Browsing Tag

birdwatching

Inspiration, poetry

Returning.

May 20, 2012

Like reading a book and looking up from the page to face the landscape, that gorgeous canopy: the red maple, the black locust and white ash, the black birch and sugar maple, the white oak- all those trees!

The ribs of gray rock under the dark mantle of matted leafage. And then back to my book again.

Which is real?

What I am looking at now?

What I think I saw?

What I think I know?

The words on the page?

The thing that the words are trying to describe?

I am returning to me, finally, after having been interrupted for so long.

Looking up at that landscape was a moment as fast as a slow wing beat.

I never bothered to lift my eyes from the page, from this same sentence for so many years. I lived inside the same tunnel of words, this tightly wound black and white sentence, these very familiar letters, for so many years.

Until I was willing to look. 

I finally saw that beautiful alternate-leaved dogwood in full bloom, the young forrest with so much to offer, so much new life and old life intertwined-the shagbark hickory chestnut sighing, it’s arms muscling at the sky, it’s scent distinct, somehow masculine.

I lived in this cave of noise for too long.

All around me, so much to see, but with my head down neck bent, eyes half-mast, I missed so much.

I was so unquiet.

We are as capable as raw bone, of becoming anything. The evolution of bone to bead, that astounding transformation of something so seemingly unmalleable into a morsel of beauty.

A chiseled thing, heavy with it’s own personality and structure. It’s intricacies detailed, experiences carved into the body of the bead make it stand out from every other.

Much like us.

I have become as migratory as a blue and white Flycatcher breeding in the summer before heading south for autumn.

Can we ever get our minds around how things go from one thing into something else entirely?

Can we wrap our minds around ideas as big as change? Can we keep expanding into things we never thought we would be? 

Can our own humanness astound us?

With all this unseen beauty in the world.

I see through matter: through skin, through flesh, through tissues and blood cells into the wild.

We still have so much to touch, so many rocks still have to leave their weight in our palms as we rub out the seasons on the stone’s belly and feel what the wind did to it’s skin, what the rain and mud had to say.

The verity of gravel, the sounds of the warblers as they sing their praises and show off for the other birds, the detail of the damp and the way it enters your body and settles like a fog inside of you, a slight coat, just enough to feel alive.

All this unseen beauty. We are as safe as houses.

As long as we keep our eyes open we are as safe as houses still settling into themselves, even after years.

The creaking and adjusting. The resettling.

Tell me: How you ever felt so alive?