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 […]
Tag Archives: contemplation
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 […]
I face the dawn and all is silhouette and shadow. I turn away, and all is lit with a kind of soft awakening that says, look!
I sensed a rush of wings above, a sudden river flowed in skyward waves, a twisting spiral random convergence leading itself centerless, to inspire it’s own innovations and my silence. First, of the crunchy growl of boots on hardening snow, then breath held for the sake of listening, then mind entrancing in it’s parallel flight with this […]
If you are one the wild God wants for his own. If your soul, your mind and your body are located in one place. If you are drawn out into the silence, near the bottom, along the edges, if you have borne up under some great catechism and now are released of it, into the […]
I am of poems and rivers. I stand as it all works around my footing. I am held, wordless and watchful. While I fish, while I write, waiting on delight, a fight, not knowing what’s next, a broad turn downstream, a desperate run to hidden structures, a sudden gasp at twisting flight then plunging to […]
The creek strives for nothing beyond to be as it is and nothing more. Its practice is an original innocence that I think we once knew yet have abandoned. May we, if willing, feel such ease, if only for the moments we bend and flow, in some grace that holds it all together? What if […]
Lone coyote whispers through the shallow grasses that bind the ridge above to the creek below. The moon throws off the last of its refractions from the deep end of the indigo sky. This morning he is lost in the abundant daily question of life or death? He has no executive function impeding his drive […]
“In the respects in which the soul is unlike God, it is also unlike itself.” St. Bernard You were born a poet, slow to affiliations otherwise. You do not belong but to elements and instincts, just the basics, in a place, embodied, of a home and a small handful of people. You were familied, churched, […]
Walk out into the first world, exhale into the sphere that reckoned this random scattering of tall grass into the field. Be received. Hail the wild geese and wish the ducklings well. It is morning and the fitful dreams are rinsing out into the one reality within the seen things.
James Scott Smith 