WHAT YOU MAKE
Every time you step in your car, you step out of natural time
and space and sound. These movements are alien to me, and
yet they condition all that I see and hear around me. Try to be
serious. Why should I be interested in what you make?
HIATUS
There’s a hiatus in all the chatter
around the evening camp fire.
In the background,
the sound of rushing water.
HEALING
I remember every single photograph
I make in exquisite detail.
I don’t want this.
How can it heal?
The river I sit next to runs fifty kilometers
from highland crest
to low canyon confluence.
Four times a day, it purifies itself
from beginning to end,
and yet the stream of my mind
seems filled with the opaque runoff from
the feedlots where cattle are fattened.
That’s bad.
I don’t want this.
THINGS
Youth is the time of acquiring new things;
Middle age tries to hold on to what it has;
Old age loses one thing after another, irreversibly.
Then, I say, then, we are young again.
FREEDOM—strangeloops
The one thing you never want to take for granted
is the freedom which allows you to take freedom for granted.
NEW OLD MINDS
We shape the world and the world shapes us.
I meet many young people along the trail, and yet, I frequently
find that their minds are already old. Chew a bit of Agastache leaf
for heart and nerves, I say to myself. In the secret chamber of
my inner ear, I listen to the sound of the Spirit Thrush, solitary
miracle, two streams of music folded together in dialogue, one
a sharp, regular staccato, always on but a single pitch, and then,
somehow fitting in between, these magnificent spiral staircase
flourishes to the stars. Who can I tell about this?