Sparkling Lotus Ink

hello i love you .2

Early last week I took a two hour wild-cat strike from my life in order to visit the old friend above.  This is the Shagbark Hickory tree I've made allusions to in other posts.   It was an absolutely smooth & easy re-union of earthly souls and cosmic spirits.  Caught my first glimpse from the road driving in - marveling that it's now a smooth aphalt road rather than roughshod mud and rocks.  When the hickory's crown first crested into view I exhaled in relief.  It was to be a ceremony of celebration rather than a letting-go/restrospective experience. I was the only apparent human in that part of the larger landscape.  When I first emerged from the car a young red-tailed hawk fluttered silently from one bare tree to another.  I had my phone out with the camera ready but the bird flew further afield.  This left me free to call out to the Hickory as soon as I began crossing the road from the ever-so-famiilar spot where I'd parked. 

A very big chunk of the Everything - all the different facets that have led me to approach the natural landscape as the inherent microcosmic framework of All That Is was learned, questioned, refined, and tirelessly developed by wandering through the forests and fields of conservation land where this particular tree is located.  It's the first Tall One I approached with a consciously co-creative intention:  Hello.  I would like to be your friend.

When I last visited this piece of land, a few weeks after we closed on our Place here, I walked through many parts of it saying goodbye to 14 years worth of time and time immemorial itself in the scheme of all I had learned.  I saved The Shagbark Hickory tree for last - telling it i was going to live in a place with many many hickories.  All coming from a Grandfather much older than this tree's Time.  I felt the tree in some undefinable way exalting in its reception of this news at a tree level - crown-to-crown.  a human who Knew would now in turn be known by Elsewhere trees. 

I walked three clockwise spirals around my friend's rootline(s) - talking aloud the entire time.   Eventually I drew close enough for an embrace.  My communion with the tree's spirit turned inward.  I pressed my forehead breasts and belly against the tree's trunk telling it Everything there was to be told.  About what it had come to mean to me over time.  How often I dream or think about it.  I recalled the delicate and swift adjustments this tree made within its own energy flow the nano-second its medicine spirit realized the force of its obviously joyous response to a far more tentative and fully-Unknowing embrace from me had been momentarily frightening enough to shrink back inside myself. 

Those years ago, when that happened, the tree re-calibrated the velocity of its energy exchange with fluidity and grace.  And although over time whenever I've recalled that moment I've felt a trace of shame that I didn't trust enough to just flow with it rather than shrinking back - as I stood once more with the actual tree I saw there was no shame. What the tree had taught me about its responsive intelligence level was a stunning gift to receive.  It allowed me to approach each and every tree I've encountered since with reverence and an authentic sense of honor to know them.

I stood silently in an embrace that felt entirely mutual  - making sure to express some pivotal experiences in which I felt myself in the tree's position with another human and did my best to find both grace and timeliness within my internalized and expressed re-adjustments.  I said it had been life-changing for me in the way a tree's life-time drops many nuts to seed the life of many more trees.  Together we vibrated.  It was a similar harmonized frequency.  I was there.  With my friend.  Both of us remembered and in various ways treasured one to the other.

(I thanked the tree, repeatedly, for believing in me enough to let me know its essential Nature.)

This is the strong and sturdy Approach I've used all the times I've hugged this tree.  The close-up shows so well how this particular species gets its name.   If you follow the trunk to its other side you see its wound.  I will admit I was shocked to see how much has changed - how much further decay and erosion - in a single decade.

(if you follow that link you'll see what the top of the wound looked like about a dozen years ago.)

Now it reminds me of larger tree hollows where people hide - or meditate for shamanic effect.   It looks like a kind of mantle a person could wear if they were strong enough to shoulder such magnificent weight & meaning.  I took these pictures after realizing the tree seemed to be doing the same thing this much smaller survivor has done.  The tree is winding into itself.  What looks so much like UNwinding in the other tree might instead speak of a much larger tree than what the living trunk suggests.  I'll have to look at the base of the other tree and see what that reveals, if anything.

do you see?
scroll down to next post to compare.  Sure looks like the same botanical mechanism. In this case it is an internal unwinding that's hard to see because of the shadows on that day's occasion.  I was amazed and astonished to make the connection.  If there's anyone reading who'd be able to help me/the rest of us add to our knowledge base - such as what is this self-healing mechanism Called and how much of the tree's various layers are involved in getting the re-stabilization goal achieved - please share your learning!

a more or less impromptu field trip

Early last week I was feeling down about The Proceedings here in the US as well as far-too-much-of-everything elsewhere throughout the globe.  Decided of all my options the best was to take myself in literal hand and sally forth into a larger world of life that inherently makes sense to me.  To go somewhere for the specific purpose of personal nourishment/internalized re-focus.  So, clearly, I needed to select a place that helps me feel grounded and solidified at a taproot level as well,. 

For me the [general] place that always seems to call most loudly when I need to remember who I am, who I've been in the cumulative past, and what I'm doing here in the NOW:  the Pioneer Valley.   It's the first place I 'landed' in MA - specifically in Hadley.  Which in the late 70's was an operational farming town of individual family stakes - primarily growing either potatoes or tobacco. 

The way I felt upon my arrival there stood out powerfully for its authentic quality of timelessness.  For whatever combination of elusive and significant reasons as soon as I stepped out of the van I was driving I was there.  Instantaneously Of The Land - as if it pulled me close in a firm embrace while whispering in my ear wtf took you so long to get here? 

I was 21 at the time.  The split second of experience proved itself an invaluable touchstone once J. and I planted ourselves in the urban/unceasingly kinetic vibration of Boston and Cambridge the following winter:

I have arrived at the kind of home that never needs to second guess itself.  I am ME here.

Think we all accumulate/collage-together a number of psychic and emotional homes among the places we've visited or come to settle for however long.  Perhaps, like me, these experiences are categorized consciously into specific types/levels of home's subjective definition. Think that's becoming clear in the collage project for all of us.  In a far more extroverted situational sense the Pioneer Valley's vibration holds the specific being home of feeling deeply fused with an immediate and unquestioning sense of connection.  To self, other humans and their history, shared history, and of course the land herself.  

The specifics of my original plan for a Wellness Date were not based on mental notions or planning but swift gut instinct.  I decided what was most likely to work for my overall goal was a visit to the Eric Carle museum.  Have never been there or made it a point to keep up with museum doings.  But my certainty was so absolute (the collage effect factor.  Of whatever original work of EC's happened to be on display) that I didn't check anything on the website other than the weekend hours because by then it had occurred to me this might be a positive bonding low-fi excursion my family would enjoy sharing with me. 

Didn't actually look at the website until the family was assembling for leave-taking just prior to heading west. Then I thought to check on what was showing in the other two gallery exihibits.  Learned the smallest gallery held two pieces of work from a variety of illustrators: a piece of "first" artwork as a child or teenager and something from the present tense.  The primary/illustration guest of note featured a Maira Kalman exhibit.  Pay dirt for what ailed me across the board!  Have been admiring her New Yorker covers for years of taking the magazine.

The above image is one of her paint cloths.  It's hung on a wall as part of a giant assemblage/artist's inspiration board that runs the length of the long entrance way connecting both ends of the gallery spaces.  You can't take photographs in the galleries.  I  asked - figuring why not -  if I could take them in the entrance way.  The docent hesitated, saw the eagerness on my face and  spoke quietly.

"go ahead but very quickly".  

The paint cloth filled me with emotion as well as instinctive below-the-skin recognition and instant inspiration. I moved as quickly as possible in front of the inspiration wall searching out a few additional groupings that somehow capture the flavor of what the below looks/feels like when you're standing right in front of it.  An entire wall arranged with a highly creative person's personal inspiration artifacts and ephemera.

The interior gallery exhibit combines inter-active areas for children with a charming video, a glass topped exhibit of her sketchbooks (oh to touch and page through them!!)  and three walls plus inner panels lined with her framed artwork - primarily gouache paintings.  Wish I lived closer, had a museum membership, and could bop in and out pretty much at will to really soak in the glory of her color mixing and its assured/inspired application.

  Had noticed on the way in there were postcards in the gift shop.  Mostly of Carle's work but with some very memorable others as well. Was thrilled to find three of the Kalman paintings I'd most enjoyed studying.  It's not even close to looking at the originals but more than enough to prompt my visual memory concerning what I most enjoyed during my time with them.

Kalman's fascination with the Lincoln family delights me because I share it.   I also have a life-long love of illustrated road trip illustrations.  But my personal show-stopper OF the show - making its postcard take-along all the more happiness inducing - was the NY harbor fireworks display.  magenta-to-pink-to-orange is my inner child/crone woman's color Peak happiness zone.  And the range is so brilliant subtle in its fluidity within the actual painting.  In your face for sure but absolutely worth looking closely for a while to see what it's really going on beyond the blare. Not unlike taking in a fireworks display.

(if you'd like to see any of these three in more detail like the two below shoot me an email and I'll oblige.)

Am including two additional illustrator's art in postcard form because they fit so well with the themes of this blog.  Above is from Jerry Pinkney - an illustration for A Starlit Somesault Downhill by Nancy Willard.

This one grabbed my heart and held on tight.  In fact, when I got home I found a like-new copy of the book for less money than the postage to get it here.  Book is called The Secret River by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.  Illustration is by Leon and Diane Dillon.

11. in which cohesion extends itself

Here at long last is the lovely winding brook that hooks our tiny stream into the powerful waterway of our closest river. 

I've only been here twice with yesterday being the second time.  The first time was during the late summer of our first year living in this place.  J. had been walking and riding his bike throughout the local byways.  Sometimes just after the peak of summer's Golden Hour we'd jump in the truck and he'd show me local sites he knew would be of interest to me.

Back then:  Even though the growing season's foliage was beginning to thin there was still too much vegetation to see the above side of the brook.  But yesterday I could plainly visualize the Way it must meander to the point I've already documented right here.  The portion of the brook pictured as this post's lede  was partially obscured with copious festoons of Virgin's Bower.  Their petals were dried to browning threads or fallen.  I leaned in so close, atop an unstable embankment, that I nearly toppled over in my effort to get a decent closeup of the nearest whirling seedheads yet-to-be.

A few moments later J. alerted me that someone had clocked us and was 'coming down'.  I asked what that meant without losing focus of framing options.  As is our way if he's driving or I'm taking pictures, I received an ongoing narration of all he observed of the woman's approach.   a woman, definitely, without a gun.  She's older.  Can't tell if she's angry or afraid ...

It turned out she was neither.  She'd noticed us stop in a place where nobody does that and then observed me lurching.  On what was a very warm evening. Thought it might be a health crisis in need of extra help.  We all exchanged names.  After four months of living here she was the first person to offer us a name and express awareness we existed as actual people rather than Whoever bought the house we'd purchased.

(now on the brink of a solid decade living in such a culture I do it too at least in casual social-construct conversation: automatically communicating via the now-ingrained Whoever thing.  As a description of somebody - an actual person who probably wouldn't like it any more than I did in the beginning - who wasn't there before.  Whoever.)

Sometimes within the first few years of living here and still not knowing more than one other neighbor by name we would marvel at how bizarre it was that this was obviously normal business as usual for people living in a terrain where a person really ought to know who they live in community with and be on at least sporadic speaking terms with them.  We would look at each other with slowly shaking heads whenever we had these discussions; dismayed by the folly of humans declaring each other irrelevant to a level of bedrock foolishness.  Then one would remind the other well we know (person in this story's name).  Closing in on a decade we don't have these conversations anymore.  We'd be able to list a couple dozen people between us and, in point of truth, part of why we wished to live here specifically was so we wouldn't feel forced into continuous social rigors brought on by closer proximity to other lives in different dwellings.

*~*

Many years later the same woman wandered, on a spur of the moment whim, into the first session of the library collage lab.  I didn't recognize her until after the fact nor did she recognize me.  She raised her hand quite promptly when I asked who believed they weren't creative.  And shook her head in disbelief when I assured them they'd all be leaving with a book they'd made themselves.  Later I observed her carefully searching through all the old national geographics.  It wasn't until I prowled back around as she was preparing to stitch that I saw she'd methodically tracked down every tiger image she could find.  And I hope never to forget the precise illumination of her smile and the soft lilt in her voice as she said to me I made a book.

A few weeks later we were rear-ended and my brain got dinged so the following month's planned session was postponed.  She'd come on the pre-arranged date - bringing with her paper she'd purchased in Italy years before and wished the program to use in some way.  But she never returned.  By then I'd realized who she was (She has a very common first name - the kind that might not stick out in a conversation unless you had another piece or two of personal meaning to attach) and kept hoping she'd re-appear.  Yesterday while I was at the brook I glanced up the hill of her front lawn a couple of times.  Wishing for a little past is prologue action.

In the town where I was raised a few hundred miles south of here I would not have thought twice about pulling my car around to the bottom of her drive, re-parking it, and  walking up to her door in order to re-introduce myself.  Here, after nearly a decade of being here, I simply made note of that fact.  Got back into my car to reflect on what had become a very meandering route home. Thought I'd had two posts worth of experiences and images but there on that brief semi-colon of a road so close to my own front door I realized it would actually be three.  Because I so loved and wished to include the way this speck of a moment could be expanded upon to include synchronicity with the collage theme going on at my other blog.

and far more importantly:

This is water directly connected to not just our stream but also our well. They're both given some derivation of the same water to hold.  So this tiny little nook of a place just a bit further down the massive hill on which I live IS my life.  Its water is the wild inverse of my life's ability to maintain itself in ways I consider normal and necessary.  If for no other reason - this part of my documentation effort deserves and needs to  stand alone.

~*~

From now on I'm going to walk to this place.  I'll let that walk be the sole purpose out on such occasions - treating a previous afterthought as its own purposeful excursion - rather than a quick something I accomplish in the midst of several other Out In The World things on my to-do list.  This is my literal back yard.  Will definitely walk there for any future visits.

10. be the change

The other day I realized I still had an ongoing reason to travel near the river/oaks twice a month.  Once a new year begins part of my ongoing routine involves picking up our winter bread shares from a local baker.  I thought I picked it up (from the designated local health food/general store) on Tuesdays but apparently I was wrong.  I'll be maintaining the same mid-week schedule until late Spring.  Today I was pleasantly surprised to admire a new mural just outside the store.  After learning I was there a day too soon I proceeded to the river.

Upon arrival I found a man quasi-napping in his car just to the right of the trees.  So I pulled in closer to the road hoping he'd be gone by the time I was heading back to my car. [he was not.] Headed along fenced pavement across the bridge in order to document the western river view.  This morning there was more of an icy rim at the bank edges but the river itself was moving with a lot more momentum and vigor than I've seen in several weeks.

If you look closely you'll see that a foot or more of previously iced snowfall is now below the waterline.    The wind was mild yet brisk in its velocity.  Traffic was very scarce.  I took my time crossing the road and walking down the boat launch on the other side of the bridge.

Ducks scattered from both water and banks at my approach.  The water moving east was really moving.   I saw evidence of a tussle between a female mallard and something that pulled a lot of feathers.  The scene lacked any hint of carnage.  I picked up a joined trio of feathers and released them into the air while wishing the duck safe passage.  Thought about what it would mean to my weekday structure and its points of focus if I were to officially make Wednesday a follow-the-water day.  It could mean so many things beyond just visiting various spots in order to document them.   The creek our little stream feeds into can be visited on foot provided there's not too much plowing build up and ice usurping the main road's shoulder.  I could, with time, become adept at a larger walking loop that most likely has unknown-to-me water ways and small ponds. 

In the days since my last River post I have moved from a sense of emotional cataclysm to one of certainty and redoubled focus on what it means for me to achieve and maintain good inner and outer balance.   I know any sort of healing from ruptured trust is inherently a form of grieving.  And this is never a linear trajectory.  I don't intend to write about that moment of my life in this space again but I know the reverb factor will inform what I do or don't write in any given post.

As I'm sitting here typing on my laptop I can only see the lower portion of the river flowing east in the image above.  It's so obviously moving.  Although water can be parsed down to molecules it's really far more continuous in its nature.  Finite only when actively manipulated and deliberately contained somehow.  I look at all the water around me and think about areas of this country/planet where people have their daily water piped-in for a staggering number of miles.   And whoever has the political clout/capital to put on the line has the lion's share of water.  Have seen, heard and read about it time after time.  Something so basic contained and withheld by so much greed.

Back in early '02 I thought about water manipulated into traveling great distance to fulfill a basic human need quite a lot.  My family was traveling through northern Italy.  During certain days of our two week road trip there we would often cross paths with vast panoramas dominated by monolithic sections of ancient Roman aqueducts.  I wondered how somebody had known where to start figuring out such a system in the first place - and how many people it had taken to prop-up and devote their lives to the person who had the idea and then to whomever carried it to enough fruition to be worth all the idea/engineering time.

Maybe this sort of far from magical feat has played a part in why we as a species are so sure we're the most intelligent life form on the planet.    Maybe?

.8 following a starry wish

Above is a slightly altered picture from yesterday's lowering sun phase approximately a half hour before sunset.  Stand still with me for a few minutes here at the Enfield lookout point, won't you?  We're overlooking a vast body of water called the Quabbin Reservoir.  This is a primary source of Boston drinking water.  The link I selected tells of towns Lost by way of deliberately sinking them.  Everything you see above, beautiful as it is, exists as a false landscape that was manufactured so that a roiling metropolis' human population 70 miles away could sustain their need for drinkable/safe water as the decades rolled by.

[as just one example the hilly peninsulas chaining one after the other as far as the eye sees are actually submerged mountain peaks.]

That said The Quabbin is an undeniably beautiful place to visit and wander around at length.  I lightened the pictures for this post because so many I know to be reading here constitute a Tree Crowd.  And there are most certainly seemingly endless crowds of trees telling the story of what has Become here at the reservoir park.  Also of note:  the peninsula on the left side of the top image is off limits to humans.  This is a place where the eagles come to nest and raise their young.   Birders with enormous scope lenses dominate the parking and first-row viewing spaces once these raptors have been spotted heading north. 

Yesterday in the later afternoon J. and I drove out to the Pioneer Valley for a seasonal ritual of great meaning to us.  Along the way I figured I'd take some pictures of the Boston area's primary water supply because even though it's not moving water it's certainly very significant water indeed.  It's also sacred ground for local fishermen and home to innumerable groves of vibrant birches and a pleasantly spooky long-abandoned apple orchard.  Since 9-11 anywhere remotely close to the water has been on lockdown or actively monitored by state employees in boats constantly on the prowl. 

I have vivid memories of what it was like here in the direct aftermath of an occasion when MA figured prominently in Security Failure news of huge magnitude.  That's because - macro to micro - in the same unprecedented window of experience I spent a great deal of time here.  This is the place - and it was the time - where/when I first began to actively merge the sciencey part of my nature interests with the vibrational certainties I'd yet to collate very effectively.   It's how I found personal stability and meaning during a time when so many people I knew kept asking me how they could/should find it.

below see the Eagle Zone in its entirety.

~*~*~*~*~

As twilight fell we drove through a great many of our history's familiar haunts.  Amherst has strong meaning beginning with the sixth month mark of our initial merging together.  And - two months in between not-being and being-All - I was staying in nearby Hadley when I realized ALL OF A SUDDEN that I was deeply in love with J. and drove all over the rural highways looking for a pay phone on which to call and privately tell him Back There in the shared hometown I had recently left for good and all.)

Yesterday was once the future.  And within it - all these years later - we arrived at a stop sign directly across the road from a house and property we've kept track of in an automatically loving way for the last few arcs of our story.  In its yard is a Beech tree I've bonded with a couple of extra-memorable times.  And in point of fact I have waaay too many pictures earmarked to include in a post about The Silent Communicator sometime in the new year.  Yesterday a large truck blocked any decent view of it. So I looked at the house and how it's changed since I had opportunities to examine certain portions of it in a close-up fashion.

When we got home I looked up the listing because our price guessing had been all over the map. In the end we amalgamated everything and estimated something pretty close to the asking price.  So there's a pointless skill to hone, eh?  price is right scenarios for things that have no bearing on one's own life.  And reading the realtor's layout description gave me serious vertigo.  Just to see the place described as a normalized home-life setting as, no doubt, originally intended.  I wondered if the yard still contained a sizeable Chicken compound.

[this place is known to us because our son lived there during his college years with 9 other people.  Every semi-private alcove of space that could be used as a bedroom was deemed to be such in order to keep the individual sliding scale rent rates as low as possible.  Fourteen years ago the three of us spent Christmas day together in the otherwise empty house there.  But evidence of extensive and frenetic habitation was all around us on that switched-plans day.  One of T's roomates had their dog sitter bail at the very last moment and he agreed to stay there for the animal's wellbeing.  Shortly before eleven on Christmas Eve our family plans pivoted for what proved to be a memorable holiday tale we enjoy re-telling to this day - heavy emphasis on the dog and the way she and J. took to each other like Long Losts.]
~*~*~*~*~*~

This morning I woke up wondering who might have the means and vision to buy this place and either make it the home and studio it once was or revert to using it as an income base for the very classic MA rite of young adulthood life lived among kindred peers in an old farmhouse loaded in equal measure with charm and windy drafts.  Every time I imagined people with the means for either I further imagined these people had a child. And the child ran straight to the Beech tree when the family first toured the [extensive] gardens.  And the way the child hugged the tree and leaned back to stare up at it made their parents smile at each other.  Yes.  This is their Place.  Screw one of their older siblings foolproof moneymaking plan of letting yet another generation of students run rampage. They'd figure it out to the bare bone - rent out the studio to a low key grad student and set about having a life they meant to live as deliberately as possible. 

I wondered if it could (still) be possible:  if a specific magnificent tree and a child not yet entirely shuttered by Devices could be destined for mutual companionship for a very long time to come.  Still.  Still.  Could that still happen?  Don't know if I'm able to actively believe it could and will but I'm certainly inclined to wish for such a lovely wish to be made real.

I am probably one of the least happy-ending dependent/Hallmark channel sort of people I know.  But far more importantly I want that magnificent tree to remain in place and authentically valued by a human companion.  And for that alliance to mean, on many levels of the deepest kind, absolutely everything to somebody quite young who has so much to figure out and survive largely because their human predecessors quite deliberately chose to drop the ball time after time.

  Last week when I visited the river I took many pictures.  In between two images of ice-encrusted river bank the above image appeared.  I thought of posting it as an Other contribution to the re-connection but also thought doing so lacked a viable context.  Then I thought: wait until it's time to make a wish publically.  Huh?  but now that quiet inner suggestion makes a little bit of sense.

a contrast in days

Yesterday around two in the afternoon from my studio window.  It snowed for a couple of hours with just enough precipitation to dust everything newly white and sparkly.  Above is the closest I can get to a true portrait of the four-trunked maple I consider to be our home's Place/Keeper as well as the property's southern guardian.  On the first day after we'd spent a night here, I went out on the porch with a few important garden talismans I wanted to introduce to this Place.  One of these was a large whelk shell I'd found in my mother's garden a few days after she died.  I took it home and placed it in my own garden the following spring.  And then placed it in another and then we came here.  I placed the shell very carefully on a large heavy rock that's just below the tree atop a low stone wall that's buried under the snow in the image above.

A family of nuthatches was living in a prominent hole of the middle trunk at the time.  As soon as I walked back to the porch and sat down a few of them emerged in order to talk at length and with considerable emotion - curiosity, uncertainty, excitement to be confronted with something new BUT WHY  - all the things humans do when something unexpected shows up on their doorstep.  I took the shell away when I realized that.  Two years ago it finally found a significant purpose when my son moved back home with a 50 gallon fish tank and four freshwater friends in addition to the splendiforous Mama Cat.  One bottom dwelling fish desperately needed a private place to Be and so I washed and offered the shell.  Felt that helped to balance the scales from having unintentionally freaked-out the nuthatches with the same object. 

and then - here's this morning

first snowfall

Thought it would be fun to share some of my documentation photos of the season's first snowfall.   Especially the above being so similar to the hazy green view of the same thing at the opposite point in the year.  Yesterday's predicted precipitation time frame was cut in half and so I declared the storm a dud at 8 inches.  But then a second snow band started adding to the mix around 4 in the afternoon.  And that one's been active until 20 minutes ago.  So it's quiet and white and timeless outside.  Winter's clearing her throat - letting us know she's about to take center stage.

If you look closely you'll see the uphill road dips and then rises to a stronger slant of incline.  This is a steep hill to walk and consequently it's an excellent cardio workout.  But not when the whole thing gets layered with impacted snow, ice, snow, ice, ice. 

Last night right before I went to bed I watched the wind blowing snow from the top deck railing.  Was amazed the difference the slight elevation made because nothing was blowing off the fence gate or sheltered-by-fence picnic table.  When I got downstairs around seven this morning I learned J. was told by his boss that he might as well work from home again today.  That gave me a back-up for my snowfall estimate.  We agreed on 14 inches.

Since it was so early in the day and there are some miles to go with neglected chores and incomplete organizational upgrades here in the house, I didn't linger a lot while taking these pics. My venture outside wasn't to commune at length so much as it was to silently address the snow (you are back.  I am grateful.  Please blanket the ground safely and securely as much as you can in your natural season)  take these pictures and put seed out for the birds.  A mixed flock surrounded me as I walked away and they all descended to the rocks.  The chickadees flying close enough to hear their wing flutters rhythmic and strong in my ears; the titmice circling noisily overhead along with jays while silent wary cardinals watched it all from the shelter of pine boughs within the adjacent volunteer windrow.

Until this point in the yearly cycle I generally let myself sit in this chair for a little while to watch them feed and interact with each other.  Now I regret not pushing myself that one last extra quarter mile to carry them into the dog run over the weekend.  But there's always the January thaw...and I did get the two little garden strips by the porch's walkway mulched while the first flakes of the first snow band fell.

Standing Still With Water.4

In this week's Riverview report:  I developed an active connection to the young oak closest to the river despite a pool of mental distraction along the way.  Was, before getting behind the wheel, smiling from a place of ease.  But once I started driving it seemed I was automatically moving myself straight into a no-win corner of trying to figure out everything we could possibly need if, during the predicted storms of the coming days, the electricity goes down for an indeterminate length of time.  Or fallen trees block the road and then also everything stops in place even further due to long-term black ice and/or fallen live wires.  Or if black ice becomes so treacherous a state emergency is declared for a few days' running.  Suppose fallen trees and/or live wires block entry or exit from the driveway and it takes a scary long time before that's fixed due to so many other live wires blocking so many other driveways.  Which has actually happened here, as have all these other things. Most of them (except the live wires blocking the driveway) more than just once or a scant few times.  Just as a regular part of winter.  A regular part of life's rhythmn.

What do we Need?  Nothing. Sure?  Positive.  No such thing as positive if we can't Get Out for awhile.  Let's take it from the top.  What do we Need? 

It was a relief worthy of some other deeper-level name to understand what I in particular needed was to shut this level of brain stuff all the way down and simply breathe deeply once my car was parked and I was There.  

[as I write this Here in the future of Then - it's 6 in the evening and pitch-dark except when lightning flares light single portions of the sky.  The thunder is loud but not directly overhead.  Hail's hitting hard against the studio windows.  We don't need or even merely want anything that isn't already here or utterly unavailable to us.  That makes the storm feel invigorating.  I'm free to revel in the Thunder Beings breaking up every energetic thing that's too stuck or otherwise past its expiration date.  To picture so many of my beloved plants safely nestled in their mulch cocoons.  To smile.  Just because it's been a good day and promises to be an equally good evening.] 

Hello.  Find Yourself Here Now.

There/then:  I was being addressed by the young sentry tree.  Felt that distinctive zap of communicative connection without question or doubt.  Having visited this place for five relatively consecutive Wednesday mornings I have a sense that All involved have helped choreograph a basic routine that is becoming muscle-memory natural to me.  Being here is a form of walking yoga as well as whatever it was that occurred on an unexpectedly vertical plane between the two oaks.  On this occasion my entire body is THERE - all the way IN that place the second my shoes hit the ground.  I let the oaken channel guide my steps.  And noticed I was both a lot more careful and considerably more sure-footed as a result.  First stop:  the mulleins growing inconveniently but, being mulleins, they are continuing to thrive nonetheless.

And then a slight backtrack to the Oak Pair for this week's portrait before heading more directly, and a lot closer, to the young sentry Oak.  I would have moved even nearer; close enough for touch but that would've been quite a mistake for somebody on a schedule who lacked boots and/or a change of shoes, slacks and socks.  I did get close enough to grasp the land looks stable enough from afar but it's seriously marshy up close.

I am a greeter not a sentry.  There are the sentries. 

I felt myself directed to look Beyond.  Towards far-off bare hardwood trees congregated here and there on each diminishing curve of the westward river. 

I see. Thank you very much for showing me. 

It felt right to go back to silent communication after just becoming not-so-uncomfortable with vocalizing my communicative contributions.  I breathed deeply into this familiar co-creative comfort zone and without doubt I sensed oaken roots breathing even deeper into this spot of theirs.  Their world.  Knowing of Oaks holding space everywhere and many other things but this is THEIR place. 

Thank you for letting me know you can hear and feel me caring about you.  For showing me who your tribe is. 

I cried a little in a very pure moment of overwhelming gratitude.  The tears were thick and copious but they dried almost instantly once I felt myself opening psychically.   My crown, palm and sole,secondary heart chakras opened with a gentle lack of fuss or ceremony; they simply opened like a blooming rose brought into a warm room - in complimentary unison and then there I was:  suddenly capable of feeling myself pulled deeper into an under-ground vibe and the pulsing divine presence of universal Root Medicine.    It was so vivid I could almost feel the snap and tingle of the tiny ice crystals forming just under the surface of the ground.  I caught my breath.  This was really happening.  Sometimes, in the past, this kind of occurrence causes a reflexive tightening up and shutting down.  What if this is NOT real and I'm merely batshit crazy?  That recurring fear, all by itself, has the power to hold me steady in Lack Of Progress and/or Getting Nothing where authentic celebration of sentience is concerned.  But not today.  I breathed deeply.  Felt the landscape breathing as a single entity.  I was part of it.  Everything breathed together and I felt, as oaken roots might feel, the rise of slowly moving water energy.  YES. We were all together and it was very googoogajoob groovy indeed. Today there would be no fear or panic or second guessing reality beyond predictable human confines or any other reflex that sets far too many ultimately irrelevant terms to also be a state of true Be-ingness.  Sometimes that happens, still.  But not today.

Thank you for letting me in.   Into this Place.

I felt as if I was mentally chanting.  That, once I was home and the coming storms stopped I could move with privacy among the oaks scattered at the edges of our field's wild windrow.  And there I would find the right vocal tones of the silent chant. I smiled to picture myself stomping around our place all winter chanting out loud.

Thank you for letting me in.

And then as a clear and direct reply The Greeter sang a very swift-paced and incredibly beautiful song.  Hard to explain via words but I felt this song vibrationally - as sound travels through wood.   This is something I know of from the decades full of sensing the way any wood in our home is enlivened and brought back to its living essence whenever J. plays bass for an un-distracted and extended period of time - particularly The Big Boy; his acoustic upright.  This is something I love to experience but now i was having the opposite experience of a tree's vibrational sound expressions passing through me and reverberating the way J.'s bass playing passes through the wood throughout our home.  Everything becoming one long evenly vibrating ribbon of sound translated far beyond the sense of hearing that ribbon undulate and unspool further and further.  Who knows where and when the language of wood stops vibrating?  Maybe it never does.

I also felt The Greeter's song as the river might receive it:  as if it was an all encompassing gentle breeze of universal language.  I felt the song encompass everything I had told the pair of oaks when I first arrived but now in this re-telling my introduction to pair and place was focused primarily on the tree in my backyard as kid.  Which was known to be from a different species.  In somewhat abrupt conclusion The Greeter sang about squirrels - even more quickly and just as beautifully.   It might have been a micro-second.  Or even something I dreamed during the night and then through some sort of confirmation bias I attributed it to the tree as it Was.  But no.   IT was as I felt it to be.

 By now my brain was chattering very feebly and sporadically -purely out of reflex - concerning the proper necessary foot gear for getting closer to the water and The Greeter.  And then. I stood all the way still, finally, all of a sudden.   It was as if I'd never done anything else, stood there looking at a part of the river's view of land on its far side that I deliberately choose not to photograph or otherwise share with word imagery.  Beyond this:  stiff peaked whitewashed 18th century farmhouses dot the higher rises nestled among an evergreen wall of dark green.  And the visible roils of granite ledge pushed far above ground. 

Some of these farms are known at a personal level.  One in particular is beloved for multiple reasons.  I watched mist rise from the ground as parallel smoke rose from the houses' tall brick chimneys.  And saw a gull pass overhead with something long and limp in its beak.  I saw in a perfectly still and well-rooted manner with slowly dawning awareness:  The Greeter was showing me how it lives.  What it senses of the landscape.  What it has come to know as part of itself and part of Beyond. Whoa. I stood still as an oak tree feeling what it was like to be just one young well-placed life form embracing everything about its existence with full sensory capabilities. I breathed in the purely loving energy of this sharing and exhaled heart-spawned gratitude.  Did a counted breath mini-meditation that left my heart and lungs fully open and my brain at least partially grounded in a focus of keeping myself out of spaceshot harms way before crossing the road to approach the river itself.

I kept my senses elevated.  Noticing my joints no longer object to the slanted walk downward.   Appreciating the many layers of ever so slightly different reddish-browns in the dried stalks of still-sturdy vegetation all around.  At the time it seemed likely we'd escape the doom and gloomy weather prediction for at least a few hours.  Maybe for an entire 24 hours until everyone could safely get to where-ever they were going for tomorrow's Day of Eating. But the image above proved to be the brightest the day ever got.  Not yet knowing that I stood before the sun and its reflection.  HELLO.  I closed my eyes and stood more like a water reed than a young oak tree.  For you to take.  Spirit of Place, I thought at first.  Telling me in some Yoda-like way to drink the moment all the way in one cell at a time.  For. You. To know. Come closer.

I was drawn directly forward.  After I snapped the above image I walked all the way down the slanting cement boat launch.  Assuming I now understood.  Because I suddenly saw the "inlet" I've been admiring for years is actually a tributary feed coming into the opposite side of the river.    FOR.  YOU.  And as I felt myself nudged downward ever closer to the water's surface I finally got it.   I was being given a gift.  Once that clicked the rest was easy.  Water energy moved through me - lazy slowing down seasonally dark and ever-potent water guided me to select a shell fragment and a small round stone.

The water was much warmer than I expected.  Not warm by strict definition but not yet shock-cold like I assumed it would be.  It was merely cold like the tap water in my studio faucet roundabout mid-February.  And as the river's energy and literal watery self moved into every crack or crevice of my palms  they felt a lot more healed than they look.  I compassionately noticed the folly of skipping my normal hand-care routine since the previous morning.  Understood without judgement that I'd imagined myself too busy or distracted or interested in something else or entirely too tired to stop long enough to do it.  I examined my gifts, especially the luminosity of the shell fragment.  And the river mentioned something very sacred that has become a cornerstone of my personal taproot's energy.  The gifts having been offered with intention for inclusion and it was such an obvious (and perfect) suggestion that I stood absolutely still staring into my own rough-hewn palm.  I don't know how long it was of standing so still before I could hear the water's steady movement.  Not approaching, passing or retreating traffic.  Not voices amplified here and there - raised in most cases specifically to make use of the water's sound amplification powers.  No chattering seasonal thoughts.  Just standing still and fully present in the place and my body right there at the river's edge.

ouch

Hello.  I'd like to introduce you to one of my most important tree friends here in the walking-around world of my life since the late '90's.  This is a Shagbark Hickory that may or may not still exist within the energetically percolating surroundings of a nearby nature sanctuary that's definitely still "with us".  I'd planned to take a jaunt over there at some point during the weekend to see if the tree still stood.  My sense is that it does. 

The plan was to go there on something of a re-con in and out mission due to hunting season.  After not being there for ten years the instinct is to wander around at length looking and examining privately while also documenting all areas that I used to document when this was my Wild place to go.  Take an offering of a very specific nature for the tree, hug it if it still stands.  Take some pictures if that felt right.

The idea's been germinating since partway through my reading of The Overstory but by last mid-week it felt imperative that I take myself there ASAP.  Not sure why.  But it's certainly true that this specific tree  remains a shining beacon to me in meditation, dreams and by way of the infinitude of pictures I took of it during all seasons over the course of 6 or 7 years' time.  But then something or other that I did on Friday made my lumbar spinal region quite unhappy.  It coulda been anything, really, because I was 'way more into getting things done bing bam boom than I was mindful of how, exactly, I was [evidently mis]-using my body along the way.

In consequence I'm currently having a lot of sciatic nerve pain from its root allllllll the way along its course, top to tip.  This is not a new thing for me - it's just a thing I generally stay mindful enough to avoid aggravating to the degree that I have to stop my life to get things properly soothed and healed.  I haven't answered any emails since this re-injury made itself known.  Will get back to everyone as soon as it's no longer foolish to sit up and type in this manner for more than the time it's taken me to get this written and posted.

LOVE.

This was the third or fourth time I hugged the Shagbark Hickory.  The scarred-over wound portrait at the top of this post contained holes where I left many gifts and healing talismans as offerings to the tree's medicine spirit.  Did this for more than a year before telling the tree I was moving in for the embrace.  Will tell that story at some point after my spine's in a better state of balance.

Place/Keeping .1

Walden Pond.  Living Deliberately.  Long revelatory conversations with significant friends talking passionately together while perambulating the pond; deeply immersed in the details of whatever we were deliberately making of our shared and individuals lives.  Tourists speaking animatedly in a number of languages.  People walking quite deliberately by themselves; often with a book in hand and a special passage within it marked by a careful finger. Looking around.  Looking Within.

Walden Pond. 

In the image above the right hand side of the background features a long tiered wooden structure where people sit, talk, and ease themselves into the water for a bit of swimming.  My son learned to swim in that spot as a young boy.  We were inner city dwellers at the time and summertime weather could get stifling despite the harbor breeze.  Looking back at my small but mighty family's shared root system, I often reflect on the innumerable times we'd pile in the car and arrive at the pond just in time for the magical early evening glow's debut.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.

My interest in/appreciation of Thoreau began in childhood.  My grandmother used to read me Walden Pond any time I got upset and couldn't find a way to calm down again.  That's what it used to be called, especially for children: calming down.  But now I see what I needed to do was nothing short of totally re-rebooting my emotional barometer.  I'd be spinning out emotionally in a very unquiet way and she'd firmly open to the bookmarked page and begin reading in a loud unquestioning tone from where-ever we left off the last time this happened.  She wouldn't stop until I'd long since stopped out-bursting emotionally and was actually listening.  Had been listening for quite a number of minutes.  Because she was reading me something other than the bible.  That alone gave this book and whoever wrote it very special status, indeed. 

Whenever we reached the end of Walden Pond we'd begin again on the heels of fresh Upset.  This went on straight up until she went in the hospital and, eventually, died there from stage 4 lymphoma cancer.  I was seventeen and it was the literal eve of Nixon's resignation.  My mother came home said well it's over, and asked me to give her the name of somebody she could call to be with me while she devoted herself to calling relatives and friends.  I blurted out the name of a 21 year old guy I knew through church and community theater.  Once, about a month earlier, I'd gotten tipsy on beer in his back yard and boldly sat on his lap unannounced and uninvited.  She called him, not knowing what else to do.  And he in turn had notknownwhatelse showed up with a six pack and willingness to drive us both around town barely speaking until we settled-in at his newly married buddy's house.

It embarrassed me tremendously to be in a married couple's house when the people involved were just 3 and 4 years older than me and we all knew all sorts of weird and mortifying things about each others parents due to being from the same church group.  I didn't know where to look or what to say but fortunately I was largely ignored. There was a single bookshelf with mostly high school 70's english class  novels sitting on it.  Walden Pond was there.  I stared at it for a long time, wondering if I should be worried that I had no desire or ability to cry and couldn't really remember my grandmother as she'd been when she read to me.  It took her a long time - well over a year - to waste away to death without once knowing why it was happening.  Her doctor and my mother believed if she knew she'd stop wanting to live.

[no comment.  Which of course means I actually have several in mind I'm all too prepared to share but this is neither the time nor the setting.]

It really bothered me that she didn't know why she was sick and unable to ever be well enough to return home.  If she couldn't get home, to her bible and various representations of her faith, would she be able to move on to where-ever?

On the first evening of her passing I abruptly stopped worrying about whatever might or might not happen when I got back home and whether or not Pearl would be able to make her way towards St. Peter and her deceased siblings without her bible.  Because the newly married couple had weed in addition to seemingly endless beer. Had I not reached out to accept the joint I would have become the focus of the entire evening.  I didn't want that.  They were leaving me alone because they thought I was numb with grief and it was fine with me to not-realize they were absolutely correct in that assessment. 

Nobody wanted to talk about The Whole Nixon Thing.  They talked instead about camping at the Delaware Water Gap.  I'd smoked before but not effectively.  My grandmother was dead.  That left my mother in charge.  The only other time I've felt that specific combination of terror and dread with such intensity was later in the evening on election night 2016.  At that time I thought not so much of Thoreau but of Emily Dickinson.  I'm nobody who are you.  We'd all be nobodies soon.  That was so clear to me I'd been clinically depressed since the previous summer.  I might have remained in that condition if  closed head brain trauma hadn't shifted the narrative in so many unexpected ways just a few days later.

Back in the Nixon era thread of this post I effectively got high for the first time on the night of the day when my grandmother died.  That's how one of the assembled Old Friends in that living room put it.  I was effectively stoned which in my case meant sitting stock-still and silent.  Looking around with enormous eyes.  Our hosts had a land tortoise.  Sometimes it was on one floor of the house and other times it was lumbering in an excruciatingly slow way in a quiet corner of the other.  I once saw it climbing up the stairs.  On that night the weed was stronger than usual and an enormous need to speak instead of Just Sitting There suddenly overcame me.  I stood up with dramatic pointing of fingers on both hands and shrilly announced the reptile's laborious movements.  

The tortoise - about whom I never once asked a single question although I was even more painfully curious in those days than I was shy - was, ultimately, pretty much the most interesting and tenderhearted aspect of that elongated moment from my past.  I was intensely curious about the creature and wanted badly to get to know it better but I never indicated any such thing in the months I dated That Guy and therefore spent more weekend evenings than not sitting in that specific living room.  Smoking just enough weed not to be noticed and then potentially questioned by the group; abstinence of any kind at any point in the proceedings was viewed as subversive rather than sensible.  Or inhaling with clear intent to keep going until the last seed popped whenever my mother happened to be Acting Up. 

Nearly everyone who gathered there in that plaid-upholstered '74 living room of Young Lives/Anytown USA had at least one parent who Acted Up on the regular.  All I had to say upon arrival was that tonight it was once again happening at my house.  I learned how to relay the information breezily and without the slightest inner feeling.  Managing a smile at times, almost, and oftentimes while UNawkwardly accepting the proffered joint that hovered closest to me once Acting Up was mentioned .  Then I was free to get back to watching the tortoise because everyone involved accepted that's what I did once I smoked.  My grandmother remained dead.  She'd been the one who raised and cared for/about me.  She was gone with a finality that for me befitted the way she'd lived.  So I kept that in mind in place of grief expressions that 'wouldn't bring her back.'  It seemed likely she'd be proud of me, if she was able to know about it, for holding that kind of line as she'd worked diligently to teach it to me.

Be sensible.  Have a bank account into which you unfailingly put a solid half of everything you earn. No use in crying over spilled milk.  One way or another pretty much everything in life boiled down to spilled milk and I'd see that for myself once I was Old Enough.  Respect the president of the country no matter what he does.  Never LOOK at a hippie let alone become one.  BE. SENSIBLE.  Always be clear about  what you love and don't let anyone take it away from you, ever.

Everyone I knew fully realized she'd been my lifeline.  Everyone, including That Guy and his friends who all understood I was even more transient from their point of view than I felt myself to be, kept eyeing me nervously waiting for me to lose it in some spectacular wreckage of a Way. 

Maybe I never did - then, or any time since, because my grandmother was no longer available to read Walden Pond to me until I pulled myself back together.

I went to the woods.

The above image was taken from an outlook that's either two or one third(s) of the way around depending on whether you proceed clockwise or counterclockwise at the pond's beach-based entry point. I used to walk the perimeter paths a lot during the year when my son was learning to swim in the company of his father and, oftentimes, a family friend with a loud hearty laugh.  T. would laugh as loudly as he could in imitation of the sound.  I'd hear them both as I walked no matter how far away they were; their joy amplified to ambient status thanks to water's sound conduit properties

In my own case I initially 'went to the woods' because it was there in a way the civilized world was not and could never be.  And because I thought dominant culture was based on absolute insanity borne of shortsightedness. (Plus the way our culture arranged itself with our complicit acceptance if not approval into contortions so toxic or soul-numbingly petty and trivial in comparison to what society could be).  I didn't see how I could possibly live well or even at all with the hurt and apprehension that conventional living evoked in me.  I started reading Thoreau for myself as a young adult for much the same reasons.   More than once I've found my sense of personal equilibrium and resolve through the words I do indeed at times read aloud to myself.  I sit bolt upright when I do it, holding the book and my uncompromising tone of voice just like my grandmother would.  But I never really thought about that until just now.

Above is my favorite outlook point at the pond's perimeter.  The first picture in this post features the view Thoreau might have seen when he ventured out of his cabin and took in the new day's air.  Once, back when the second bush-president had declared the official opening of the second gulf war, my moments of peak despair were interrupted by news of an impending release of Faith in a Seed.   Just thinking about that (and a fresh out-loud re-reading of On Civil Disobedience) kept me going until J. gave me the book as a Christmas present.  I read it with such tender love and gratitude that each sentence took root in my soul.  And grew outwards embodied within my own faith in seeds of many kinds.

*****

Ever since children and babies started living in cages at the pleasure of our federal government - like that's a perfectly okay thing for an even partially civilized nation to do - I have been thinking about the stability and grounding I know I'd get from reading Faith again.  All the same I have been totally unwilling to give a book that means a great deal to me a connotation of this particular magnitude.   Maybe it's time for me to learn how to change my mind about these kind of things.  It's now.  It's happened and continues to be happening.   And yet.  When has faith in seeds ever been more relevant and meaningful?