Sparkling Lotus Ink

January Thaw .2

Let's take a little walk together.  You might remember all the leaves from a mid-autumn walk in many of the same places. As you can see they're still there settling further into the cellular world of the landscape's history.  On warmer February days I'll begin to groom the frog pond's rockscape in line with late winter pruning tasks.  But for now it's a symphony of decomposition.

Today was so warm that I expected to see a few oily black frog noses peeking through the slim passages of melted water.  Perhaps they sensed how brief the pleasant weather was going to be.  Am very thankful there was a break in the high to gale force winds of recent days so I had a chance for a lingering inspection tour before they descended again.  Looks like this may be our third consecutive January thaw when there's very limited time to be outside enjoying the smell of rising earth and perhaps managing to knock off a few of the lingering items on the Didn't Get Done list.

The stream water was very lively and crystal clear.  I took a little video at this spot and sent it to everybody I thought would be enchanted rather than annoyed.

The above stream views I habitually share are a familiar touchstone.  But when I keep walking into the woods the view quickly shifts to offer a fresh perspective.
not pictured: a daunting amount of fresh tree-fall debris. 
additional context:  on our first evening of so-called 'ownership' I discovered the landscaped pond was full of frogs.  J. discovered an enormous rock that grounds all energy and sight-lines in our backyard.
When we arrived the self-mulched area of the rock was dotted with Jack-in-the-Pulpits in full flower.    The following year I learned that in earlier spring Canadian anemones ring the rock's entire border.  Nearby is the first Hawthorne I noticed during my first full morning in residence.  It took me two magical hide-and-seek years to find its Grandmother.  Smaller rocks form stony breadcrumbs leading towards the heart of our little woods (pictured in the previous post with a look upwards at the heart's crown-land.

Since our arrival we've been encouraging various oak saplings throughout the property.  A few ring our shared hearthstone at the edge of the woods.

Before the third installment of my Thaw documentation let's take another moment to consider the lookout rock.

At some point the rock split.  A few spindly maples set their roots just there but all have died and subsequently fallen since our arrival.  Last year I used my grandmother's method of seeding woodland plants around our home's foundation to (hopefully) seed an additional colony of Jack in the Pulpits within the split.  Time will tell if I was successful. 

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?

.9 truth might not be simple/trigger warning

trigger warning.  FOR REAL. I'm going to post as briefly and as gently as I can about a core personal truth:  I was recently diagnosed as having lived in a state of active trauma for 90 per cent of my life.  I knew this to be true for any number of reasons but I also knew I saw no reason to let it stop me.  Pretty much on any level beyond the realm of steering clear of trigger happy situations if I had any advance warning that's what they were.

~*~*~~

SOMEBODY WHO READS HERE NEEDS TO READ THIS.  I'M NOT OFTEN AS CERTAIN OF SOMETHING AS I AM OF THAT IMPRESSION.  THAT'S WHY I'M WRITING IT.  and of course also because it has the same bedrock level truth about me and my days and how and why I am as I am as anything else that I share here.

*~*~*~*~*~

The primary reason - bundled with errands and occasional coffeehouse/girlz together time on the way home - I've been visiting the river on such a reliable timetable is because I've been going to therapy for what most people who love me tend to refer to as [my] situation.   I, in a very glib way that never hurts because I am by non-nurture very dark in my unexpurgated humor veining, like to refer to it with icy sarcasm as my condition.  The therapist I have been seeing truly felt like unshakeable proof the cosmos wished me to shine as never before.  Until something happened right before the winter holidays. She inadvertently triggered me in a way I couldn't let myself fully comprehend let alone express as it was happening.  

Timing-wise it was just then we skipped a week of sessions due to winter holidays.  During the first week I seesawed around in various levels of trigger reflection and rebound - nine-tenths of it alone up here in the studio.  I'm sure if it had been a regular week and we'd met I might have found my way around where I was headed.  At least on the outside and layers of personality focused on thinking with my brain rather than my gut and little shards of heartspace.  But on the inside I felt like a feral version of my child-self.  Every time I shoved my awareness back to the present tense I felt like Victoria Falls - heavy emphasis on falling - but on the outside I was holding it down with enough sincerity and grounding that I thought I'd be okay.  And I really was.  Until I wasn't. as in really REALLY wasn't.

When I explained it yesterday, in my final therapy session, I said the levee broke.  I looked into her eyes and she looked into mine and I made a smashed-apart gesture with my hands.  I said it just broke.  And she nodded.  She felt it and saw it.  I said  there is nothing but water everywhere.  And I saw her feel a pivotal particular trauma from a childhood crammed full of many.  She saw where I was going to take the session and I felt in every cell of my own body how difficult that must have been to take in and sit with and continue to track all the particles of meaning and grief and my stark-blind terror that were pulsing back and forth between us. 

My final words of truth spoken in a room that held me safe enough to now continue onward keeping myself safe here in another room and well beyond:  I ask a lot of myself everyday.  But I can't ask this.  It will break me.  Every time I think of - or very softly whisper just barely aloud to myself - I weep.  Have been weeping quite a lot but I think that's gotta happen.  It will have to be how and what I do for the next little while.

The oaks have known if not detail then both context and outcome.  They have spoken in their rustling firmness of the autumn season.  All of this is very temporary.  You have to be strong enough to see this before it explodes  I thought "this" referred to general life flow being safe and stable enough to be out toodling around living life as it might not stay.  Stoic to the bone but not really understanding until yesterday when I visited them.  I planned to stand between them with a palm on each trunk.  Looking for strength to do the unthinkable:  Something so counter-intuitive to 'common sense' and also everything I know and have experienced on both ends of the self-sabotage spectrum. 

oh no.  It was the greeter who threw me that just as I realized everything leading to the oak pair was a thick sheet of icy glass.  I thought the younger oak meant my intention to go anywhere but back in the vehicle. 

NO.  You KNOW that is the lie.

When I got home I realized I was going to write this post but I didn't know the turnaround time would be so soon.  Letting truth find its un-simple way into simple words has been profoundly grounding.   I hope my intuition is on track that somewhere somebody else feels that way just a tiny bit more from reading what I've shared.

Yesterday afternoon I took this image of myself as I was movin' and groovin' between activities related to the 30 day collage challenge I'm hosting on my creativity blog.  Inner wisdom suggested I would be including it somewhere in the post I'm just finishing.  I thought: the fuck I will.  Yet here I am doing it anyway...

.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.

.7 sharpening everyday senses

Today's morning Out took a different directional turn first thing in the morning but on my way back home  from my usual lineup of activities I noticed a dirt turnout close to the River Bridge was clear enough for me to risk parking on its icy crust.  I'd worn my thickest thermal socks and winter boots because I'd planned to walk around somewhere before I went home.   After I parked I followed some fresh and clearly purposeful coyote tracks.  They led to the western bank of a tributary I first noticed for what it was during this visit earlier in the fall.

The apparent whitish haze in the mid-distance is actually ice.  It's currently coating every leaf and branch in the outside world.

All vegetation was still as can be in the absence of wind.  Not so the birds scavenging with fierce intent.  They were a constant flurry of highly focused motion - much too busy to talk among themselves let alone pay much attention to me crunching my way along the stable ledge of water bank.  I'd never been here previously.  Only gazed at others parked in this spot in order to walk where I was now walking - wondering what their business was.  As to my own business on this day:  I followed my four legged relative's tracks trotting busily back and forth no doubt on the trail of small or medium sized rodents.

Stood for several long moments breathing deeply at this spot.  It was very cold (mid teens) to be standing still but I couldn't bear to rush this first introductory visit.  I kept smiling as I made my determined way towards the river and oaks.  I could do that because there was no wind today.  Had there been I might have gotten back in the car.  Had I done that I would have discovered all the snow blocking my usual parking space had melted in our recent rains.  I would have been warmer but I would have missed so much.  And am glad I didn't.

I took the above on my double-time lope back to the car.  By then my fingers actively hurt from the cold as did my toes.  I'm posting it out of sequence so you can easily compare what a difference a half an hour and some moody cloud cover can make in these parts.

 I crossed the road as soon as I spied safe and relatively sensible opportunities to shoot the western view from a different perspective.  The foraging birds were everywhere amidst the brush and marsh grasses.  I felt ecstatic to catch sight of the Oak pair on the other side of the bridge.

I chose the two images above (east facing first, then west) to share because they show so many variations of the way moving water changes form as a very gradual process.  Below all three Oaks share the same frame from a heightened perspective just before the bridge's sudden descent.

I was very joyous to be here again but kept my exchanges internal.  At the higher elevation the ice crust was thicker and slippery.  My imagination's engineer - always so eager to slide right on over into metaphor and potentiality - wasn't silent so much as otherwise engaged.  Today I was simply a woman walking briskly - one eye cocked towards the water.  Watching all the different layers of ways water slows down with the cold.   Paying special attention to some new wind/storm damage to the lunar oak.  Walking all around the pair's trunks about five feet away from them with my right palm extended towards their bark so we could exchange vibrational hellos.  I recognized that it can be as joyous as it is vexing (as well as, let's face, often just as pragmatically likely as not to be the Biggest Mistake Ever) to throw out every plan and rule book and ethical premise a person authentically values.  Just as a way to keep up more cogently with what's actually happening in and around all our various spheres of influence.

But mainly I simply was.  There.  I was There.  Taking my place - even though it moved around a lot today - here in this landscape.  I felt both accepted and recognized. 

Above is something new for all of us!  A view of the western river from the opposite bank.  I made special note of the hardwoods right at the edge of the river bank here and there on the right hand side of this image.  Wondered how many of them were Oak sentries as indicated by the Greeter.  The scent of winter's approach is astringent but also crumbly with blown seeds and dried vegetation.  I suddenly and abruptly noticed I  was missing the vast symphony of plant-scents I've come to associate with being there.  On this side of the river most everything's been cleared away for an extensive private boat launch.  I saw how that type of development changes everything.  Real river bank is excavated and taken away in order to replace what was there with who knows how much tonnage of rough-chunked granite.  I saw a bird flying in very low over the water - most likely hoping to score some lunch.

My hands felt like they'd take half an hour (twice that as it turned out ...)  to stop burning.  My feet and nose weren't far behind.  I double-hoofed it back across the road and beelined straight to the turnoff where I'd parked.  By the time I was home the sky was completely grey.  It's now three hours later still and I just checked our weather forecast.  Seems there have been squall bands skewing all around us throughout the afternoon.

 

running strong .6

This morning I woke early.  Could hear the sound of fast-moving water even with the storm windows down.  When I opened the door in Jim's office to listen through just a screen the NOISE of the water's movement was exhilarating.

The picture above faces upstream/northeast.  Below faces west.  The stream doesn't run in a straight line; it veers sharply to the right at a 45 degree angle.   My plan to follow and photograph where it goes after it leaves the farm's barnyard has been thwarted for the day.    There's a missing link in what I've documented so far - a place close enough that there's no excuse not to go and complete one section of our local watery network.  

Today was a good one to spend some time standing quietly with swiftly moving water.  It's mesmerizing to listen and watch.  The longer I stand doing just that the more clear it grows that water is inevitably and organically true to itself.   Since beginning this impulsive follow-where-it-goes project I've had days and a couple of evenings when I found it hard to think of anything else.  To want to think about anything else. 

When I first went outside the cow featured in the Grandfather Hickory post was standing right at the pool where our stream re-appears from the culvert.  I could see she was waiting for the pool to fill just so before she drank.   Or maybe she waited for the white water bubbles to settle before lowering her head to the surface.  I watched her having her post-rain morning outside.  Then turned my attention to an evergreen on our property that's been calling my attention quite a lot in recent weeks.  Don't think I'll live long enough to learn something about every tree here.  But I'm doing my best not to sleep walk too much of the time.

While I was searching for the above image to close out the post with a quick shift back to Green and Balmy I realized I've yet to stand in the stream.  It's always seemed so forward and presumptuous to even imagine doing such a thing...

Glacial Potholes

Also of interest in Shelburne Falls.  Seriously.  Stand still with me and look.

shifting scenes .5

We got not so very much snowfall before and directly after daybreak.  The roads were clear by the time I was on the road and the river looked absolutely gorgeous.  BUT.  It doesn't seem likely I can get close to it to photograph until J's behind the wheel and I can jump out, walk around, and be picked up on the other side of the long bridge.   That can happen for sure but guaranteed not on Wednesday mornings.

It's become important to me to stand near trees and moving water Out in the larger world from our place - and to do so on a reliably consistent schedule.  This experience has built itself into my week the way some people cherish the same half hour to forty five minutes of Alone time to do whatever.  Or nothing.  Alone. So today I made it my business to find what I needed. 

But first.  A whole different form of water that I can visit quite easily as part of my established schedule.  The available parking that overlooks this swamp used to be private property.   Now it's county wildlife management.  I can park there long enough for 15 or 20 minutes of deeply inhaling the actual components of this familiar landmark.  Don't know much about swamps at all.  But have always felt that in some other lifetime I knew enough to get by within them.

This is a very cool place I have photographed and loosely examined from this particular vantage point.  Love the spot but wouldn't consider making it a regular thing while it was private property.  

and yet it isn't running water, is it?  however ...

this is.  I crossed the road to say hello to a large expanse of icing-up water.  Before I was halfway there I felt a kind of energetic stopping mechanism.  I am a place.  So I focused beyond the river to its bank and all the beautiful trees on both sides of the road.  "You are a very beautiful place."

On the other side of the road: water moving swift and loud. This very happy brook is just aside a confluence of roads where I have two or three options for parking long enough to get better bearings of less time-sensitive places to leave my car comfortably.  The latter option might not work due to everything there being private land with scant town/county abutment rights.  So my quest will be ongoing but for today this is where I went to reconnect with the constant pulse of moving water. 

Of course I can always go to our little stream but I like the idea of making a point of forming connections with wider landscape water ways as well.  I also like keeping that a part of my mid-week psychic/emotional groundcloth.  Last week I actually got a little bit buggy without this intentional Time With Water experience.  Like: early April still haven't seen any green yet level buggy.  

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.