Morning Sun
Love or Rust
“I’s been livin’ a long time in yesterday, Sandy chile, an’ I knows there ain’t no room in de world fo’ nothin’ mo’n love. I know, chile! Ever’thing there is but lovin’ leaves a rust on yo’ soul. An’ to love sho ‘nough, you got to have a spot in yo’ heart fo’ ever’body – great an’ small, white an’ black, an’ them what’s good an’ them what’s evil – ‘cause love ain’t got no crowded-out places where de good ones stay an’ de bad ones can’t come in. When it gets that way, then it ain’t love.”
― Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter
The Plains
During a trip to New Mexico, I learned that it was called the “Land of Enchantment”. As I drove down long stretches of road, wide-open landscape all around me, it was easier to understand. But what was it that made the land enchanting? To understand, I think you’d have to be there. Feel it. Experience it. I found myself driving mile after mile, hardly another car on the road and tears coming out of nowhere. It was spiritual, it was mystical.
Until I see you again, great mystery.
Land of the Trembling Waters
Okefenokee NWR – Images from years paddling across those trembling waters.
Summer
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver