The Creek Journal: Inoculation

[This post accidentally got left behind a bit more than a year ago. But here it is anyway.]

Inoculation

When the weight of nature’s gravity turns brutal,

I find surest relief by walking close to nature,

returning soon to home, now a healed being.

Nature deals death, disease, and the

multitude of sufferings when our

work contends with our world’s rawest rules.

Rain seeps inside, scoffing at our invented walls—

half a lifetime’s investments dissolve or rot—

tossed back outside now to

crumble under summer’s sun.

Or we watch helplessly, empty hands dangling

at our side as nature’s own double helix

takes a twist for the worst.

Honest purchase damned by entropy’s

casual indifference. Rust’s quiet appetite.

Everything’s breaking or broken.

Our things and ourselves dissolve and are forgotten

because of our mother-earth’s infanticidal apathy.

Yet I do not die before my death if, if that is,

I practice seeing….

Practice feeling….

The wind by dawn, red and yellow snake-scale,

sun across waters, angles of leaf-vein

one after the other, feathers on the wing

drying outstretched above a marsh,

stone’s swirled patterns, fossils in the cliff,

wasp-wing, springs seeping out of the cutbank,

fiddleheads, cloud, darkening woods wet and

dripping after a late-day rain.

You know what I’m saying.

Like the congregation that prays for comfort

from the god of hurricane and lightening strike, and

the diseases of mother’s children,

I still find refuge in the guilty arms of nature.

But there’s also a vaccine made from the poison:

spending whole mornings in a field, inoculating

ourselves from the next death or disease in line.

I cannot recall a walk through field’s-air or

wood’s-air that did not find my return home

a happier, stronger, less fearful way.

Yet to avert disaster, prevent unnecessary hurt?

We injected bits of smallpox to prevent

the blinding blisters later. Now a

morning walk introduces tame bits of a wild universe—

falling moon, frost on a dead fawn’s eyes,

reddened clouds high above—

soon the new day,

hand of grace, the one that grips.

This is how the opposite side of the canyon returns evening light. The Creek (this blog is supposed to be about a creek) flows left to right just in front of the white sycamore trees in the middle. We call this "night rise," as the evening shadow rises up the canyon wall. As opposed to sun-set.

An Inca dove that had flown into one of our home's window. We quickly set it in a box in case it recovered from the traumatic brain injury (as more than half of the do). But this one died.