We must return wild, guided by wind and moon to find our way. The journey made simple When we find the way out of the wilderness of cities. Then Into the forest Along the shore… More
Advice From A Live Oak
to the Owner of the Mercedes Floating Down the Street in Miami
Listen, you there...step back from the edge of the precipice you’ve come upon with no warning (in your mind). Here now, at your winter home in Florida, you stand on the crumbling asphalt watch your Mercedes float by as if it was your yacht .Nearby, as if in a dream, you hear someone saying words like aquifer, global warming, unsustainableBut you don’t understand any language not spoken in banks. You shout your mantraFix it! Fix it! You shiver in the heat under the roof you constructed over the planet. Listen This is how you got here:You looked at me through blinders and called me a tree. Then you named me:Live Oak. I became a fact you could dismiss or use as it suited When you cut me and my sap ran you did not recall the stickiness of your own blood. So, I knew that our reunion would have to wait until we had no choice. Like now. Before you were too busy. You dug mines, drained swamps, smothered the soil with cement slashed the forests and fields forced water where it did not want to flow. Now you are surprised. You order the seawalls to be rebuilt higher again and again,yet the waves roar at them and they succumb over and over.For comfort, you grab at your pockets for your rosary of coins. On the news you see Coyotes leap over the walls of your mansion Panthers roam the yard Black bears rummage through your trash swim at their leisure in your Olympic-sized pools. your homes are hidden behind steel gates but the animals know these woods and marshes they have mapped the paths in their veins feel the contours of the land in their hearts see through the dark know exactly what needs knowing upon the air. You reach into your vault of millions for your talisman of dollars and find a time bomb lodged in one corner. When this bomb is triggered by the last floods and the final fires even you will become brethren to the lowest insect, the stalk of grass. For the first time, you hear the alarms.Your senses open like a deer listening for the hunter’s next step. Listen, here was your next mistake You mowed when it was time to sow. Demolished what it was time to save. You understood how to ravage but not how to prune. Now is the time to listen. Listen to what speaks quietlyi n both of us: Live… live… live... The Great Extinction Even if you aren’t a believer your feet have faith in the earth your lungs are believers in the air your thirst trusts in water. We are held, nourished with no effort of our own. What other love gives so freely? This is holiness crucified by those who once again know not what they do.
Centered
When you find yourself standing on the edge of a cliff be still just be be a lighthouse watchful steady as you search for safety and Illuminate the stormy, starless darkness as waves crash to loosen your rocky foundation just be and you will see through fog what could be saved, what could not and how what remains precious and real remains after the wreckage. When you find yourself standing in the middle of the highway be still just be be a boulder your power peaceful settled and solid certain of your place on the land energy contained silent and sustained as traffic roars past relentless, ruthless pounding down on asphalt like thunder headlights striking you like lightning bolts, be still just be so you can let go of what passes, always passes, so you understand what lasts always lasts.
What Remains
What passes? Dreams on night air and nightmares words spoken notes played the flight of birds laughing through the sky an embrace a kiss. our bodies. What is completed? A teacup, Its purpose served, the crack appears, a memory sealed with one gold thread. What remains? Wide blue sky silence that fills a canyon.
Inspired Writing Workshop: The Wisdom of Transformative Stillness, Leonard Cohen, Pico Iyer, Pablo Neruda
*Not only for experienced writers. Join in even if you don’t think you can write!. You will surprise yourself!
Dear People,
During these trying times, it can help to be inspired by wisdom, humor and profound observations. For those who do not know me: I am a published writer, and have been teaching writing at the college level for the past twenty years. I’ve always found inspiration for my own writing from writers and thinkers, and so am offering these workshops to inspire your own thinking and writing.
In this workshop, we will read short inspiring selections from many wisdom traditions then discuss one of these before we write. Some of the excerpts will be philosophical, some disturbing, some comforting, others just playful or funny.
Our writing will be whatever we are inspired to write after our discussions. Sharing what we write will be optional, but encouraged. I will also offer writing guidance based on Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, and others.
Here is an example of a quote we might discuss and write about: If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees. (Rainer Maria Rilke)
When: Each Sunday September 5-26, 3:00 PM – 4:15 PM
Cost: Sliding scale according to need, from $20-$50.
If interested, please reply to this blog or to andapeterson@yahoo.com
Brutus, Gus, a Slime Mold and Me
The Western mind draws a sharp boundary between humans and the rest of the world….for the Western mind, it is hard to recognize mind in animals, whereas for the Japanese mind, it is hard not to do so.~~Semiotician Yoshimi Kawade, written in 1998
That quote gets me to thinking…
Brutus, the lab mix that I often dog sit, sends me love with a look. He and I look directly, usually silently, into each other’s eyes each time we want to tell each other something. It’s simple. Direct. Clear. A type of mind reading. I’ve learned from dogs and cats how much can be said by the eyes.
With Brutus and Gus, the tiger-striped cat, words are seldom necessary even though I use them out of habit. Brutus and Gus hear me make sounds. Brutus looks at me patiently until I make myself clear.; Gus is less patient and will walk off unless I add a treat to the sounds.
I think, that people need dogs and cats for more than the unconditional love (well, conditioned as for Gus the cat)—we get sick and tired of talking.
Or we can’t stop talking around people and can only be quiet with our pets. Words are hard to come by. The right ones. Words can be so difficult to find. Those we speak are often the ones we repeat out of habit; they aren’t the words available, or even appropriate often, in the present moment, if we took the time to notice those.
People don’t listen for the most part. Dogs listen. They learn the meaning of words.directed to them. When I say “car” or “beach” or “cookies” to Brutus, he comes to a happy attention. Have we learned any language from other animals in the same way?
Our words come from minds filled with past and future, so how accurate are they? How wise? Meanwhile, my stock and trade is, ironically, words; I’m a writer and a teacher. However, I’ve been investigating the mind in the way of the as a Buddha and I am starting to see its limitations.
Intelligence in Nature, An Inquiry into Knowledge, by Jeremy Narby, an anthropologist, is filled with words for 243 pages. Since they are written instead of spoken, they have been carefully chosen and re-thought many times; writing can be a more clearway to use words than speaking. Narby writes about the intelligence he and other scientists, have discovered in creatures great and minuscule (like nematodes). “A slime mold,” he writes,” in a maze has the capacity to apprehend its situation and act on its knowledge.” He makes the point that there are more forms of intelligence than we ever dreamed of. A Western mind has to overcome hundreds of years of the myth of human intellectual superiority.
Recently I read in Narby’s book that “Information of one kind or another is consistently circulating in nature, in particular in the form of biochemical molecules. The world is streaming with signs. Not so long ago, some people considered the use of signs a specifically human trait.”
All this is to say, that I am searching as I write: what is nature telling me? What is it I am missing? Can I become better at reading the signs life is posting? We’ll see…
Inspired Writing: From Silly to Wise–A Four Week Workshop*, or “Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.” ― Einstein
*Not only for experienced writers. Join in even if you don’t think you can write!. You may surprise yourself!
photo from Google photos
Dear People,
During these trying times, it can help to be inspired by wisdom, humor and profound observations. For those who do not know me: I am a published writer, and have been teaching writing at the college level for the past twenty years. I’ve always found inspiration for my own writing from writers and thinkers, and so am offering a workshop to inspire your own writing.
In this four week workshop, we will read short inspiring selections from many wisdom traditions as well as by humorists, chefs, visual artists, philosophers, comedians, fiction and non-fiction writers and poets, then we’ll discuss one of these before we write. Some of the passages will be philosophical, some comforting, others just delightful, playful or funny.
Subjects will range from food to furniture from silly, to spiritual.
Our writing will be whatever we are inspired to say after our discussion. Sharing what we write will be optional, but encouraged. I will also offer writing guidance based on Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, and others.
Here is an example of the types of passages we could consider:
“As you unfold as an artist, just keep on, quietly and earnestly, growing through all that happens to you. You cannot disrupt this process more violently than by. looking outside yourself for answers that may only be found by attending to your innermost feeling.”~~~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Here’s another: “You have to stay in shape. My mother started walking five miles a day when she was 60. She’s 97 now and we have no idea where she is.” ~~George Carlin, comedian
The first session will be free. If you choose to continue, the cost will be $60.00 for the four week workshop.
Begins once per week October 1st-November 5th (day and time be determined) via Zoom (instructions will follow)
If you are interested, please email me at andapeterson@yahoo.com, or leave a comment here.
What kind of courage do we need? We must accept reality in all its immensity…the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to meet the strangest, most awesome and most inexplicable of phenomena.~~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
The Courage We Need is
to stand alone
on the dance floor.
The courage we need is
to stay steady
as we feel the foundation cracking
to see clearly
through lies
thick as heavy blankets
as the sleepers
pretend wakefulness.
The courage we need is
to refuse
the safety
of the trance.
The courage we need is
to love with a broken heart,
shed fears like leaves,
bend, bow
and continue.
Chicago, for Fred Hampton and Larvell Henderson, my Irving School Classmates
Today my hometown music
sets the groove
for the dance
soul sway
joy drum
beats
saxophone
shouts
in this coffee shop.
I remember
Chicago rhythm
and blues
how the projects
loom over expressways
the “El” clatters
shakes the rattling windows
of a tenement
screeching to a scheduled stop
from the eleventh floor, a five-year-old watches
big-eyed
as below cars speed
downtown
the refrain “Stand by me…”
fills the air from somewhere near
before the deafening roar of the train
passes the boy
I feel the
faith
not mine but
unshakeable
his brother waiting
sitting on the stoop
at noon
job denied
one more time.
In third grade Fred and Larvell were my friends.
When I was ten
Larvell's mother was shot.
When I was twenty,
Fred was shot in his bed.
In my car, Marvin Gaye sings
“Makes me Wanna Holler, Throw up Both My Hands…”
on the radio.
I feel faith between the notes, love
not mine, but
from a distance, mine too
as I drive to the South Side
singing, weeping
with Marvin
to my job at the welfare
warfare office.
Who Will Explain?
The brown-eyed children,
under silver blankets
that sparkle like Christmas tinsel
or gleaming party gowns
worn at country clubs,
sleep on the cold, cement floor
but do not understand
the wire cages,
their loneliness
the long, hot walk
through the desert.
Do they wonder,
as children will,
what they did wrong?
Who will explain
to them
this land that hates them,
these people who sleep
on silk sheets
walk on marble floors,
washed by brown-eyed women,
take cool rides
in shiny new trucks
through the desert
like cruel-eyed matadors
immune to the pain
of the bull,
drunk on their comforts.
Who can explain
why these people
never wonder
what they did wrong?
Amazon Author Page
The Dog Says Sit
Words mask meaning
which rises in silence
comes clear
with the attention,
the patience
of a dog.
We know this
but refuse to trade our talk
for wisdom.
Those who stop to still themselves
know how dogs know:
see the others’ eyes shift
flutter like a bird taking flight
how the mouth tightens
the shoulders rise.
Though we sit close to each other
we hear
from a distance.
Tender Work
Work with what you are
If you are a fawn
at dusk
you will
stand still as wood
in a field of tall green grass
at the edge of a forest
your dark eyes wide open
watching sparrows
flit and fly home
through the twilight.
If you are a fawn
your soft brown ears
upright will catch sounds
of wind through the pines.
If you are a field mouse
you will
scurry, slipping between
wildflowers
fawn hooves.
If you are a human
you will
see the fawn, the pines, the wildflowers
feel you breath as wind,
how your heart beats as
bird mouse, fawn
then and only then
your tender work
is done.
Tinney Creek
Tinney Creek, St. Petersburg, Florida
Tinney Creek runs past
under
and despite
the TJ Max
CVS, Target.
It travels back and forth
from Tampa Bay
rises and falls daily with the tide
feeds Egrets, families of Muscovy ducks and Mallards
who seek tiny prawns, mud crabs, bugs.
Feathery Java fern
rounded Moneywort
grow in it’s rich mud,
abundant
as if this was still The Garden.
Between snaking highways,
Dollar Stores
gas stations
condo buildings
Taco Bells
the creeks and their residents
carry on
as if this was still The Garden.
Down the busy street a ways
atop a pole advertising Beer and Low-Cost Cigarettes,
an osprey has built a roomy nest,
designed in the contemporary open sky plan.
A lone Roseate Spoonbill sometimes visits Tinney Creek
always in company with her Egret.
I watch as
Spoonbill lifts it’s comical Dr. Seuss face
twitches its white and rosy feathers
lowers its wide paddle-like beak into brackish water
sweep, sweep
side to side
poke, poke.
The ducks, Ibis, Egret, crows and I claim
this creek and the remaining
Royal Palms, oak trees, iridescent sunsets
as ours.
“I used to see many Roseate Spoonbills here once,”
a neighbor tells me.
My heart aches
as regularly
as it beats
these days
at these all too familiar words:
There were many here
once.
At night, arriving home,
my headlights sweep over the banks of the creek
lighting up a line of ducks, like fat-buddhas
heads curled into their downy breasts
asleep despite ambulance sirens,
the roar of traffic.
At dawn they will wake
waddle like drunks
raise their chicks,
the Osprey will hunt,
the Spoonbill and Egret will visit
I will marvel at how they float and splash
and the creek
feeds us all
as if this is still the Garden.
A Music Video Poem
Great White Heron Selfie
Great White Heron Selfie, original photo by Carol Kay, %22selfie22 by Anda Peterson
To capture
a Great White Heron
in Florida
on a log
in the Hillsborough River
but really
in a frame
on your wall
take a picture
of a picture
of a heron
a selfie
of hands
capturing
all
the beauty
they can hold.
Excerpt from Walks with Yogi
# 39 Dolphins are not Manatees and I Am Not a Princess
Dolphins and dogs, like my Yogi-boy, do not need to be loved for their youth, beauty and good behavior to be happy. This is why I like being around them–their energy may not always be buddha-peaceful, but it always is buddha-present and buddha-accepting.
Yogi stands on the seawall, alert to a shapes and movements. The energy that comes zooming by strong and fast. The dolphin rises from the water, slaps his tail, churns the water in a feeding frenzy. Yogi barks so hard and loud, his body trembles along his leash. I want him to be quiet so I can watch the dolphins fish, but Yogi has his own agenda–response to the dramatic energy with his own dramatic energy in the moment. No expectation of this moment, no demand that it be any other way than it is. His clamor does not mean he wants the dolphin to be a Yogi-dog– like him. He is simply taking part in a great exchange of energy in this moment. The next moment may be a quiet lying-down-in- the-grass moment.
My ego, on the other hand, sometimes wants Yogi to be a different dog–placid and quiet, so he doesn’t disturb the dolphins and the dolphin watchers. Ego has expectations of the dolphins too–they should not be aggressive as they hunt for food; they should please us, look up at us with gentle eyes and eat only seaweed, like manatees. But dolphins are not manatees and, though Yogi’s big snout resembles a manatee’s enough so we call him a Sharpei-manatee mix, he is neither peaceful manatee nor calm Labrador. I also know that Yogi is not a cuddling dog, that he expresses affection on his own independent cat-like terms. I can love Yogi with small love, secretly wishing he was a “better” dog, a lap dog who eagerly curls up with me, or I can love Yogi with Big Love that accepts his own way of loving me.
Yogi and my friends teach me about Big Love, as opposed to small love. I’ve written here before about my definitions of those–Big Love is unconditional and usually experienced with friends or kind strangers, and extended to all. Small love has a longer definition because it has so many requirements: small love is extended (with conditions) to one other and one’s children. Small love has conditions: be a Poodle, even if you are really a Rat Terrier; do what I want you to do and be the dog/dolphin/man/manatee or woman I believe will be perfect for me.
One of the attachments that I hope my Buddhist practice will free me of is the need for the approval. My addiction to this type of “love” has been almost as destructive as any drug. I’ve felt as if I would not be able to live without it, and when I was forced to do so, the withdrawal was torture: I am not enough. I think that many people are fellow addicts, and they are abide, unhappily, in denial. It may be they knew better than I how to get their supply of small love; at least I am loved for my looks, they might think. The dealer of the small love drug demands a payment of physical beauty or financial success; if that is missing, subservience to and care-taking of the dealer will suffice. The dealer will then marry you so your supply is promised.
On one of our morning walks Yogi obsessed about getting a dog-treat from John, my friend Barbara’s partner. Yogi strained at the leash repeatedly and lunged up at John’s pockets for a cookie. Frustrated with his lack of response to my commands I finally said, half-joking, “Don’t be a crazy dog! Be normal!” Barbara, his dog-godmother said, ” But Yogi thinks ‘This is normal’–for me, Yogi.” She loves him with Big Love, and extends the same to me and to John.
Big Love doesn’t care if I sometimes am not wise or happy, or that my hair is graying, or that I’m not always cheerful and helpful, selfless and all-nurturing–a princess. The men I’ve known and dated all cared about those things. A great deal. So did I. We all rejected me when I did not fit the bill. I have been so attached to that small love that it became an addiction and it sure cost a lot—more than I could pay.
Yesterday I got to look into a dolphin’s round, dark curious eyes–he or she let me–while sliding by sideways along the wall looking up at me.
The other day, Nancy called to see if my bronchitis was better.
Barbara brought me soup.
John (a semi-retired doctor) listened to my lungs with his stethoscope and wrote me a prescription for a better anti-biotic than the one that wasn’t working, to save me an extra trip to the doctor.
Barbara told me I should never feel I am alone because she and John consider me family.
My friend Joy wrote to say she loves my blogs and is inspired to join a Mindfulness group because of them.
Last week in the grocery store check out line, I unloaded the groceries for the older woman who sat in wheel chair with her cart full of items; her smile of gratitude was more beautiful than the fake smiles of models and movie stars on the magazine rack next to us.
I can sense and see the energy I encounter each moment without judging it as good or bad. And if sometimes I bark or am barked at, I can let go of that energy and not carry it to the next moment. No need to demand that you be a Poodle and I be a Labrador if we are both acting like crazed Chihuahuas . I can do the same for myself and others. I can swim and float in the ocean of Big Love or sink in the swamp of small love.
With mindfulness, I can tell the ocean from the swamp. Without mindfulness, I sink neck-deep into the muck and wonder why I can neither swim or float .
#39: Yogi is not a Labrador. I am not a Princess. All is well.
In Honor of Thich Nhat Hanh
Clouds, like memories, are weightless yet gathered grow heavy cover the light. And like the fog of old fears tumble and build one upon the other. Clouds, like steam rising from Thich Nhat Hanh’s teacup float out the window, return as rain quench the thirst of tea leaves. Thay teaches this: clouds appear in teacups, wthe fog e drink moonlight, and can see clearly through fog.
Not Just Another Writing Workshop:
Inspired by the Senses: Coltrane, Whitman, and others
Not Just Another Writing Workshop:
Begins January 9
During these trying times, it can help to be inspired by wisdom and humor. If you enjoy pondering thought-provoking ideas with others and writing about those, this is the workshop for you.
After reading inspiring quotes, on the topic of The Five Senses, we will write short pieces on whatever we are inspired to write. Sharing what we write will be optional, but encouraged. Writing guidance will be based on Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, a proponent of “free-writing” and “writing practice.” Our final session will include experimentation with fiction, led by a USF faculty member.
For those who do not know me: I am a published writer of poetry, essays, memoir and feature writing, and have been teaching various writing courses at the college level for over twenty years.
When: Sundays beginning January 9th to February 13th, 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM
Where: Via Zoom
Donations $20-$50 sliding scale for five sessions
RSVP: andapeterson@yahoo.com
Listening to Old Love Songs
Hear “you’re nobody til someone loves you” Lament of the rejected child. “I’d rather go blind than have you walk away from me” Lament of the neglected child. “can’t live, if living is without you” Lament of the abandoned child. Love songs sung white-knuckled on our knees. Hear Coltrane’s saxophone refrain “a love supreme” “a love supreme” sung big as the sky notes round as the planet call us to the love that makes the grass grow. Love mirrored in each other’s faces to remind us, joined we can wipe our tears with flowers.
NOT JUST A WRITING WORKSHOP: COMING TO OUR SENSES
Excerpted from, a blessing “For One Who is Exhausted” by John O’Donohue
You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.
Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.
Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.
Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.
Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Dear People,
During these trying times, it can help to be inspired by wisdom, humor and profound observations. If you enjoy pondering thought-provoking ideas with others, this is the workshop for you. Writing will be one of the ways we will share our thoughts.
This is not a workshop that focuses primarily on writing skills and techniques. We will rely on our innate creative thinking which results in our innate creative writing.It’s true! Once we guide the inner critic and perfectionist to their proper places, creativity has room to appear.
Our writing will be whatever we are inspired to write after considering reading quotes on the topic, this one being The Five Senses. Sharing what we write will be optional, but encouraged. I will also offer writing guidance based on Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, a proponent of “free-writing” and “writing practice.”
For those who do not know me: I am a published writer of poetry, essays, memoir and feature writing, and have been teaching various courses in writing at the college level for the past twenty years. I’ve always found inspiration for my own writing from writers and thinkers, and so am offering these workshops to inspire your own thinking and writing. Critical and Creative Thinking, which I studied at the University of Massachusetts, has always been one of my interests.
When: Sundays beginning January 9th to February 13th, 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM
Where: Via Zoom
Donations $20-$50 sliding scale for five sessions
Please RSVP: andapeterson@yahoo.com
Abenaki Trees
First, remember to breathe as your heart beats upon the wind mixed with your own breath, then let it slip through trees, slide over ponds, along the ridged backs of the mountain, the spine of the deer, the moose, the human being. Now exhale your breath and the earth’s circles the globe in gusts, and gales. Ask: What isn’t full of breath? Mud breathes. Rocks breathe. Science tells us that trees collect sunlight, moisture, earth and water, convert it to oxygen, exhale it from the canopies of forests. When Henry David Thoreau needed more wildness than civilized Concord and even his beloved Walden Pond could provide, he went to the deep Maine forests. He sought out the people called the Abenaki who lived in the deep green Maine woods.The Abenaki’s believed, according to Thoreau, that trees “possess a spirit as real as that of a human.” When the Abenaki needed to cut a tree for their shelter and transport, they asked forgiveness of that tree’s spirit and thanked it for providing sustenance. Now Inhale, then exhale like a mountain, like the ocean.. It was in Thoreau’s nature and his philosophy to know trees as the Abenaki knew them, as the very stuff of life. For him the indiscriminate clear-cutting of the Maine woods by the white man was a tragedy, and he mourned their death. Still, we neglect what we cannot see: Inhale. Exhale, and consider this There are two ways to notice breath: The first is when it demands your attention as you gasp for air. The second is by choice, since the mind ignores the breath. The mind is a noisy dive filled with drunks shouting trash talk over each other, the loud band that plays the same bad music in endless loops. We sit on the bar stool drunk on thoughts, barely breathing. Now inhale exhale Buddhists speak of the emptiness that is our essence. But how can something invisible be real? We ask as we take the next invisible breath. We are full of what is formless. Our hearts charged with electricity. Thoreau and the Abenaki saw the living being called “tree.” They knew its oxygenated, watery blood coursed within its rough skin. To know a tree is more than its bark, more than that it’s fallen leaves, more than its dead fuel for fire, more than our wooden ships, more than the solid floor beneath our feet. Even death breathes life into the dusty world. This mystery is no mystery to wildness, to the trees, whose bodies in death as are diffused as mulch and fungus and firewood that offer shelter and nourishment. We too, exhaling our final breath, leave our minerals for new life as wind scatters our ashes into the soil. Exhale winter, inhale spring, exhale summer inhale autumn Only with the great green lungs of forests, we breathe. http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/08/12/211364006/this-pulsing-earth?utm_medium=Email&utm_source=share&utm_campaign=
Death is Different on Weedon Island
Death on this city street is unnatural. Declarative as a gunshot. Fatal as poverty. Blood stains on pristine sidewalks, a nuisance. If I died on this city street I would first feel tossed like litter, like the people thrown out of homes plowed over, away, buried under heedless highways trembling high rise condos. as screaming sirens of careening police cars, and ambulances, played the urban dirge. If I died on Weedon Island, I would be like a tree, my body felled onto the forgiving sand, reclaimed by the endless transformation as green leaves are yellowed, wasp wings dried to powder, my bones brittled into soil for Spring blooming magnolia trees, underfoot of cautious raccoons, busy sparrows, quiet turtles, sleepy snakes, hurried bugs. On Weedon Island life and death move with the rhythm of bird calls woot woot, pause, woot woot, pause. Rest and rise. Rise and rest. So the song, and the daylight comes and goes comes and goes like the final heartbeat, before the first breath.
Clear Water
must first run fast like you it rushes, stumbles over boulders tin cans rusted detritus floats under broken bridges failed dams flood your road muddied darkened, thick stagnant, yet fertile surprised by the lotus then the flows downstream swept clean cleared, until all things once hidden by dark, churning waters are visible in stillness.
That Got Me Thinking...Featuring Einstein, Buddha, Gus, et al 
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