vow

I vow to love every moment as much as I love this slam-on-the-brakes-and-take-a-picture-of-birds moment and as much as I may seem to be obsessed with some perfect wild world I realize that I don't give much credit to the roughly 43,000 other moments in a day.  For instance, this is not a photo about the daily fought and won battle to drag an 11 year-old boy out of bed, nor is it about the narrowly averted flatware crisis, nor the beautiful (and i mean truly remarkable) food that my lovely and extraordinary students make.  It is not about the e-mails that I answered, and the ones that I didn't -- likewise projects completed and those still hanging.  It is not about tooth fillings that last longer than Novocain. It is not about zombie ninjas and company returning from a night's prowl with mud-streaked pillowcases of booty smelling like sugar, fish, and rain.  It is not about nachos for dinner or 20 text messages that say come tuck me in.  It is also missing a trumpet solo.

wild

A Meeting

She steps into the dark swamp
where the long wait ends.

The secret slippery package
drops to the weeds.

She leans her long neck and tongues it
between breaths slack with exhaustion

and after a while it rises and becomes a creature
like her, but much smaller.

So now there are two. And they walk together
like a dream under the trees.

In early June, at the edge of a field
thick with pink and yellow flowers

I meet them.
I can only stare.

She is the most beautiful woman
I have ever seen.

Her child leaps among the flowers,
the blue of the sky falls over me

like silk, the flowers burn, and I want
to live my life all over again, to begin again,

to be utterly
wild.

-Mary Oliver

shift

Perfect grey day in a new season.  Being outside is never the problem.  It is the solution. It does, however, require a shift.  More clothes, heavier shoes.  I ran first -- but it felt like a fight so I gave myself up to wind and this.   

These are all pictures made in motion -- mine, the wind, Bach.  I want to call it dancing. I'm pretty sure we don't do enough of that.  

bone

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn't show. 

Andrew Wyeth 

ft. worth blues

field notes

I have felt the weight of words lately but the universe is not one to be forced to speak or sing just because I said so.  Instead I make biscuits, and meatballs, and soup from squash and apples and fennel seeds.  I am comforted by my kitchen cocoon, woven over glass between oven-warmed air and north wind.  I run a race at a breath-taking pace with my sweet friend and we hold hands over our heads like school girls as we cross the finish line.  I drink red wine.  I listen to Bach.  I sleep restlessly.  I feel the moon even though I cannot see it.  I walk in the changed woods ... waiting.  

illume

Fall is divided into two parts.  First a vibrant final burst of energy and then the spare days and longer nights that lead into winter.  We have reached -- passed -- reversible momentum, which is a funny phrase because there is no such thing when it comes to seasons.  But, in the nick of time I plucked these chrysanthemums to study in some pale morning light.