Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘Earth Day’

When Everything Is Field

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 24, 2023| 13 Comments »


Again I fall in love with the field
as if for the first time—the first time
I ever saw a pair of geese land there
then waddle through tall dry grass;
the first time I ever watched it transform
from drab ocher to brilliant green;
the first time I ever felt its spaciousness—
how it becomes a basin for light.
Every day I fall in love again with the field,
many times a day. Every day, I marvel
there are new ways to fall in love.
Once, I didn’t know how intimate it was,
this relationship to the land.
Now I know it as the truest thing.
Inevitable, this love affair with color,
texture, change, scent, the sound
of grass moving against grass.  
Inevitable, the love that rises
out of dew, out of frost, out of vastness,
out of wholeness, out of loss,
and reteaches me what it is to love, to be loved.

Read Full Post »

On Earth Day

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on April 23, 2023| 2 Comments »




We walk on the back road
through ponderosa forest
laughing and singing for hours,
and the sky comes down
in tiny white balls
shaped like flowers
that land in our hands
and melt into our gloves.
We don’t get to hold anything
for long—not the snow,
not this fabulous day
with its freedom,
its braiding streams, its mud.
We don’t even get to hold
each other, not forever,
though we try—
but for these hours,
surrounded by trickle and trill,
I feel how surely we are held
by the scent of spring,
by the shadows, by the deer,
by the jay’s bright squawk,
by the sun breaking through.

Read Full Post »

On Earth Day

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 21, 2021| 4 Comments »



Of course, the trees with their greening,
their growing, their gift of eating light—
how beautiful they are in these first days of spring:
their feathery drupes that gather low sun,
the tender gold when the leaves first unfurl.

But today I am awed by the vital soil that feeds them—
awed by the multipedes and woodlice, fly larvae and springtails
that fragment the once-living world into mulch;  
awed by the nematodes, the mites, the pauropods,
awed by the rotifers, the algae, the bacteria,

the single-celled protozoans—all of these makers of earth.
There’s elegance in the process—the breaking down,
the separation of proteins, the release of nitrogen,
the creation of rich, dark humus.
How seldom I honor the beauty of tearing apart,

the blessing of brokenness, the importance of those
who undo, who help the world go to pieces.
The earth itself is an altar to breakdown, decay,
collapse, demise. And from these infinite violences,
we rise, like trees, we rise.


Read Full Post »

%d bloggers like this: