Grass is the cloth of the prairies, a pattern of roots woven underground. In darkness threads of fescue, vetch, old man’s whiskers, needle and spear, porcupine, brome and bluegrass twine and entwine to bind the earth together. Grass emerges like the tip of an iceberg in a land too dry for forests, too wet for […]
I’ve passed this slough everyday on my walk around this country block. It’s hard to ignore, though I have, too busy wading in my own marshy thoughts, until – one day I see gold. A blackbird with a bright yellow head. I can’t resist. I stop to kneel, to be still, to be one with […]
There’s loneliness here today. Tall stems of sedge chafe on unpredictable breezes. A month ago the bulrushes held dark heads high above the grasses, now they are grey and moulting. Scent of tickle, mildew and musk ride the surly air. No green here, only a dry, wizened brown beneath a sky feathered in clouds, the […]
Cold air scratching my lungs bare branches clawing the red cloud sky. To fall here so far from anyone I would be dead before the low sun had buried itself beneath the scrub trees of the distant hedgerow. Drifts shelter tilting stones holding them against the wind time freezing in this white openness distance and […]
for Thich Nhat Hanh Dimly we know the mystery in the deadfall that supports us: the life in this place, they told us, is on the ground. Journal Entry, March 25, 1995 Slave Lake, Alberta Finding a forest older than yourself you widen a clearing inside. Listen through your toes. You’ll hear openings created long […]
