The wind has gently murmured through the blinds, or puffed the feathery softness against the windows and occasionally sighed like a summer zephyr lifting the leaves along the livelong night…We sleep and at length awake to the still reality of a winter morning. Henry Thoreau, “A Winter Walk”
I have declared this a day of calm at roiled week’s end. Yes, my current writing project tugs already at resolve – thinking about how we respond to mishaps in the mountains is seeded with its own turbulent drama. But when I work at that writing today, I’ll choose a stoic incident, one full of acceptance, and, perhaps near its close, even light.
The day opens with thin sun through the pines and the coverlet of a dusting of snow. The village of juncos who’ve settled the feeder keep adding to a circling calligraphy in that snow; as ever their subject is the urgency of food. For me, urgency points to the non-Thoreauvian beverage, coffee, and, beans ground, the pot dripped full, I settle in front of the window that makes me this morning’s ship captain. The yard looks navigable…and so the day…but it is the dark jolt of beverage that launches me on it.
Add a little toast and poetry. Dark bread, and a darkish poem as well about a long-ago marriage and its “unsnapped threads.” But the words and images are so apt, so chosen as to celebrate poetry’s answers to the hard questions we bring on through living. The poet’s words and images are so precise that I hear a faint click as each slots in behind the other.
I look up after reading. The gray squirrels sort themselves through a hierarchy of chase; not exactly poetry, but motion leading into the day.
And it is a day! exclamation point courtesy of the enduring cyclamen that looks out over the same scene Perhaps it is the rising light; perhaps it is plant-reminder to me, but this now 1+ year-old little plant (which deserves and so will get a larger pot) has chosen this month to exclaim in red. “Sunsunsun!!! … and don’t forget the water.” For all these weeks, I have not, though once or twice the plant had to lie down as reminder.
Exclamation plant! (posed for the photo-op)
The wind arrives, announcing deeper morning, and I’ve begun tumbling through the day’s words, revising some passages and wondering specifically at the way mountain ridges generate turbulence as the wind rises to their crests and then tumbles into the ravine below. I have been pressed nearly flat by such a giddy wind, and I am wondering how to convey such a feeling in words. Strong wind is so-many-handed, in touch with so much of you all at once that it defies the linear, the singular touch of reason. Heavy wind can feel like a form of madness. Perhaps I should toss the words aloft and watch them fly.
But no madness on this day, designated “calm,” even if now a little wind-laved. After work, I’ll read some from Henry Thoreau’s “A Winter Walk.” Then, I’ll take one.
