Rain

Rain is needed everywhere including here. And it is falling right now. I am happy. I am cold! Where two days ago I had on shorts and moccasins and today jeans, socks, double sweaters, still I am happy. Perhaps you are too. Perhaps you are not, you were planning your first large gathering after the 2020-2021 hiatus, likely a cookout or a beach day with family, friends. Ah, well. Wait a couple of days, or until next weekend. Enjoy the slow, new-adventure-each-day return to life with others. Easing into any new or renewed circumstance is softer than diving in, all rawness exposed. No? Personally, I am often a seeker of solitude.

And the other day, in different weather, I shared time at the falls with a great blue heron who also was watching for herrings (or any other fish for a meal, which aspect of the watchI did not share)

I am sad, this said in the face of my earlier admission that I am often a seeker of solitude, I am sad that we spend so much of our time and energy being not that person or not this person, being not another, being aggressively self in the face, the presumed oppositional face, of other. I hope we begin to understand the sharedness that is living that enables life here on earth.

I am listening to a really good podcast. https://onbeing.org/programs/tracy-k-smith-and-michael-kleber-diggs-history-is-upon-us-its-hand-against-our-back/ I hope you’ll listen to it all, but especially from minute 25 on. And really especially, the three poems these two poets read during minutes 43-48 closing out the conversation. Really, this is a great episode of on-being. I hope you will listen to it.

Tomorrow my mother would have been 98 years old. Earlier this year my father would have turned 100. I cannot fathom these ages. I cannot touch the back, the palm of my own hand and understand that it has brushed against so many years of surfaces rough, smooth, broken, chipped…. Yesterday, standing in a wood at the waterfall shown above, I was taken by a tree that stood stiller than I and about five feet from me. I stepped over to it, it is a big tooth aspen and probably in its middle age, based on the shape of the bark’s cracks, and their depth; I stepped over to it and lay my palm against its side. I stood there palm to bark for a few minutes. The silence that stilled my body and settled my thoughts calmed me from breath out to bones to derm to epiderm (my bark), to a peace I wish I could have pocketed and could bring out today, tomorrow, anytime. Perhaps I can bring it out. Perhaps I only need remember, because, even as I type these words I am recalling and sitting nearer that peace. Again. I am grateful. I am grateful for the what were’s that can be the what are’s again. May only the good what were’s be repeated in your life.

Thank you for reading.