Still There

Giant storms and earthquakes and volcanoes spewing ash. Schoolyard bully-style name calling, missiles flying and jets swooping, hydrogen bomb threats... it's a wonder we can sleep at all.

When I woke today from a restless night, the world was still there, so I took a walk in it.

It was pretty cloudy when I started out, but the sunlight slid right through the mist covering the mountains.

My phone camera did its best to capture the emerging light.

Beany, dirty face and all, kept a careful eye on me, 

while Weetzie watched the great blue heron that accompanied us, up ahead and just out of camera range. 

Farm workers have picked truckload after truckload of green chiles from these fields. Now they wait for the last ones to turn red for the red chile harvest.

I know the farmers rightly dislike the field bindweed, but its flowers are beautiful among the red chiles. I saw some tomatillos growing in among the plants, too. 

I need to stop watching the news and take my cues from nature. 

Here is Arthur Symons' poem, In the Wood of Finvara, first published in 1896. Although my heron is no fairy bird, and Symons speaks of "sea and sea" and fairy woods and not of the desert and its irrigated valleys, he knows my heart.

I have grown tired of sorrow and human tears;

Life is a dream in the night, a fear among fears,

A naked runner lost in a storm of spears.

I have grown tired of rapture and love's desire;

Love is a flaming heart, and its flames aspire

         

Till they cloud the soul in the smoke of a windy fire.

  

I would wash the dust of the world in a soft green flood;

Here between sea and sea, in the fairy wood,

I have found a delicate, wave-green solitude.

  

Here, in the fairy wood, between sea and sea,

  

I have heard the song of a fairy bird in a tree,

And the peace that is not in the world has flown to me.