Walking arroyos

Oh, it’s been lovely in the mountains. You don’t want to know. Rest assured that I’ve been doing some work. Here’s a new poem.

Walking arroyos

Though gravel paths are published as preferred

route through sage and piñon pine, causing

least disturbance in this fragile desert community,

the Others who live here follow other ways,

learned and sensed, that lead them to food and

water and places where they feel safe.

I find in walking these alternate throughways -

these mountain arroyos - a language of the Mother

spoken through Earth and Water: the unconditional

embrace of a molten heart, cast up and seething,

with the cooling of air and the comfort of rain, loved

and worked by desert wind, into an exposed wholeness

of conglomerate self, knowing sand and rounded granite

as relatives, and a revealing of Truth in our time

assuring us that we are part of all this that comes and goes.

Today’s elder idea: The Day undressed - Herself - /

Her Garter - was of Gold - / Her Petticoat of Purple....

Emily Dickinson

excerpted from Franklin 495 c.1862

photo: ‘Walking arroyos‘ by Tom Schaefer. (2010)

Taken right outside my hermitage. I’m telling you, you could come.