Thank you Michael. Blessings of love are surely enfolding you. Your honesty and tenderness, your perseverance and poetry of eye and heart sing through the screen. Such bright living full of the passions and sensations of being awake and alive! Thank you for honoring us.
Hooray for for rivers, egrets, ecstasy and journeys! . I am sure you will always find ways to communicate with those you love, with or without words. Love to you and your dear family.
Where the path closed
down and over,
through the scumbled leaves,
fallen branches,
through the knotted catbrier,
I kept going. Finally
I could not
save my arms
from thorns; soon
the mosquitoes
smelled me, hot
and wounded, and came
wheeling and whining.
And that's how I came
to the edge of the pond:
black and empty
except for a spindle
of bleached reeds
at the far shore
which, as I looked,
wrinkled suddenly
into three egrets - - -
a shower
of white fire!
Even half-asleep they had
such faith in the world
that had made them - - -
tilting through the water,
unruffled, sure,
by the laws
of their faith not logic,
they opened their wings
softly and stepped
over every dark thing.
I'm signed up for this ride with you, Michael. And your visit with the egret reminds me of the wisdom in this poem by Wendell Berry:
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.