Gratefully Indebted

More and more, I am paying ever greater attention to our natural world.  I feel both sadness and elation as I breathe through my days ... sadness at realizing how much of my time is consumed by a world that is so tragically removed from the natural world with its great to-do lists and endless deadlines and all the consequences of that disconnection, and elation at how much beauty and mystery there is to behold when I take the time to head into the wild or discipline myself to notice when, for

example, I drive somewhere. It's incredible what I can see and feel when I look to the trees lining a street and attune to the conversation taking place between oak and wind. I wrote this last week in the quiet sunrise of the morning:

You take your first step towards the western hills ... your tangerine ball of molten fire throws a holy beam that kisses the horizon on this frost covered morning. You kiss her body's curves as you do every dreaming dawn and on this awakening day your cool breath can be seen hovering above the pumpkin dotted fields and hanging ever so still in between the fingers of chestnut and oak, still wearing leaves whose green blood has turned shades of ochre, bronze, crimson and amber since your harvest moon ... their unblinking eyes looking one last time at their own thinning beauty before the breath of old man winter loosens their grip from solemn arcing limbs and into the swirling sea of your exhale spiralling to a soft landing on your skin where their crisp bones will slowly be pulled back into your lush fertile body.

So I praise thee with my words. I raise my articulate brush to touch your bold and archaic canvas. My wild heart beats like the ruby throated hummingbird's heart which is on fire, and like the buffalo herd's one heart which is thunderous, and like the noble stag's heart which is proud. And I fall on my knees unto you, knowing with ardent joy and a sorrow that tastes of honey and saffron, that I can never repay you.

~ Rachelle Lamb

Autumn Mist by Ros Walker