~ A Joy Warrior's Journey
You have to do it every now and then – get away.
It’s a survival tactic, demanded by circumstances,
by your mind, your soul. One of the best ones
is the one where you gather with friends, aged
as fine wine or a worthy cheese is aged, and walk
telling stories, sharing bits of wisdom gathered
along the way, noticing the foliage, the flowers,
quietly laughing, bathed in memories, making
fresh ones to carry you from this day in early June
into all the days to come. Yes. I’ll take this one.
As if the fragrant blossoms weren’t enough,
a yellow swallowtail came to sip the lilac’s nectar.
She was the first I had seen this year, regal
and lovely as she fluttered from flower to flower
on her delicate wings. Once more, I found myself
catching my breath in astonished wonder
that such a thing could be, right before my eyes,
in this heady, perfumed May air.
I understand the benevolence of the sky,
a single cloud of tarnished silver floating
from horizon to horizon. It’s gift, the dimming
of the light, and the way the rain diffuses it
so that the woods is veiled, as if in mist.
Here, the hillside is awash in emerald green
so intense that you could hardly stand
to look at it, so suddenly appearing,
if it were drenched in sunlight. it’s enough,
just as it is, to make you draw your breath,
inhaling its hue and the taste of a cold May rain.
That the branches of bare trees erupt
with bursting buds simply because,
so they tell us, the planet’s axis has tipped
toward the sun, is one wonder.
A larger one, it seems to me,
is that we walk past, heedless,
hardly noticing such marvels at all.
What a fantastic world, where
miracles occur in such profusion
that we barely give them
a ho-hum!
She dreams, on a frosty morning, that she is migrating with the wild geese.
The wake of air that trails from their wings makes tunnels of spinning light
as they stroke into the frozen dawn, their calls echoing against the cold.
Ahead, she sees the bay of a great lake, solid now, a flat steel gray,
and she falls with a flurry of downy white flakes to its ice-heaped edges.
Near the shore, winter reeds pen haiku with invisible ink on fresh snow.
An Irish setter walks past, stopping to read the lines, burying his nose in them.
“Bailey!” a woman calls from a house that sits on a rise above the shore.
“Bailey! Come!” And the dog trots off.
As a pale pink sun pushes above the horizon, its light spiraling in tunnels
through the falling snow, the calls of geese echo from across the bay.
She wakes, and finds a gray feather resting on her pillow, glistening with snow.
More rain is in the forecast,
maybe mixed with a bit of snow.
Even now the clouds have gathered
in the western sky. The sleeping fields
dream beneath puddles and frost,
oblivious of the weather. But we,
who have gone long days without
a glimpse of sun, danced today
under great swaths of blue sky,
counting it as a gift and a blessing.
I hadn’t been to this section of the creek
in a long time, maybe not since the autumn
of last year. Today I came here on a whim,
wanting a new perspective, not of the creek,
although I would welcome that, too. No,
it was something larger, and deeper, I sought,
something to dispel the wistful melancholy
that wrapped me like some dim veil.
It happens every fall. The year, after all,
is coming to its end, all it held rushing away.
The blast of cold air that struck me
as I emerged from my warm car woke me,
Startled I breathed it in, I took in the whole
scene with a sweep of my eyes. The pines,
the hill with its bare trees and the fallen leaves
spilling down to the rocky creek, and the creek
itself, singing in the cold. I didn’t name things.
I tasted and smelled them and felt them
on my skin and heard their silence and sounds.
I saw the motion of it all, the constant change,
all choreographed. And how perfect the light!
I walked along the creek for a while, noticing
the details, noticing that my face wore a smile
and my eyes felt alive, as if they had awakened
just now from some deep sleep. And so they had.
You never know in the morning
what a day will hold. Surprises
almost always lurk in the folds
of its hours, some welcome, some not.
But both are gifts to you, even those
that come disguised as setbacks
or misfortune. One rewards;
the other teaches. Take this flower,
a scarlet nasturtium, that yesterday,
before it bloomed, I had almost covered
with mulch for the winter, but didn’t.
Beneath its fat, green, lily-pad leaves
I saw its tiny bud, full of life and hope.
This morning it beamed its thanks
and whispered, “Never, ever give up.”
I pluck these ripe, juicy days as if they were berries and heap them in my basket of remembrances to contemplate on cold, winter days. I’ll sit with snow drifting outside my window and recall these fields filled with bees and wildflowers and remember the steamy heat and how the sun burned my neck and nose.
I’ll remember the fragrance of it, the carrot smell of Queen Anne’s lace, the dry honey of the goldenrod. And I’ll see this golden field with its crown of Joe-Pye Weed standing tall against the deep green woods, waltzing in the breeze.
It may not entirely warm me. But it will tell me to hold on and remind me that even snow doesn’t last forever.
It was one of those summer days that the geese tucked into their memory stores to recount to one another on long, winter nights. They would remind each other how they sat on the lawn and ate their fill of the bugs that crawled between the blades of grass. On those cold, dark nights, they would remind each other of the wonderful smell of the newly mown grass and luscious white clover.
Normally, the humans filled the park. But they disappeared in the rain as if it would melt them and rain had fallen all morning long and threatened to return. So the geese had the place to themselves. And they sat on the earth amidst the waves of grass and preened themselves, and slept and dreamed, wrapped in the green luscious smell of it all, breathing it into their hearts to hold for the days when the grass slept beneath a blanket of soft, sparkling snow.
Such wise birds, these.