Monday, December 19, 2016

VALLEY WIND EVERGREEN THORN SKY PATH CORN STALK SUN AND OTHER……………..



The wind came down to the valley. It touched the top first. Well, it was not a touch, but a resounding sound and visit. Akin to the way the ocean can crash on the shore. I saw that the trees began to shake and the snow laden branches shed the white, let it to go into the wind. I half-expected the earth to tremble, but it didn’t and wouldn’t. The things I remember whist standing there the most were the blue sky mixed with white clouds, plus the green of the tall evergreens mixed in with that blue, or I suppose in front of it. White and green and blue. There were other parts of nature besides, such as the little thorns that lived on the branches if they be called that, and just waited atop a bit of snow, as if to say that they had been frozen in time, which in a way they had. Also the old tree trunks that were covered in winter’s charms, - white, wind, some invisible but felt coldness.
 
The summit of the valley held a path and nearabouts the end of it was where I once saw a deer race past. In fact, if the truth be told, it wasn’t that it raced past, but that it was there, waiting, watching, and then raced away, - to my left, to its right. Once it was going through the brush it was like paint being thrown through the air, or a dream, a vision, and as quick as a thought. A deer can be as quick as a thought I would swear. Well, we circle around a bit eventually and come to a path, once again there is a path, - but this one has deeper snow because less souls have tread upon it. Nearabouts the end of that particular way, there is an opening, and once you go right, further away from the forest, the tracks usually stop and you have to make your own way. That is where we went and we did fine by taking our time, and also through enjoying the sun that shone down fairly, openly, honestly, and with its prowess, upon all and everything there.

After a while some inner clock said it was time to go. The wind, having picked up a bit here and there, had left again. I thought back to some time before when it was strong atop the valley wall. I had not seen the farmer in a long while, or the corn stalks that wait silently in the winter air, their aura something I had never experienced, their energy something I felt definitively, but could still not really place. The aura of corn stalks, of feed corn, is a peculiar one,- but it is handsome somehow, if an aura could be handsome, and seems like a smart wooden pier just newly built on a clam lake or quite a quiet part of an ocean inlet. I shall have to think more on that one, and re-visit those stalks that stand like that, hiding some mystery within such as spirits, stones, vortexes, such like that.

In the meantime we begin the walk out, part and parcel of a larger, of an infinite, of a sometimes difficult but always overall wonderful story.


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Sunday, December 4, 2016

PRAYER FOR SNOW




So fast the small and definite snow left. So many visitors we don’t want or need, numerous loud souls abound and call. How will we skirt them? Yet the snow, the little poem itself, precarious on branches and kissing the ground, its leaves, and the rain tumbled rocks, had to go. Maybe it shall come again. I have to hope. It wants to come, I think, but is coy for some reason. I remember it before, the first time last year. I was on the summit of a large hillside and not only did it arrive but the wind chimed in and brought it across swiftly. Oh, it was some kind of song without words. I shall have to wait and wait. A calm but almost quietly desperate plea I shall silently make: White and sky, please see fit to mix and fall upon the region.



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Thursday, December 1, 2016

RAIN



The rains had subsided. We walked. Upon entering a few of the really committed and true dog walkers could be seen. Greetings were made. One was finishing up and heading out. I had a good feeling about it all. The dogs sniffed and seemed happy. Fresh air. Movement. Brain and body activity. We went far and far and far. The rain, having completely stopped, left some remnants of itself on branches. These drops formed themselves quietly and didn’t fret. I thought, Aren’t you scared that you may fall into the grasses, the leaves, and disappear forever? They said simply, There is not a worry here, for we didn’t exist before and soon won’t again. 

Continuing on we saw the chaparral, the feral shrubs, an incredibly high old tree solitary reaching to the sky. We looked at some wilted flowers, felt the sand under our feet, and knew the pebbles and stones, the discarded branches, and a bit of wind.
 
Then it happened.

Just as we had entered a secluded and soulful path to make our way back. 

The rain.

It was patter patter patter against the forest top, and some of it was making its way down to us. We calmly went on, for what can be done? A little water never hurt anyone they say. It was its own music, and oddly enough, later, on the radio, which is rarely turned on, they played a composer and talked, I swear it, about how that particular piece was trying to find the nuance of water itself, mostly water in nature, as in what the speaker called the low and high sounds of a brook and everything in-between. 

Well, a brook we hadn’t discovered or been at. But I had stopped and turned around to gaze briefly but slowly and meditatively, contemplatively, at the fields. The sound of rain was there, - and the thing itself also. It coursed down and down to meet the land. It would keep people and their animals away for the most part, - until it really passed. And in a week or so it would be not rain but snow for the drop in temperatures. I thought about that, and how weird rain is in the beginning of December or the last day of November rather. 

Rain.

Soon it shall be traded for snow.

And then I will be writing about other colors and shapes, impressions and the altogether different season.









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Tuesday, November 29, 2016

AS THE SKY DISAPPEARS



The night was curling up towards the city like a cloud. I could see the electrical lights coming on and even a bank, even a store, even a bus could and did begin to appear as magical. Some old lady sat atop a parapet and drank what looked like a coffee and there was an old man walking thru a lot with a cane and what looked like a take-out box of food. She lifted her cup slowly and he moved slowly also. Maybe they were not taking it easy by choice, but by age, time having done its own number on them both. Yet,- the frayed sweater or faded cane were beautiful, soulful, and I wished for a second, for a long second, to be on an actual old street in an older time with bigger cars and brick houses waiting as mature trees watched it all on boulevards. In any event, the sky was pink in the distance and the vehicles, sometimes trucks, would come along up a hill and appear and then just as quickly disappear down the other way. Where do all the people go and why does nobody seem to really talk to anyone else? Yet, - the night is a good and solid friend. It arrives always and has never failed. It’s not fickle or judgemental. In fact, the night is such a good friend that it is sometimes taken for granted. And soon the remnants that are left of the day sky, - well, - it mixes inwards somehow with itself, - in a last minute silent panic, - and then disappears. Where did it go? Where does the sky, pink and a bit of purple, in the latest possible stretch of dusk, - disappear to? Does it hide in a rooftop or the hole of the top of an industrial building abandoned? - With an old squirrel? With a series of racoons? With some feral felines? - And does the sky dream? If so, - does it discern the difference between dreams and visions, - and can in interpret and intuit spirit messages? Oh sky oh sky I wonder wonder why?- Well, the night was curling up towards the city like a cloud and the cloud disappeared and we watched it all in the early winter way of the growing city that housed us and lights and the parapets for the aged or tired or simply pensive.

 

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FOREST




It wasn’t exactly glum there but yes, a bit so. It had not snowed in days, and there was not rain either. What it was, was that the sky, well, it was covered by clouds and the clouds, opaque as such things tend to be, were just staying around forever. It must have been five days long and was continuing. Shouldn’t it snow by then, by now by some time? How I longed to see the real snow fall, when there is a darkness in the distance in the middle of the day for the storm that is approaching, and then it comes and is sprinkled everywhere like a song that is ubiquitous and continuous. The pictures I could get! - If even for me or a few other souls, a few sympathetic eyes or ears as it were. The snow as I remember it sits on every branch and can be undisturbed, well- leaving some of it there even if the wind comes. There are parts of that place so pristine, so untouched on a daily basis anyhow. Like a kid waiting for a vacation, I can’t wait, - because there has been a re-direction, a new configuration, a re-assembly of the soul- and I can see the magic, the dare I say, and not lightly, - the divinity in the everyday. Mostly there, mostly there. For now there were a few
hawks that I saw watching and we took a strange downwards and meandering way that led first to a little bridge with moss and some parts repaired. The water could be heard, but slightly and lowly in volume, - but heard, trickling either down from somewhere or to somewhere again. There, the trees and their branches made strange shapes like they were ghosts caught still in the day, remaining frozen to fool you or me,- the intrusive walker. I half-expected one to come alive, to begin talking, but such things really are only found in fairytales. Yet, - didn’t they say their own thing in their own peculiar way? I am not talking about divination, pendulums, rocks, and the rest, - though those things have their place. Here what is being mentioned is that the trees talk the way the whole earth communicates. And there talk was that they were middle age, quiet, had seen some things, and could see much at night. What is the night like there, by the little bridge and the surrounding area? Everyone has surely gone home, and the thick darkness kisses everything at once. I can see the trees though, even through the thick darkness, in my mind’s eye? Why? Because of the moonlight, - a moonlight that appears briefly during a break in the clouds. The trees are intricate and scattered to begin with, but in that play of light there mystery is pronounced, vivid, and poem-like. In any event, - it is not bad there, not exactly glum like I said, as the snow is waited for and counted on. After a while, we shall probably be sick of it, no? - That is the way of things. But,- first we shall be enthralled and perhaps as we negotiate a hill or descend down a valley path a fox or deer will run just down or up the way, having be stirred by our presence or else just on its way anyhow through the snow laden forest ways.





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