5.1.14 Mutual Experience and Years of Insight

Two friends drove me three hours, up up in Vermont near St. Johnsbury, 

to visit a gifted healer in a yurt, surrounded by dogs and unruly hillsides, on along a mud-gutted dirt back road.

Vestiges of snow lingering in the countryside along the way; enormous chunks of blue white ice slowly separating from sheer rock faces, larger than your house. 

The glory of endless mountain views. The clean air and feel of Vermont. 

Once, long ago, as a wild young one, I lived there; Brattleboro my home and community. 

Three young deer prancing across the highway. 

We pass through woods with such altitude they look like small Boreal forests. 

A few hours looking carefully at many aspects of health together, with fascinating results, borne of mutual experience and years of insight.

Life at times is simply chock-full of love and devotion and brilliance, despite challenges and illness and surprises.

4.30.14 Slowly We Clean The Land

Little beauty boy- ever protector. 

Wonder what it's like to bounce about 

with your tongue out, panting, all the time? 

He is SO careful when, each visit into the woods,

 I carefully cut a bit more horrible 

hidden rusted barbed wire 

from embedded trees 

and beneath leaves and brush.

 Slowly we clean the land 

of these dangerous-to-wildlife 

abandoned old fences.

5.1.14 Such Loveliness In Flight

The storm clouds approached swiftly this evening

deep purple turning to grey and black,

letting loose huge spring raindrops

amidst much posturing 

 until they all blew back 

out of the neighborhood 

Two bats returned

 for the first evening of thick bitey bugs

one stuck in my throat

as a most inquisitive bat flew

three feet from my head

possibly for a sniff or an

echolocation

to my absolute delight

In the fresh start of dusk

I often catch sight of

the two of them

carousing, fleet, through the

wooded land about my home

and theirs

racing and careening and

clicking and squeaking

such loveliness in 

flight

5.2.14 Unto The Upright

"Unto the upright there arises light in the darkness: 

for they shall be gracious, 

and full of compassion, and righteous."

5.3.14 Everything Passes: Everything Changes

I've heard you say many times 
that you're better than no one 
and no one is better than you 

If you really believe that 
you know you got nothing 
to win and nothing to lose

Everything passes
everything changes
Just do you think you should do

And who knows baby
someday maybe
I'll come and be crying to you

The Irreplaceable poet, Bob Dylan

5.3.14 We Find Ourselves

I'm sitting outside on fragrant layered forest ground , having made my usual way here by twists, turns ; the same system of landmarks and wayfaring you used as a child, if you were lucky enough to be grown up near a forest. To become friends . To greet you at the end of the difficult or delicious day.

We always turn left at the Maple, down by the edge of the yard -up and over the fallen rotting trunk. Beneath the painful and capturing wild Rose fronds , twist round past the brambles curved around another tree; hang a right at the small Juniper . The oldest Maple now in sight, recently shorn of it's embedded rusted barb wire, as we head down the hill. Then up and over fieldstones , into the deer thicket of Paperbirch saplings. Turn right heading down the steepening land, as the expanse of river Outwaters , far below the ridge , becomes visible.

I sit down on some luscious spot, surrounded by masses of emerging tender Fern , as  moss spreads up the north side of the forest's trees, from the spate of recent rains.

The magnificent light show begins, as we settle ourselves; Dante still for a moment from his careening about the forest.

Pale pungent blues and fluttering pink stripes careen across the skies overhead, seen through the staccato of delicate treetops. The sun, gilded, slowly sheds it's incandescence- disappearing quietly behind a far off range of mountains. 

In the meantime, there's some insect, inhaled as I walked the hills, now stuck, dead,in my throat.

The sunset is fading behind still bare trees, that hold a barely discernible sprinkle of green tipped leaf beginnings. Before us spreads a carpet of Solomon's Seal and Trillium beneath and between all of the forest. 

We stand to turn and tromp back up the foothill, Dante again racing in laps about me, a streak of young, glistening black , across the loam and leaf covered hills- as I look up to watch steep dark lands of storm clouds passing by overhead. 

Reaching the house, darkness falls. as our two neighborhood bats swoop and feed . I sit outside, alone, infused with the stillness and songs of evening creatures moving into the night. One elegant bat swings by , 3 feet from my face , to say hello; and there I am, left, utterly entranced. 

Moths begin fluttering about under cover of dusk, rushing to do their business, while avoiding capture from the Phoebes , and later, the bats; then taking refuge beneath the creases of the aged Maple's bark. 

I sit, as insects appear with their impeccable seasonal timing . I am soaking in the essence of the foothill I live upon, the history of glacier and basalt and steep decline down to the times that dug out this aged river.  So soon the trees again will explode with tender new leaves, and the view on three sides of blue hills will be invisible once again, until fall comes round, the cold progresses, and the trees fall deeply asleep. Here, is the present, pregnant with past and future rhythms and cycles that begin to make sense, far within, as we slowly age. And find ourselves, sitting out, gazing out across the vast distant expanse of everywhere at home. 

The stream ,on the far edge of the conservation field ,following its aged ravine, sings loudly with the surfeit  from recent storms, as  rain , large ungainly springtime drops, again begins to fall upon the land. 

4.25.14 Something We Begin To Notice

Something we begin to notice as we grow older is that the most memorable, thick with import, moments of our lives are not the disney movie type vignettes.

But rather the depth of feeling involved in either the day to day small experiences.. morning tea, the laugh with a neighbor, the brush of lips upon ours of a beloved, setting our home to rights, arriving at work fresh and ready for the day, or at peace with the present that our day consists of ; or other small, often repetitive experiences. 

Yet, sometimes, an experience that stays with us, with feeling, may not be a wonderful dinner or conversation or sunset, but an odd difficult something else, that leaves us with something indescribably rich and deep and lasting.

One of my most memorable moments that still is clear to me as that day, involved sitting in a car, holding hands silently with my husband, in a city of Springfield parking garage.

Low, dark grey cement ceiling. A view before us of city buildings. The heat, so early in the morning, already oppressive.

He quietly sat with me, and I settled myself prior to a disposition, where opposing lawyers would try to disprove the severity of a brain injury I had sustained. 

We simply sat and looked ahead and breathed together. And that closeness, that devotion, that comfort and mutuality at that moment settled deep down into my soul.

It so happens that we then walked in to have me questioned and cross questioned, we discovered that their neurologist , who they  had paid $8,000 to examine me and disprove any assertions of lasting injury, gave them a 'hands down, too bad, its all true statement'. 

Somehow they had just then opened the report, and the evident dismay splayed across their faces.

They then walked up to me, went belly up, we all signed a slew of papers, and we were out of there.

Fast as could be. The end.  Holding hands, as the day went on its way.

In pretend, tv, disney land, you would imagine the most important days would be things like victories or lifesavings or births or falling in love and all.

And those are so remarkable, and often sear our very essence.

 But the small gems of day to day life , or the errant stilled times , often have the capacity to transform us ; to transform that which we are made of.