More on the North

Yesterday someone asked me, are you going to blog about your trip to Alaska? And I said, well I did! I did, but it was topical on loss, on loss this earth and all its elements continue to experience. It started with delight, local seasonal delight but it drifted northwest of here and downhill (figuratively).

I will try again. I will tell you about what beauty there is there. What beauty there is and could be anywhere, seen by looking, felt by touching, heard by listening, smelled by sniffing, tasted by I don’t know, tasting! And we can attend with expectation of surprise, of something new, of beauty, of worth. We can, any time we want–expectation is, is it?, without precedent.

Many things I’ve read recently seem to be playing with the idea, the physics and the philosophy of what one perceives is very much the product of what one brings to the moment. The fact of objectivity is? therefore? not fact. We can’t get out of our own way.

Well!! see, I have veered off the proposed path, even before stepping on it.

Alaska, the silence was what held me the tightest. These enormous shards in myriad shades of green, and the even huger white shards toss me into silence. Were I sitting among those trees. Were I sitting on that ice that snowpack, those boulders indigenous and erratic, and inclined my ear (inner and outer) toward an inch, a foot, 100 feet of it, I would hear myriad small, near and distant scratchings, hummings, huffings, and even whisperings. But at the feet of these giants, at their feet or far off in a body of water the dimensions of which I cannot fathom, I am placed in and brought to silence.