I didn't see the forest

It's been constant, like background music that you don't notice. Music that is like the beat of your own heart, unheard but essential.

Perhaps it started on those long Sunday walks with my Dad and smaller siblings, when I was the only one listening as he pointed out the different varieties of apples, and ushered me off to collect the windfall. What were those yellowish ones with the slightly waxy, slightly sticky skins? The flowers named (sapphires, primroses, daisies, speedwell, chamomile, buttercups, bluebells), and the trees identified (horse chestnuts, sweet chestnuts, hazelnuts, beech, hawthorns with their bread-and-butter fruits). Take a firm dark fleshy leaf and push your fingernail in to scribe your name; tuck it into the leg of your sock. Like magic, the name appears when you take it out of your sock at home.

It continued as I grew, and took long walks alone with no planned direction. Then, from about age 11 to 15, I walked to get out of the house and think, hours of solitude in the city just walking and sorting out the world in my head. My mother didn't like it. I'm sure she was afraid some harm could come to me, and perhaps she didn't quite believe that my answers to the inevitable questions "where are you going?' and "where have you been?" were true. "Out" and "Nowhere" felt true to me, because I was simply wandering and thinking. But you can't wander blindly, and my eyes were drawn to the details. The moss growing between concrete slabs, the dusty ivy growing up walls and the shiny new leaves not yet covered in urban dust, so may different barks on trees, and the lovely little flowers that find their way in the most inhospitable places.

What is “it”? It’s the process of walking, seeing, learning, thinking, understanding, and making ---not necessarily in that order. Through the years, I have continued to wander and wonder, but now I collect my observations in photographs, my thoughts in writing, and found objects in many kinds of containers. I am finding, at last, interconnections between most everything I have learned and loved, and am working on writing about them and making things with them. The results will appear here and elsewhere, with links here as I complete things. I'm seeing at least parts of the forest, and I'm excited!

To RF, October 28 2012

This is the moon soft bright Last Night

I, looking up, small and amazed,

Her eye on you leaving.

The west coast shuddered, tension 

 leaving the earth like a sigh, your breath.

The east coast wearing its fall garb

Yellow, copper, bronze, carnelian, and burning bush red

Textured here and there with the soft grey fringes of early wintersleepers

And the everdark forest, a pageant marking time.

 

On the lonely beach this morning, patches of blue promise above,

I met three First Nations women, one from BC, one from Saskatchewan, 

and the last from Manitoba. 

"Is that an eagle?"

 It's wings worked strong, rowing deliberate strokes over our heads. 

"Yes"

"A blessing," she said, "blessings on you."

"And on you, too."

 

 

Late afternoon, the clouds close in and touch the trees,

Preparing your wake with whirling winds,

The sky will cry for three days

For the world has lost a lover.

With every poem I read aloud, 

And every time I pass your door,

With the sounds in each field,

And the silence of each rainbow,

I will feel the blessing of your presence

And be glad.