Took my listening walk with the dog up Poly Mountain this morning. The clock moved back on Saturday. The dawn was fresh and brilliant after last night’s rain. On the way down, near the gate, I was arrested by a burgeoning yellow acacia at the side of the path. Two peeps emerged from inside its opaque crown. The new leaves glowed green as the light swelled. Pearl-shaped leftover raindrops glittered like diamonds in the sun. The slow strains of cello and viola in Beethoven’s Hymn of Recovery slowly crescendoed in my earbuds and burst into a high-pitched dance of the first violin. A tiny bird flew out of the canopy, remained suspended and vibrating, then fired a blast of colors from its emerald head and ruby throat.

When I saw white butterflies in the sun
Flutter among my broccolis,
Like a tragic king at the oracle
I knew what was in store.

Now dark mornings find me
On aching knees
With headlamp pointed down
Searching undersides of ragged leaves
Stems fouled with droppings
Tangles of shredded buds.

I spot the velvety worms
The color of what they’ve eaten,
The shape of where they hide.

I lift them tenderly
With forefinger and thumb
To squeeze out their guts.

Back to black coffee
Not lighting a cigarette
But remembering

* * *

New zazen cushion
Arrived by yesterday’s mail
Right knee still hurts

* * *

Thick snow falling down
Mixed with cherry blossom petals
Lit up from below

This flattened trail gives softly to my tread
As cedar trunks suck water from below
Two hundred feet high where new shoots are spread
And, pointing to the sun, tough top tips grow.

With winks of shade and light the slovenly bush
From off the beaten path calls me to turn
I stomp on brittle twigs and logs of mush
I stroke slow swaying fronds of unfurled fern.

Up and down the dance of feed and kill
To music of the robin, jay and gnat
Warble, squawk and buzz. Then all is still
Till shattered by woodpeckers’ rattatat.

Summoned to return, as from a dream
My offering left: a sparkling golden stream.

“You get what you pay for,”
My momma used to say.
But shopping for bargains
Was how she spent her day.

Outside the night window a mockingbird renders her love
To the moon-soaked restaurant buzz and the creek
Indoors, a succession of bards warble syllables loosed
From the wellspring under the stairs.

Pumping thighs drive the flow
Fondling fingers swell the sound.

And as an arrow that upon the mark
Strikes ere the bowstring quiet hath become,
So did we speed into the second realm.

My Lady there so joyful I beheld,
As into the brightness of that heaven she entered,
More luminous thereat the planet grew

Dante, Paradiso Canto 5

The holiday began with Ian cutting chard leaves and eating them cooked, then playing the letter game with me on the floor after supper.  A return to the rapport we used to share when he spent more time here, not just intervals between school and home.

I’ve anticipated this holiday for weeks, though  I wasnt sure I’d be able to get away.  I didnt pack my gear until just before leaving last night. I’ve been longing for a respite from the campaigns–Jan’s and Obama’s–and from my own compulsive clicking on  the news of world economic collapse.  I’ve found surcease only while working in the garden and on my upcoming talk on “God and Nature” for the Methodist Church in Morro Bay.

After Dennis took Ian home last night, I pedaled across campus toward Poly Canyon.  Car, bike and pedestrian traffic bustled on the approaches to the new residential complex at its mouth.  The parking structure, swimming pool and athletic field lights cast a garish glow on the huge eucalypti and the mountainsides, but halfway up the canyon it was replaced by moonlight and the hooting of owls. Beyond the Peterson Ranch buildings, I crossed paths with two other bicyclists wearing headlamps as bright as an automobile’s.

I parked the bike by the dirt road near the junction of the south and middle forks of the creek at the base of Cuesta Ridge, a spot insulated from noise and open to a broad sky.  The cricket sounds were overtaken by the rising and falling roar of a crowd way back on campus, probably a soccer game.  By the time I’d finished unpacking and fiddling with my camera, the roar disappeared, and the chorus of crickets returned, now with its own throbbing pulse, like the sound of the stars. Through my binoculars I saw black shadows of mountains on the bright side of the half moon’s dividing line and white summits peeking through the dark side.  As I settled into my sleeping bag, a family of coyotes yodeled to one another across the valley.  Overhead, a shooting star stitched in and out of existence.

I awoke at 2:30. The moon had set and Orion stared down at me. I rested my camera on my shoe and took a fifteen second exposure with manual focus at 1600 ISO.

(more…)

Great God, I ask for no meaner pelf
Than that I may not disappoint myself,
That in my action I may soar as high
As I can now discern with this clear eye.

And next in value, which thy kindness lends,
That I may greatly disappoint my friends,
Howe’er they think or hope that it may be,
They may not dream how thou’st distinguished me.

That my weak hand may equal my firm faith
And my life practice what my tongue saith
That my low conduct may not show
Nor my relenting lines
That I thy purpose did not know
Or overrated thy designs.

(1841)

Universal spirit, O hear my urgent plea
For nothing less or more than plain integrity
That I may carry out in deed what in my mind I know
Is true but never comfortable, and find new ways to grow.

And if it is required to abandon obligation
And spend more solitary time in quiet contemplation
Then give me strength and confidence to follow my own light
And cut loose from the need to be approved in others’ sight.

Please let me saunter off with you, really walk the walk
Instead of giving yet another classroom Thoreau talk.
Let it not be that making do will win out finally,
That I cant find a way to write and testify,
That what was learned so long ago stays merely memory
Some idealist delusion better left to die.