages over bare fields
the soft rattle of the breeze as it moves through clinging beech and oak leaves
the various sounds of footsteps over slushy snow -- melting crackle ice -- frozen bare earth
the silences between

four

...days:

hallelujahsunshine

sippin on some sunshine

economy and grace

From this interview:

This brings us to the difference between having an intimate knowledge of food versus fetishizing it?

Kurt: Yes. Is there a more fetishized food than bacon?

Tamar: Bacon is a great example. Bacon is a sort of magic food, a little like olives, or anchovies, in that if you have a little, anything else you have seems special. If you have a tiny bit of bacon around, simple pasta with butter and cheese becomes a wonderful version of carbonara. Or an egg, fried in [bacon] fat, seems rustic and hardy. If you have olives, you can make olive paste, which disguises the fact that other than that you only have toast. A couple of anchovies transform anything, from pasta, to salad, to stale bread. But I didn’t feel able, in my book, to say that bacon was magical for all those reasons, because instead of understanding bacon as deeply economical, and all it takes to transform a staple into a great, rustic meal, we [now] understand it as something that needs to go into bourbon and chocolate. Even into peanut butter! We manage to pervert the most useful things, and in so doing, lose the ability to really marshal them.

The most profound and artful cooking is easily the most humble and satisfying.  I write these words as the aroma of bacon still hangs in the air and reminds me that simple abundances -- eggs from a co-worker, the last two potatoes, a bit of homemade bacon, and some toasted bread slathered in butter and a little something from a jar of summer preserved -- these are all that are needed to make a meal that will nourish and beautifully sustain the body, and the spirit, regardless of the time of day.  

...cooking with economy and grace here.

bigger than love

Aimee Mann and Benjamin Gibbard

The Colbert Report
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simple

Simple in a way that goes like this:  There is some fine comfort in not knowing.  Without specific knowlege there is limited criteria for judgement and concern.  Some kinds of wisdom can easily feel like weight and the opposite of that feels like freedom.  

all i need

... is a little hippie jam from back in the day:

song

Sometimes the song rises over the trees.  Sometimes the song is the trees. Sometimes, silence is the song.   

like catching snow

...on your tongue,

you can't pin that butterfly down.

religion

I haven't got any special religion ... My God is the God of Walkers.  If you walk hard enough, you probably don't need any other God.

--Bruce Chatwin