To Life!

Listen

Psalm of the Daughters and Sons of Earth and Sky

Are we not your daughters and sons?
We who wish to be of service
Who walk with you
Who listen for your words
Who meet fear daily
And go forward inch by inch
With broken hearts
With deep weariness
And yet with love and hope in you
In whom wholeness and brokenness dwell
Together through life without end

(October 2010)

My unpublished book 42 years: a book of changes is in the process of the addition of the above poem, an afterword and a list of books that helped me through those years. Oboe is sitting next to those books whose titles and authors need to be entered, along with the poem and an afterword, into my manuscript on my MacBook Pro. It's been a little over 2-1/2 years since Richard died, and I find I have more to say. For those of you have bought a copy of my book, I plan to give you a copy of the newer version, if you would like one. My energy for doing the footwork needed to get my book published is limited, but that is my goal.

"Go on, go. In our tongue it is a single word, i.

It is the last word Aeneas said. So in my mind it is spoken to me, said to me. I am the one to go, to go on. Go where?

I do not know. I hear him say it, and I go. On, away. On the way. The way to go. When I stop I hear him say it, his voice, Go on."

(From Lavinia, by Ursula K. Le Guin, 2008)

Love Minus Zero / No Limit

"We have to learn what we can, but remain mindful that our knowledge not close the circle, closing out the void, so that we forget that WHAT WE DO NOT KNOW remains boundless, without limit or bottom, and that what WE KNOW may have to share the quality of being known with what denies it. What is seen with one eye has no depth ..."

(Quote from Always Coming Home, by Ursula Le Guin, but the capitalization is my mother's. She typed that out for me on a little piece of notepaper with a drawing of Rattlesnake Grass from California's North Coast and enclosed it in a letter she wrote to me during the 1980s. I may have posted this quote before, but I feel like posting again it because I love it.The photo was taken a few days ago from the trail just before the small bridge over Whatcom Creek at Derby Pond)

Always

Walking home in January 2010

Listen to this from 1970:

"On our way back home. We're on our way home"

And from 1985, in Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin, pages 21-22, and an excerpt from a song from an unnumbered page that is two pages beyond page 523:

"Walking down to Hard Canyon Creek, I felt old, as if I had been away longer than four days, longer than the month in Kastoha-na, longer than the eight years of my life. I washed in the creek, and came back up the meadow in the twilight. Gahheya Rock was there, and I went to it. It said, "Now touch me." So I did, and so came home. I knew something had come to me that I did not understand, and maybe did not want, my walk had been the golden hill; the coyote had sung to me; and so long as my hand and the rock touched each other I knew that I had not gone wrong, even if I had come to nothing."


_____Stammersong
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
From the Library at Wakwaha.


I have a different way, I have a different will,
I have a different word to say.
I am coming back by the road around the side,
by the outside way, from the other direction ...

...There is a valley, high hills around it.
There is a river, willows on its shores.
There are people, their feet are beautiful,
___dancing by the river in the valley.