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Posts Tagged ‘nature poetry’

Noticing What Counts – SANCP 2020

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 28, 2020| 9 Comments »

I remember the first bird that counted. Clarification: I remember the first bird I counted.

Mom and Dad had rented a cabin so we could join them for a long weekend on Skyline Drive in the Shenandoahs, June, 1988. Did they think their grandkids were Nature undernourished? Mountain vistas, enfolding trees, night sky – we even saw a bobcat at dusk one evening. Maybe I was undernourished.

The second morning we hiked up a lonely trail in deep shade that suddenly brightened. A forest giant had fallen and invited into its space the sun and the sky. And birdsong. (Prime transitional habitat, I’ve since learned.)

Mom spotted a yellow streak come to rest on a bare branch and begin to sing. I focused. What is this?! Never had one of these on the feeder outside my dorm window, never saw one snagging worms on the front lawn. And listen to it sing! What?!

That Chestnut Sided Warbler is the first bird in my list. Well, make that lists: pocket notebooks, index cards, the backs of trail maps. And of the course the database on my hard drive, which has swelled to megabytes. But what’s the big deal? Thirty-five years old and writing down the name of a bird? What?

I wasn’t a Nature-deprived child. We played outdoors until the street lights blinked on. Caught fireflies in our hands and honey bees in jars. Raised tadpoles to peepers. Camps, beach trips, hiking, Scouts; I was out in Nature pretty much, but I count that CSW as the moment I began to notice. This is not just an unpopulated landscape, not a homogenous backdrop for picnics or games or a nice walk. These are things. Individuals. Differentiated. Species. I start by counting birds but then I notice wildflowers and take up botany, notice one side of the ridge has more blossoms and different, it’s geology, get down on my knees for the tiniest blooms and dang there’s a beetle, entomology.

Pretty soon I want to notice it all, the great grand beautiful interconnected mess, ecology, the parts and the whole. I’m becoming a Naturalist – someone who pays attention. Someone who notices.

Chestnut Sided Warbler in Virginia was my gateway drug. How much was I missing all those years before? Now I can’t help but notice. Blame the wrens that scold me every morning in the driveway. Blame my friend Mike who is always so careful to step over every millipede on the trail. Blame Amelia my granddaughter as she watches the crocuses open. And after last weekend blame Emily Stein* as my chief enabler, she and the other twenty hard core Naturalists I joined at Tremont in the Smokies for an intense course in “Skills for Sharing Nature.” As always, begin with some questions:

Where have I come from to reach this place? Why do I care? What is my personal story? What do I have to share?

The answers may arrive like spring buds that swell along the flank of the mountain seeking the summit, a lifetime of questions and answers, but now it’s time to screw up my courage and take Step 2: I’m going to get you hooked on Nature, too. Come here a minute. Try my binoculars. See that little dab of brown fluff that just flew up to that branch? Yes, that’s the one. Let’s see what he has to tell us.

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* Emily Stein: Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont naturalist educator, youth programs coordinator, and instructor for the February 2020 course “Skills for Sharing Nature,” part of the Southern Appalachian Naturalist Certification Program (SANCP). More information at www.gsmit.org

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Prayer for the Great Family

Gratitude to Mother Earth, sailing through night and day—
and to her soil: rich, rare, and sweet
in our minds so be it

Gratitude to Plants, the sun-facing light-changing leaf
and fine root-hairs; standing still through wind
and rain; their dance is in the flowing spiral grain
in our minds so be it

Gratitude to Air, bearing the soaring Swift and the silent
Owl at dawn. Breath of our song
clear spirit breeze
in our minds so be it

Gratitude to Wild Beings, our brothers, teaching secrets,
freedoms, and ways, who share with us their milk;
self-complete, brave, and aware
in our minds so be it

Gratitude to Water: clouds, lakes, rivers, glaciers;
holding or releasing; streaming through all
our bodies salty seas
in our minds so be it

Gratitude to the Sun: blinding pulsing light through
trunks of trees, through mists, warming caves where
bears and snakes sleep—he who wakes us—
in our minds so be it

Gratitude to the Great Sky
who holds billions of stars—and goes yet beyond that—
beyond all powers, and thoughts
and yet is within us—
Grandfather Space.
The Mind is his Wife.

so be it.

Gary Snyder (after a Mohawk prayer)
from EARTH PRAYERS, edited by Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon, HarperSanFrancisco, 1991

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Buxton Woods – Susan Laughter Meyers

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 21, 2019| Leave a Comment »

A ten minute walk from Buxton Woods there are a hundred people milling around at the base of the lighthouse waiting to climb or just spraining their necks. A ten minute walk into Buxton Woods it’s just the three of us. The trail rises, ancient dune now eternal with live oak and yaupon. Surf crash can’t reach us here but the hum is constant, cicadas, mosquitoes, something swift in peripheral vision. We descend to a slough, marsh slowly becoming meadow then woodland. Looks ancient. Smells ancient.

Even in deep shade the trail is not cool but our grandson thinks it’s cool to be here. We’ve never seen this many different colors of dragonflies. Along one stretch a platoon of thumb-sized toads is invisible until one hops across the trail. It’s not a dinosaur, this trail, not yet extinct but endangered. Not only because every other scrap of maritime forest along the outer banks is scrutinized greedily by developers with bulldozers, but because this is the Outer Banks. The dune ridges are a timeline of shoreline creeping ever west, the bank rolling over itself for millennia, now faster and faster. Thousand year old clam and oyster middens are still uncovered, evidence of the human beings that have visited and resided here. How much longer?

This little trail is an insect in amber. Engrave it in memory. From the gallery rail on Hatteras Lighthouse they can’t see us here.

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This poem is from Susan Meyer’s My Dear, Dear Stagger Grass. I return to this book when the world smells like asphalt and I need a whiff of spartina. I mean, when my own ideas are pedestrian and my inspiration is muckbound and I need something with clear veined wings to chase me back into sunlight. Or a chiseled head and slender neck. How can writing be at once so rooted and so lofty? Oh Susan, how few words we need.

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Two Friends Hiking at Old Santee Canal

Ahead of me, he balances his feet, left then right,
on the first of two planks – an unsteady bridge of sorts –
laid down for hikers to cross
what, on most days,
would be bog,
but on this one, after weeks of rain, is flooded.

We are learning the look and feel of swamp.

Waiting my turn, I can see his every step.
He pauses halfway across, standing sweaty
in the midst of the ordinary.
An inch or so beneath his heels,
under the seam of the two boards,
I see the loops and curves
of a thick brown snake.
The chiseled head, the slender neck. Above them,
his bare ankles.
How few, the words we need.
Snake, I say, unable to utter where
or put sense to it.
Which way should I go? He is a statue,
his arms frozen in air.
I tell him to come back, and he does.
We watch the snake uncurl
and disappear, but in the thrill of fear just past,
our bodies, all breath and jitters, now belong
to someone we don’t recognize.
Forward is the direction we want to choose
but neither of us can step onto the board.
We know what we must do:
stumble through ferns and mud,
clotted roots, the thick
of mosquitoes, a limestone bluff –
backtrack in the safety of a path already taken.

Susan Laughter Meyers
from My Dear, Dear Stagger Grass, Cider Press Review, 2013

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Forever Mountain

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , on October 28, 2012| 10 Comments »

Keep close to Nature’s heart, yourself;
and break clear away once in a while,
and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods.
Wash your spirit clean.
John Muir

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Why have they come?  Why have they driven hundreds of miles of highway and another twenty of Forest Service gravel to this Deep Gap?  Why have they tracked down my friend Mike Barnett and persuaded him to share with them everything they will need to know to spend a few nights on the trail? Why forsake comfort for mist, rain, steep switchbacks, cold nights, hard ground?  Why have they come here?

Now they huddle at the trail head – Judy, Nora, Cathy, Gloria, Joan, Nancy – median age 65 (just a wild guess, Ladies!).  They pull on fleece and rain gear because we’re already above 3,000 feet and it’s mid-October.  Mist condenses on the leaves and drips like rain.  The plan is to hike the AT for three days with everything we need to survive on our backs: food, stove, water & filter, tent, mummy bags, and lots of layers for nights just above freezing.  We’ll reward ourselves the third night with a short side hike to Albert Mountain and hope to catch the sunset and sunrise from the 5,280 foot summit and fire tower.

That sunrise seems a long way off as we hunker down for the first night half-way up Standing Indian Mountain.  It’s pitch dark , a “hunter moon,” first new moon after equinox, but what does absent moon matter when we are engulfed in cloud with thunder echoing ridge to ridge as lightning strikes the summit?  Kids, I just want to let you know that your grandmothers are some tough-ass mountain women – they wake up the next morning joking that the howl of wind and rain had caused them to miss George Clooney’s surprise midnight visit.  And the only complaint I hear is when Joan comes back from digging a cat hole just as the mist lifts to reveal a nice rainproof privy not twenty yards from our camp site.

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Our second night we stop at Beech Gap, a saddle between peaks with a good spring and level tent sites.  The stars burn cold as diamond just above our shoulders; we are wearing every layer of clothing we’ve carried.  I ask, “Why?  Why did you go to so much trouble to put this trek together?”

Judy was the instigator.  She told Nora she wanted to hike at least one stretch of the Appalachian Trail before she died.  Nora replied, “Gee, I know someone who’s been taking kids on high adventure hikes in the mountains for twenty years, and his sister-in-law Carol is my good friend.”  Nora called Carol, Carol called Mike, and Mike said, “OK.”  (I still haven’t asked him why he said yes!)  Wheels began to turn.  It began to look like Judy’s promise to herself that she’d have something big to to tell her grandchildren would be fulfilled.

Nora invited others, and Mike’s wife Nancy makes six.  One had hiked with her family as a child and wanted to recapture that feeling.  One walked miles every day and wondered if she could handle the challenge of doing it uphill with a pack.  Another had become concerned about her stamina and embarked on a course to improve her fitness; now she wanted to kick it up a notch. One had never experienced mountain wilderness.  All of the women had come with a frank openness to experiencing something new.  Something challenging.

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There are plenty of obvious physical challenges to spending a night on a mountain.  Just deciding what you’re willing to carry vs. what you’re willing to live without can become a metaphysical exercise.  Then there’s the trail itself.  Where will I find water?  Will the spring be dry?  How many uphill miles before my buns turn to steel?  How much huffing and puffing before I have a heart attack?

Physical challenges are obvious, but they are illusory.  I may be thirsty now, but I will drink later.  When the trail is steep, I walk more slowly.  I stop and rest.  Tired and sore?  Leaves are falling that I may scrape together for a bower.  Strange noises in the night?  My companions are close by.

I’m guessing there are still more reasons we’ve come to these mountains that none of us have yet spoken.  I’m certain there are reasons we couldn’t even have named until after we took this walk together.  There are reasons we’ll discover only with days and weeks of contemplation to come.  A taste of wildness – remote, unforgiving, pristine, elemental.  An assurance of self – I made it, I persevered.  Connection, unvarnished and unabashed – each one of us making our small offering to the survival, and the joy, of the group.  And a much larger connection – wind, trees, slopes, stars . . .  we are part of this living realm and can’t exist without it.

Why have we come here?  That’s exactly what we’re still discovering.

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Final question: Why did Mike ask me if I’d like to come and lend a hand as general schlepper, filter pumper, water boiler, story teller?  Because he knew as soon as the word “mountains” left his lips I would be saying, “YES!”

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Forever Mountain
Fred Chappell

for J.T.Chappell, 1912-1978

Now a lofty smoke has cleansed my vision.

I see my father has gone to climb
Lightly the Pisgah slope, taking the time
He’s got a world of, making spry headway
In the fresh green mornings, stretching out
Noontimes in the groves of beech and maple.
He has cut a walking stick of second-growth hickory
And through the amber afternoon he measures
Its shadow and his own shadow on a sunny rock.
Not marking the hour, but observing
The quality of light come over him.
He is alone, except what voices out of time
Swarm to his head like bees to the bee-tree crown,
The voices of former life as indistinct as heat.

By the clear trout pool he builds his fire at twilight,
And in the night a granary of stars
Rises in the water and spreads from edge to edge.
He sleeps, to dream the tossing dream
Of the horses of pine trees, their shoulders
Twisting like silk ribbon in the breeze.

He rises glad and early and goes his way,
Taking by plateaus the mountain that possesses him.

My vision blurs blue with distance,
I see no more.
Forever Mountain has become a cloud
That light turns gold, that wind dislimns.

This is continually a prayer.

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from The Fred Chappell Reader, St. Martin’s Press, (c) 1987 by Fred Chappell

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A brief postscript: Mike has told me several times of his instructions to Nancy that his ashes are to be strewn from the top of Standing Indian Mountain.  By noon on our second day the mist had lifted, and we ate lunch at that summit with glorious views of the autumn-hued ridges extending to an infinite horizon.  Mike, I hope it’s years in our future, but I can’t think of a better spot to lend the flora a little potash and calcium for all eternity.

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Our true home lies outside, deep in the wilderness of forest and mountain, river and desert and sea, the source of our being and the destiny of our great meandering blundering dreaming journey through time. Like Odysseus in his wanderings, we are homeward bound whether we know it or not.
Edward Abbey

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