Crossing the Bonner Bridge, near Bodie Island Lighthouse
at Lee Robinson General Store, Hatteras
Mary, Ocracoke
Photograph (35 mm, standard color film) from the Space Shuttle Discovery (2000), 35 mm, from a position over the Atlantic, of the coast inland toward North Carolina and Virginia.
On October 23, 2000, high pressure centered over the northeastern U.S. had created a capping inversion for aerosols. Forest fire smoke and industrial air pollution accumulated under the inversion. The inversion pattern is stronger inland, and the aerosols are being banked against the Piedmont. Relatively clearer air is flowing from the ocean over the Carolina coastal plain. Small smoke plumes from individual fires can also be seen on the ground stretching from central Virginia to Raleigh, NC.
Society
Eddie Vedder, from the soundtrack, Into the Wild
You think you have to want
more than you need
until you have it all you won't be free
What would happen if we let go of the notion of ownership? ... if we found a way to work with instead of work for? ... if we could listen to our spin across the black and open? ... if give were more important than take?
~
Marilou Awiakta
When Earth Becomes an “It”
When the people call Earth “Mother,”
they take with love
and with love give back
so that all may live.
When the people call Earth “it,”
they use her
consume her strength.
Then the people die.
Already the sun is hot
out of season.
Our mother’s breast
is going dry.
She is taking all green
into her heart
and will not turn back
until we call her
by her name.
Keynote poem, Governors’ Interstate Indian Council,
Nashville, Tennessee, August 1988
*
William Stafford
Ask Me
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
*
Mary Oliver
At Great Pond
At Great Pond
the sun, rising,
scrapes his orange breast
on the thick pines,
and down tumble
a few orange feathers into
the dark water.
On the far shore
a white bird is standing
like a white candle –
or a man, in the distance,
in the clasp of some meditation –
while all around me the lilies
are breaking open again
from the black cave
of the night.
Later, I will consider
what I have seen –
what it could signify –
what words of adoration I might
make of it, and to do this
I will go indoors to my desk –
I will sit in my chair –
I will look back
into the lost morning
in which I am moving, now,
like a swimmer,
so smoothly,
so peacefully,
I am almost the lily –
almost the bird vanishing over the water
on its sleeves of night.
*
Gary Snyder
On Climbing the Sierra Matterhorn
Again After Thirty-one Years
Range after range of mountains
Year after year after year.
I am still in love.
4.X.40086, On the summit
Blog Action Day
Spent time with this wonderful work... A rich, powerful read.
Natasha Trethewey
Native Guard
You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.
– from “Theories of Time and Space”
–the sea,
five miles off
Hatteras Inlet,
Outer Banks, June 07
But that star-glistered salver of infinity,
The circle, blind crucible of endless space,
Is sluiced by motion,—subjugated never.
– from Hart Crane, “Cape Hatteras,” The Bridge
Ryōkan / 1775-1831
When all thoughts
Are exhausted
I slip into the woods
And gather
A pile of shepherd’s purse.
Like the little stream
Making its way
Through the mossy crevices
I, too, quietly
Turn clear and transparent.
(Trans. John Stevens)
*
This untitled piece by Ryōkan, a master Zen poet, focuses directly on the relationship between human being and universe. To begin, the mind must be emptied – exhausted – before enlightenment is possible. “Turn[ing] clear and transparent” illustrates the self’s passing form a state of “in the world” to “of the world” – a part of the living system.
In the first stanza, the shepherd’s purse is rooted in the ground, but it flowers into the outside world – connecting both. The stream in stanza two cuts into the ground, touching each crevice. And like the stream, the self connects with its universe, becoming transparent – again emptied – for the journey.
To touch the world is to find the way.
Maybe this is all ...
Smoky Mountains, Eastern Tennessee
May 2006
*
Wendell Berry
Woods
I part the out thrusting branches
and come in beneath
the blessed and the blessing trees.
Though I am silent
there is singing around me.
Though I am dark
there is vision around me.
Though I am heavy
there is flight around me.
*
Sometimes images and words are perfect in a connection – in a rising up into something that was already there, waiting.
Sometimes a forest is a forest – sometimes it’s your soul, your breathing, and all the words you could ever write to paper.
*
August 2005 – near Grandfather Mountain, NC
