summer postcards on autumn's talking leaves

as far as i'm concerned riding the airplane was a falling off the edge of the earth. i'm a fire-keeper from the peninsula, the loving hand on the waters. who am i to toast to foreign lands? my water to their beers. but the wind is beautiful, as the song goes, and i was blown about by the summer breezes of cool northern europe, yet in the end i returned to the irish hills of kemokemonom for my 4th fall. who warned me the grass was ripe? a migrating hawk or a bur oak? fiddler jones or the ghost of mr. kaiser?

two ways to my tree of life:

to choose some place (one can't know it all) and grow native. let roots reach deep. to know and be known by the deer paths and the librarians.

or to sing those walkin' blues at home on the open road, not fattening at the trough, but growing lean and strong on the highways and byways never seeing the same tree twice. having little, being much.

"so here we are again vagabond. let's go." it can be good to collect, but walking on is better yet. don't we dream of a promise land? a place just to be and make a life in and not worry about trespassing. our own fresh water spring.

water is life. wetlands... visions... dreams of fenny... i've been walking in the creek. its moving water forever flowing on, and yet always here just wandering around a bit. i could follow it all the way north to the arctic sea, but it is difficult to get far quick when there are cardinal flowers to stop and stare at. every step is revealing more of the glory. don't miss it. but at this pace it may take a decade just to reach the mill pond. sure i liked paris, singing on the steps of the sacre coeur, eating speculoos every morning, but i didn't see as many autumn olive resprouts in all of france as we have here in unit 9.

can one touch two extremes at the same time? i know one can't eat poetry, but i don't want to live on food alone. i do believe in positive and negative. whenever you breath out i breath it in.

better in real life. so i've heard.

just a week back home and then i'm off again for the rest of the summer.

the youth are out. saw two coyote pups yesterday under a stand of red pine as i was standing in the rain. watched a young ground hog watching me by the barn this morning. saw a fawn standing close to its mother. and the lightning bugs were incredible under the lightning on the summer solstice. and the forest, still young with spring when i left, is a jungle now that i'm back, and when i'm back again will be on the border of fall. i don't need to go to europe when everything cool is right here in my back yard. i don't even know why i'm going. i guess i still have that wanderlust wrestling in me. tension between letting my roots grow deeper and being the leaf that blows where the wind goes. like the tension between thought and action. like the swimmer and the undertow. the string between the cello and the bow. when the player doesn't know the note there's no stopping the show. the crumbling earth between the river and the bend. i stand at the edge wondering how it's going to end and i grow old. and of course there's always fiddler jones to remind me that if they know i sing and play than sing and play i must for the rest of my days. even though it was a cooler spring the swimming was still good. wamplers lake, iron creek, the creek at papa, lake michigan...hopefully the north sea won't disable me again, even though the spirit comes through the wound. i'm trying to learn the songs of birds and the names of the wildflowers like wc handy the father of the blues who taught that nature is our music teacher. often here i can see job meeting behemoth, wild, undomesticated, and in moments of bewilderment see God our Mother Bear in every ray of light. so it's hard to make plans. if you pay attention to how you feel about life you may end up anywhere. i'm partial to the north country, but this winter i'm looking forward to the southwest coast. it's all beautiful.

the moving backgrounds of my life

the wind is blowing the snow hard now. good. i need the winter to wake me up and remind me that this isn't a practice i can procrastinate.  once again i am living my one life right now. my body keeps walking ahead up to the arctic prairie, while my thoughts get stuck in little groves of pecan trees where i used to flirt with different destinies like agustus mccray in lonesome dove.

like our old chestnut i ain't dead yet. i'm pulled into the future by milkweed angels. time to gather around the source of heat. grateful to have friends to gather with. next we step back into the biting wind. both extremes. stories and dreams. the cello and the bow. the swimmer and the undertow.

humans and all we make are humbled in the winter. the metro-dome in minneapolis just collapsed. this is big news, but who cares that the bushmen are loosing their land because the president of botswana (who is on the board of conservation international) said that their primitive ways are undignified. civilize them for their own good. but we all have to get a little more primitive in winter. at least i have to deal with the fact that when i walk outside of this coffee shop it will be cold.

"i grow old, i grow old. i will wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled."

winter is one of those magic words like mountain, tree, river, bird... they are better in real life (so i've heard).

"i should have been a pair of ragged claws."

it's a good time for writing. i can't wait to take time off from work in a couple of months to work on new songs. still trying to locate the ideal getaway.

toasting our coffee cups each morning

slept in a gazebo along the bike path overlooking the bay last night. this morning we're in petoskey waiting for the bike shop to open so we can get more tubes. hope to make it over the bridge and into the U.P. today. despite the fact that rich people kick us off their private roads that google maps sends us down we are still making progress and enjoying the moments, the cedars, birches, wayside chapels, waves, hills, red exhaustion ripping through....

liberty - a trial by water