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Off the Trail For Carole

We are free to find our own way Over rocks---through the trees--- Where there are no trails. The ridge and the forest Present themselves tour eyes and feet Which decide for themselves In their old learned wisdom of doing Where the wild will take us. We have Been here before. It's more intimate somehow Than walking the paths that lay out some route That you stick to, All paths are possible, many will work, Being blocked is its own kind of pleasure, Getting through is a joy, the side-trips And detours show down logs and flowers, The deer paths straight up, the squirrel tracks Across, the outcroppings lead us on over. Resting on treetrunks, Stepping out on the bedrock, angling and eyeing Both making choices---now parting our ways--- And later rejoin; I'm right, you're right, We come together. Mattake, "Pine Mushroom," Heaves at the base of a stump. The dense matted floor Of Red Fir needles and twigs. This is wild! We laugh, wild for sure, Because no place is more than another, All places total, And our ankles, knees, shoulders & Haunches know right where they are. Recall how the Dao De Jing puts it: the trail's not the way. No path will get you there, we're off the trail, You and I, and we chose it! Our trips out of doors Through the years have been practice For this ramble together, Deep in the mountains Side by side, Over rocks, through the trees.

--Gary Snyder

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We Collect Gull Feathers

As the evening dies over Pepin, we collect gull feathers, black and white ones, and pretend they were dropped by the eagle whose track and wing marked the gray Mississippi sandbar.

Jesse remarked as we arrived, "If I point at hawks they fly away, but if I don't they stay in their trees."

The river moves heavily, south, and the sun drops beyond the bluffs. The air chills me. I want to keep my fingers in my pocket, because everything moves on here, except that sweet pain of love that knows he's growing up to leave me.

Timothy Young

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Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. -John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)

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Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair. -Kahlil Gibran, mystic, poet, and artist (1883-1931)

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Eyes of Night-Time

On the roads at night I saw the glitter of eyes: My dark around me let shine one ray; that black allowed their eyes : spangles in the cat's, air in the moth's eye shine, mosaic of the fly, ruby-eyed beetle, the eyes that never weep, the horned toad sitting and its tear of blood, fighters and prisoners in the forest, people aware in this almost total dark, with the difference, the one broad fact of light.

Eyes on the road at night, sides of a road like rhyme; the floor of the illumined shadow sea and shallows with their assembling flash and show of sight, root, holdfast, eyes of the brittle stars. And your eyes in the shadowy red room, scent of the forest entering, various time

calling and the light of wood along the ceiling and over us birds calling and their circuit eyes. And in our bodies the eyes of the dead and the living giving us gifts at hand, the glitter of all their eyes.

--Muriel Rukeyser

From Collected Poems, 1978

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The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently. -Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)

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An Ox Looks at Man

They are more delicate even than shrubs and they run and run from one side to the other, always forgetting something. Surely they lack I don't know what basic ingredient, though they present themselves as noble or serious, at times. Oh, terribly serious, even tragic. Poor things, one would say that they hear neither the song of the air nor the secrets of hay; likewise they seem not to see what is visible and common to each of us, in space. And they are sad, and in the wake of sadness they come to cruelty. All their expression lives in their eyes--and loses itself to a simple lowering of lids, to a shadow. And since there is little of the mountain about them -- nothing in the hair or in the terribly fragile limbs but coldness and secrecy -- it is impossible for them to settle themselves into forms that are calm, lasting and necessary. They have, perhaps, a kind of melancholy grace (one minute) and with this they allow themselves to forget the problems and translucent inner emptiness that make them so poor and so lacking when it comes to uttering silly and painful sounds: desire, love, jealousy (what do we know?) -- sounds that scatter and fall in the field like troubled stones and burn the herbs and the water, and after this it is hard to keep chewing away at our truth.

~ Carlos Drummond de Andrade ~

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Remember, we all stumble, every one of us. That's why it's a comfort to go hand in hand. -Emily Kimbrough, author and broadcaster (1899-1989)