Approaching the Grand Canyon at Dawn

On the nature of daylight by max richter

(Recounted from a road trip with Daniel Livsey

 Summer 2010)

through the night we drove

and now

long shadows cast

as we glide

down the straight gray road

light through the aspens throws

their dark side slender

cross our way

and we traverse through

shadow and light

yellow ticking gray

blurred foreground

patterned panorama

aspen, sun, aspen, sun

shadow, light

yellow ticking gray

through the horizon

of new growth

and blackened decay

day broke, piercing, brilliantly,

again, the dark side of our turning

And we sit,

Daniel and I,

without words

as the strings emanate,

Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight”

from the randomized music machine

made audible through the speakers of this car,

the violin reverberating

the poetics of being

that we now sit witness to

a total moment

at just the right velocity

all tales

our story

the details

converge

now

I feel the history of humankind

ride with us

plucked from the past

and all the present

is here too

without their barriers

all come to commune

in this sheer moment

feeling the human

beyond this singular isolated entity

the being beyond I

the turnings of

the sun’s past and

the sun’s future,

as one,

lighting existence

nothing else matters;

we arrive

How To Be a Poet by Wendell Berry

(to remind myself)

i   

Make a place to sit down.   

Sit down. Be quiet.   

You must depend upon   

affection, reading, knowledge,   

skill—more of each   

than you have—inspiration,   

work, growing older, patience,   

for patience joins time   

to eternity. Any readers   

who like your poems,   

doubt their judgment.   

ii   

Breathe with unconditional breath   

the unconditioned air.   

Shun electric wire.   

Communicate slowly. Live   

a three-dimensioned life;   

stay away from screens.   

Stay away from anything   

that obscures the place it is in.   

There are no unsacred places;   

there are only sacred places   

and desecrated places.   

iii   

Accept what comes from silence.   

Make the best you can of it.   

Of the little words that come   

out of the silence, like prayers   

prayed back to the one who prays,   

make a poem that does not disturb   

the silence from which it came.

Some articulations of interconnection.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe. -Muir

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe’ —a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. 

     -Einstein

All things are connected.
Whatever befalls the earth
Befalls the sons of the earth.
Man did not weave the web of life,
He is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web,
He does to himself.     - Chief Seattle

           

We should free ourselves from the narrowness of being related only to those familiar to us, either by the fact that they are blood relations or, in a larger sense, that we eat the same food, speak the same language, and have the same “ common sense.” Knowing men in the sense of compassionate and empathetic knowledge requires that we get rid of the narrowing ties of a given society, race or culture and penetrate to the depth of that human reality in which we are all nothing but human. True compassion and knowledge of man has been largely underrated as a revolutionary factor in the development of man, just as art has been. It is a noteworthy phenomenon that in the development of capitalism and its ethics, compassion (or mercy) ceases to be a virtue. ― Erich Fromm, The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technolog

To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.  -Terry Tempest Williams

There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are also the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of bein except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And . . . in whatever . . . place by whatever . . . name or by no name at all . . . all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one. 

-Cormac  McCarthy
    The Crossing

A stand of trees in a field somewhere in Texas.

           A friend and I recently made a trip to Marfa, Texas to aid another friend; another story. We drove through the night to arrive in Odessa around 3. We stopped here to pick up a Budget truck in the morning. Not wanting to spend money and making it up as we went along we drove around scouting for a suitable place to throw hammocks up or sleep in the car. Before long we found ourselves crossing a cattle guard somewhere in the perpetual industrial zone of Odessa prompted by a stand of trees set back in a field. We found that the caliche road took us back to another paralleling with a pipe gate and this road lead through the stand of trees. My friend slept in the car; I slept in the trees. The night was frigid and the woods alive. These are few of the images I collected upon rising at dawn.

 

Rising

A bird flys,
black,
from a post

A human
carried by,
car,
takes a picture

The sun spreads,
fresh,
cross the visage

fence and field
forground

old mountains
horizon

and in the middle,
you are,
somewhere with
the black bird
soft mountains
and sun,
rising

Listen

Listen
silence; words unuttered; synapses firing,
the woods breathe,
here I feel,
everything stirs; nothing
  stirs,
wind; needles; boughs; branches,
the crisp evergreen breath,
the whisper of morning light through the pines. 

Here
I
am;
here
all
are. 

My impression, the impression I leave, is not my own
   but the shape of the world removed
   the space bequeathed, allotted,  gifted, for "my" existence.

The mind divided is too loud;
fear of life
being in tumult
noise of "self"

Existence is a subtle breath
  whispering to our nothingness

We need
 only listen

about the first fire

lifetimes ago we sat about the first fire
under most of these same stars
staving off the cold night
with its teeth and eyes and claws
its poetry of inverse light