Something Readable

I am often sad at how frightened the deer and bear are in my presence, and grateful to moose who don't seem to pay it any mind. Can you tell what the crow means when you hear its raucous cry?

The moon a blue haze in early autumn clouds, rain moving in from west and slightly north. If you think of our bodies as texts, a lot of so-called problems settle into something interesting, something readable.

Near the corner of Radiker and Old Post Road I eased a baby snapping turtle - barely larger than the fifty cent pieces my grandfather loved - into the tall grass of the cow pasture. We are never done with the image or, if you want to be fancy, with phenomena.

The fantasy in which I write is a kind of sexualized New England monasticism. Last night I cleared a spot in the forest for late fall fires - stars turning circles overhead - and thought of her, again, for whom I am always trying to find just the right word, just the right hymn.

Thought is illusory (which doesn't mean it can't be helpful too) and most of what we call "life" or "experience" is thought. The specifically Christian myths are not as fructive as I want them to be, and so often pretend (a form of insistence) they are.

Out near where in summer I spooked three bears working the raspberries it occurred to me I need never think in terms of a crucifix again, preferring as I do a profluent greenery. One needs to understand that "joy" and "happiness" are not the same word (the distinction relates to luck or chance) in order to go beyond where such discernment matters.

I keep deleting the email I write to her, in part because of how she wears a vest, and in part because of my longstanding fear of not knowing the patently obvious. That pile of books does grow taller, doesn't it!

The silence of just before dawn, then bird song where the hedge is thickest, then the roosters. A certain commitment to perceiving - and being willing to see undone - specialness is not without benefit.

I dream often - not fearfully but attentively, fiercely attentively - of that afternoon about eight years ago when I cut the heads off a couple dozen ducks, allowing only three to live for my daughter, who loved running in the tall grass with them. It is real work suffering a snake to live, writes the man who ought to know.

Please give attention to Dickinson's devotion to art and don't be distracted by the gossip, no how matter how the many decades have gilded it. I'm saying there are many ways to clear a field and the one you choose reflects what you have learned - so far - about love.