Quiet

 Looking at a springing sky

As sundown comes now

As a long and

Longing vesper 

Prayerful twilight 

This is my long twilight 

April 18

My Equinox

 Most of the time, 

Most of my life I look west 

Instinctively 

On this axis where home sits, my

Gaze is due west. 

The gift of ephemera, as nothing 

Interrupts yearning 

At first I needed to go, 

Home,

And I did

Those long and precious years

And now, 

I’m just not sure 

But the comfort is this difficult 

Horizon.

I follow

Old Sun from an eastern sky

Painted by the still mirrors of the lakes, 

Wintering faint, ghostblues, grey chill of pink, but still

Sunset.

Winter.

Presently now 

I find I’ve been watching more

I watch the sun

In this newly-seasoned skying to

That prairie. 

The snow for now is gone,

And as I wait for the loam, 

The sky blooms gold as it lopes west. 

Covert 

March 11

Musing

 Navigating the February Leap Year 

A favorite X follow @OurShallowState begins his posts rather like this:

“Good morning, there are blue skies, my dog is a very good boy. The snow is melting…” and then curates the day & events, posting analyses & observations. I may have to nic that first paragraph. It invites me and maybe us into relationship and oddly, conversation. I admire how he applies deep knowledge & relates it in so many aspects of our lives, actually.

So for tonight, 27th day of a Leap Year, political news junkie that I am, here are some things from today waking up in me about moving thru life right now: 

In this evening when the sun begins to glow low on the western horizon, when I fix dinner and absorb the news of the day as best and thoroughly as I can, Gunnar is a very good boy. I have managed to avoid falling on the ice, and there are swaths of green for now, appearing thru the melt. 

The SAVE Act is dead, with a nod to Majority Leader Senator John Thune for that (not ditching the filibuster). Hon James Walkinshaw (D-VA) is amazing. Big media mergers/buyouts are in question (goal for oligarchs' control of narrative up to midterms?), and Epstein. Epstein. Epstein. The courts are holding. John Roberts is up to bat again soon. We are assaulted every single day with issues that DEMAND our attention, our visceral learning, our self-reflection. 

I’ve taken many a beating for my untamable optimism. Can’t help it, I’m wired this way. My wiring has gotten pretty frayed and stretched, but some days I’m able to encapsulate feelings for the day, just not everything of course. I find scaling back what I can take in makes room for my reaching up to that notion of hope a bit. Find nuggets of hope in the wildness, and therein find some calm and equanimity amid the swirling landscape.  I sleep better with hope. 

Gunnar is the best boy. We’ll get more chickens in the spring. I fancy I’m soon to start looking out to my barn beds for the first peep of daffodils. 

~2-27-26

Dark Sunday Light

 If I don’t care about sides

I’ll see what’s in front of me 

Light a candle in the wind

Flicker, flow, grow, blow out 

Earth always the sextant. 

I said this to myself: 

Begin unburdening now, 

And when the 

Clearing lightens, 

Your wings are stronger. 

And Almost

In early November

This old place is so alive. 

I recall long ago another 

November alchemy, 

When I drove into the slumbering

Meadows flowing from the Hector Backbone

Late, on a night searching for my

Beating heart, 

And now I’m understanding 

What I never knew 

In the molecules of every day, 

Home from the vast night skies of the forest

It is everywhere, in a thousand thousand acres, 

This pulse and breathing, into the 

Necessary interstitial pausing. 

Squirrels hide sustenance under 

The sheets on a guest room bed in this old place—

They have their ways 

And critters in the walls scamper busy, tho

No bird nest builders in the cornices 

Now this season come.

The garden sleeping, 

Bulbed, and rooted deep and 

When I pause I feel our breathing 

We are earthing, fragile passages of time and 

Mine in time as well,

Japanese maple finally drifting leaves red and 

Verdant to the ground

And still, you see, while all not quite into the deep,

I verge on winter. 

Here We Are, I Am

 Wondering this day, 9-11, 

How one deals with shock? 

We tried, as a nation. 

We’re trying now. 

We’re trying as each precious

One of us is trying 

To find the equilibrium.

Bonnie Raitt & Allison Krauss

 https://youtu.be/DZki0PkSgAs?si=WWAQrpUjBAzVeDv7