Night is only shadow in which the stars remind that light is all around, still burning. This, an admonition to us, the small dimensionists, the ones, in all this matter, that struggle with our fear. The frailest of birds, in the coldest dark, sleep sound, somewhere. So, as this earth turns, each day, and night […]
I stepped out into the morning night. The stars were running, laughing in a living brightness as if the sun were throwing them like flaming embers further into the dark. I felt the woven world loosen and unravel all around me. I stood still until I heard the world of people asking what do you […]
For Ansel There is a certain lilt in the whole of things, so demure yet so threatening to the letter and the law it must subtle itself in life forms and experiences that take hold in the unguarded spaces of the heart. The lesson is to learn to see what one did not […]
The morning will break. This turning to that. To view the edge of a new thing from the far side of an old thing. To be through with what is meant to go beyond. To share the lingering night with light and open what has been withheld as a gift of other and elsewhere to […]
The deer walk out across the meadow, not one distorted thought among them and lit with the brilliance of instinct as we confound ourselves in every clear moment. Knowing this is like fearing God (the reverent kind King Solomon enshrined). The deer teach wisdom simply by walking out across the meadow.
To live beneath the tongue, not tasting of the things I make my meanings of. Instead, to sense the ground below my feet, the north wind on my neck, the winter death of grass, the piercing light of stars, the weight of moving water, the huffing breath of dogs, the woman’s touch on skin, and […]
I see the three of things, the sky, the earth, the wind. I am of each at once, never not been, always, evermore.
I read twenty to thirty books at a time, piecemeal, like short visits to important people I wouldn’t want to bother with my insignificance. These days I’m stricken with attention deficit disorder beneath which flows a stream of consciousness confluenced to a sure mystery. That’s where I have come to rest at this age. Stars […]
I walked into the wild, the high country, a silence, the first to the end of that sky canyon, no sight of human tracks before me on the last of the great snow embankments. I was held in my steps alongside fields of fallen rock, above hidden torrents. When I arrived, I realized it is […]
Having withdrawn from the contest, I live on the edge of town with a mind for mountains. I learned that dogs will follow if you point your feet in the other direction. So will the heart pounding whole in places where musk of warm earth vapors with the fragrance of spruce. There is always only […]
James Scott Smith 