HOME

Intention
determines
focus

Intention determines focus
in a convoluted conversation
conserved in the candle flames
of ice
expanding
in a universe
within a universe
galaxies colliding
with a universe
of stars
until ALL
ends
in the same place
in the dark.

HOME

Solstice Morning

Somewhere people are shopping
caught in the frenzy
of the Sunday
before Christmas.

After a week
with no electricity
reluctant to reenter the
twenty-first century
I hide
from the madness
on Main Street
where possessed people
forget the bounds
of human dignity
to focus
only on
the present.

In the heat of the wood stove
I watch the snow fall
with a cat curled beside me.


Beyond the clouds
I know the sun has risen.

Somewhere people
are shopping.

The snow hides
the ravages of an ice storm
the fire crackles
as the cat sleeps on
I focus
only on
the present.

Somewhere the sun
has risen
people are shopping
and we are all
One.

Happy Solstice!

Contraband

In smoke and snow
I wander a world away
where spring blossoms
and dried fruit
spell contraband
I stand guilty
before a judge
in Santiago de Chile
where thousands
are gathered for execution
in a stadium
I am only a yanqui
a gringa, a contrabandista
an imperialista
in this thread
of a nation
strifed by machine guns
I am left free
to wander the streets
where Victor Jara's clear voice
still rings
Correle, correle
por aqui, por alla
correle, correle
que te van a matar
his mutilated hands
dance before me
caminando, caminando
walking, walking
Monjitas and Merced
San Antonio and MacIver
in the Plaza de Armas
mimes drum the beat
of rogues and pickpockets
as a gold medallion
from Lourdes
takes flight
into an expressway
of diesel fumes
that choke out
the Andes.

El Zonda
whips my paper identity
into the desert
and leaves me illegal
in a country
filled with gendarmes
and a bureaucracy
built upon stamps
Victor Jara still sings
correle, correle,
por aqui, por alla
correle, correle
que te van a matar
run this way
run that way
run run
por aqui, por alla
they are going to kill you
por aqui, por alla
correle, correle
que te van a matar.

I kneel
before a widow
stuffed into a plastic water bottle
I carry a blood red ribbon
as I pay a peso
for a piece of toilet paper
while a dust devil swirls
and a saint rises from nowhere
whispering always,
te amo, te amo
por aqui, por alla
te amo, te amo
so many voices
speak in so many tongues
each one etched
in a layer of stone
the days disappear
into stars
the stars into galaxies
I sail into the unknown
a paper
on a spirit wind
a name
lost to the desert light
singing
always
singing
correle
correle
por aqui
por alla
correle
correle
que te
voy a amar.


( Notes: translation of Victor Jara's words: Run, run, here and there,
run, run, that they are going to kill you.
and te amo-I love you
que te voy a amar-that I am going to love you.
Victor Jara was a Chilean poet, playwright, singer who was arrested and taken to the stadium where his hands were cut off and he was executed after the coup of September 11, 1973.)

La Querencia

In English there are no words for La Querencia, an act of love, or the return to one's roots. It could be the last vibration of a sound that travels on the Andean spirit wind, el Zonda, and ripples the red cintas of the Difunta Correa, unofficial patron saint of travel, who died in the Argentine desert on her journey to recover the bones of her martyred husband. In route to La Querencia, our Kia sputters and shakes over the hours of ripio from Upsallata to Barreal in search of the Southern Cross. This is the place where the Nazca Plate converges with the South American Plate and the deepest layers of the Pacific Ocean sink beneath the continent and push the purple, red, orange, green, and yellow sedimentary layers twenty two thousand feet into the sky and then the winds sculpt the pre-cordillera of the east into monuments that leave us all with one voice exclaiming, "Holy Shit!" as we turn the corner and our gaze meets the Cerro del Alcazar. This is La Querencia where the tumbleweeds are carried by dust devils across hard packed sand flats and an astronomer sits with his five telescopes and tracks the expansion of the universe and the paths of asteroids. We follow a cantoring horse through the dark night in this place where a post card stamp costs two dollars and there are no telephones. Our hostess whispers to me as she hugs me on our departure, "I will not say good-bye to you, Amiga. I will only say, 'Welcome Home.'"

First Frost

Life comes down to the first frost at three a.m. I feel like the wiring in my brain hangs on the moonshadows dancing among the trees and I brace myself for the ice as the cold creeps in to expand the cracks in my world where the skeletons leap to light in the cross quarters of the sun and the trees open themselves to the stars and we all surrender to the slumber to come.

Residence on Earth

i fly into the deep chill of the gorge on the back of a Darkling Beetle crawling across the pink tiles of my bathroom floor. If only i had the words of Pablo Neruda to describe my Residence on Earth, but the rusty feathers of a Wood Thrush gurgle from the throat of a Cat and i slap a Mosquito that spatters blood all over my forearm.

Who am i to play God?

i dodge Red Efts in the road and curse them at the same time they eat Salamander eggs. What are the odds that the eggs in the Robin's nest above my bed will hatch as one torrential downpour after another washes the Lives out of holes and the river becomes wider and higher?
i chase a Frog to safer ground.

Who am i to play God?

a Hawk screeches above the currents and sinks Her claws into my flesh because there are no words excruciating enough to carry me to the edge of where Life and Death just are and it's amazing what a difference one Flower can make in this Residence on Earth

The Fungus Among Us

"Fuck!"
I say to myself.
"Can I do this?"

I jump off the ledge of the familiar into the sticky sweat of a slimy world that is drip drip dripping with spores. I have gone into the translucent gills of a Destroying Angel to the place where colors become sounds, tastes twitter behind my eyeballs, and visions pop from faeries' mouths. I am in the Kingdom of Fungi. 400 million years old. 1.5 million species strong. 100,000 latin names. Amanita. Agaricus. Boletus. Cantharellula. They sing in musty wines and powerful drugs, and in the largest of known living creatures that spans thirty acres of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and is fifteen hundred years old. These fungal creatures are saprophytic, living off dead and decaying matter; parasitic, killing living hosts; and symbiotic, digesting nutrients for other living organisms.
Rising as if out of nothing and disappearing again into nothing, they charm us with questions. They dare us to taste the exotic and risk intoxication. Aphrodisiacs. Hallucinogens. Epicurean delights. The Fruits of Gods. The Buddha's last meal was mushrooms and as he lay dying he said that in his lifetime he had eaten two exquisite meals. One, the first meal after he had attained Enlightenment, and the second, this last meal served to him by a humble farmer.
The rain pounds the forest canopy. I lie on my belly and feast on brilliant orange Chanterelles.

The Decline of the Wood Thrush

A wood thrush scratches at the sun-dappled leaves of the forest floor. He stops to probe the soil for beetles, spiders, millipedes, and other small invertebrates. I watch the small, rusty colored bird with a heavily spotted chest and think about how the sweet flutelike sound of his song was once so familiar in these woods. Lately, there have been years when I have not heard it, and each spring now, I wait and wonder.

The problems of the wood thrush's decline of 48% in the last forty years points to the complexities of this interconnected planet we all inhabit. The wood thrush
is a migrant. It breeds in the forests of the eastern United States and then it flies thousands of miles south to Central America, where its range is much smaller. It is dependent on large forests that can supply the protein rich diet of insects and invertebrates that inhabit the darker reaches of the forest floor. These small creatures, in turn, are dependent on a calcium rich environment. Unfortunately, acid rain from coal fired plants, auto emissions, and other air borne pollutants leaches the calcium from the soils and there has been a decline in the food sources that the wood thrush relies upon in its northern environment. In addition, acid rain also frees up heavy metals like mercury and further pollutes the soils where it falls.

On the Central American end, where the wood thrush is called Jumping Joe, the threats come from deforestation and heavy chemical fertilizers that are used for farming. The impact of deforestation is much greater in the wintering range because there is less of it, and each acre must support about six times as many wood thrushes as a comparable acre up north.

It's been forty years since Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, and warned that there may be a time when we have no more songbirds. It's been over 150 years since Thoreau wrote, "The thrush alone declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest."

There are moments in my life that I will never forget. One is the first time I heard a wood thrush. I was camping on the banks of the Housatonic River and I was stunned by the music of the forest that evening.

"We pave paradise and put up a parking lot." There are so many things that we lose without even realizing it.

Thanks to Audubon magazine for its great article on the wood thrush.

For All You Gardeners

This is a piece I picked up in Mongoose Junction on St. John. It's signed by someone named Gingras and it's copyrighted and made available through How To Live. Long Beach Island, NJ.
609- 492-6454. Enjoy.

How To Be A Gardener

Lean toward sunshine
dig down deep
make peace with chaos
Grow Amazing zucchinis and too many tomatoes
raindance
rake leave and jump in
hum along with bees
Ache, Sweat and Yearn
wear crazy hats
and baggy pants
have wise hands
cultivate patience
moonglow
stay rooted
blossom wildly
have shady and mysterious corners
mend fences
wonder
get earthy
make magic
share the harvest
be thankful

Colony Collapse Disorder

The rain forest emerges
from night of thunder
dripping into morning
my colony suffers
collapse disorder.

A young virgin
in a strait jacket
of chemicals
graduates
from the bleachers
of Hackettstown High.

My alarm clock
blinks 1230 AM
as lightning rouses
me to a spiritual pilgrimage
in the pursuit of food
while all the time
the sky is telling me
to get my nails done.

My fingers smell
like burned flesh
as the sun chases
the storm away
and I emerge
a bedraggled fox
wondering
how my world
has changed.

ST. JOHN, USVI

Hillsides burn in the eyes
of the baggage handler at Cruz Bay
as slaves swim to freedom
in the dark channels where a Black man
is running for President
while the ferry from the Westin
fills with the faces of his African ancestors
and heads away from this island
where I am the invasive species
perching on the hard red rocks
thrust from the depths of earths's magma
in the collision of two tectonic plates
fifty million years ago.

Blue tangs, parrot fish, octopus, eagle ray
barracuda, shark and sea turtles
all swim among the many corals
brain, fire, flower, elkhorn, pillar and deadman's fingers
Lizard fish, damselfish, grunts, grouper, trumpet fish, eels
and bar jacks,
I could make a longer list
doctor bird, bananaquit, frigate bird, kite, trembler
whistler, egret, black heron
on and on the names lure me
with their sounds and colors
century plant, sensitive fern, soursop, calabash, lion's tail
flamboyant, allamanda, Izora,
how many songs
in the words my tongue trips on?

This is not my habitat
I tell my wife
I was not made to live
and breathe here
The rocks are too sharp
the air too humid and too hot
my white skin crawls
out of itself
as I seek shelter
from the sun,
darting from the shade
to the water
like an iguana
under the watchful eyes
of the mongoose
goats eat the hillsides
cows stroll the roads
and a sign reads
Donkeys Keep Out.

Whose island is this?
Whose habitat?

Gas costs $4.68 in Coral Bay.

Dawn

A blue heron
stands guard.

Drunk on light
two otters
mate like snakes
in the dark water
in and out
up and down
waves ripple
in the stillness.

Prostrate
on the pine needles
my body awakens
to the scent
of life.

An owl calls
the night's end
and the wind whispers
"We were put here
on this Earth
to witness Beauty."

The day dawns.

Anonymous

We are all outsiders at the water hole. I purchased this poem for five dollars from a hooded man at a BART station in Oakland, California. He told me his mother made him promise that he would never beg so he wrote poems and sold them in the subway, and he helped people figure the system out. He showed me how to use the automatic machines to purchase my ticket. He told me which train to take and then when I went to give him some money, he acted really surprised when I insisted he give me the poem. " I'm payin' you for the poem, Man, not for the other stuff." I said. " Give me the poem."

Here it is.

WHAT MOTHER

Mother's are the one who birth

many children one God who sent his

Son, no matter, what day Mother's

birth boys and girls.

No phone necessary to

say I love you Mother,

That call will never be missed, Love

stays with you mother forever and al-

ways

Reaching for the Stars and Heaven

I Love You Mother

United States of America

My five year old fairy princess grandson leaves a message for me on my bed, "Welcome to the United States of America!" There is a drawing of me with my long gray pony tail and a witches hat. Welcome to the United States of America.

On the way into Denny's among the strawberry fields of Oxnard, California, I am stopped by the headlines of the Los Angeles Times, "Gay Marriage Ban Overturned."
"Wow!" I tell my wife. "We're married in California!"
My niece says, "Congratulations!"
We drink blue margaritas by the pitcher
and ask the mariachis to play "Besame Mucho!"
This is the United States of America.

I am alone in Oakland, walking the trails of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Shoreline. The Canada geese are parading their goslings. A blue heron is preening. There is a cormorant perched on the concrete and steel remains of a lost civilization and a white egret gives me hope that this wetland in the shadows of Oakland International Airport will survive the assault of the two-leggeds.

A man on a bicycle stops. "I'm not going to rob you," he says. "I'm not going to hurt you. Just tell me one thing. One thing that Jesus said to let a man like me go hungry. I won't lie to you. I just got out of Folsom State Prison. I did six years and ten months. Six years and ten months of hard time, and now I'm a free man. I can't make it here in this world with all this noise and all this traffic. I don't know anything about this world. I don't know how I'm going to survive. Plain truth is, I've never begged in my life, but I'm hungry. All I've got are these clothes and this bicycle, and I'm hungry."
All I have is a twenty, a ten, a five, and a full stomach.
This is the United States of America.

I sit on the plane with a man named Steve Star. He is eighty-three years old and has bad breath. The son of a Croation coal miner from the mountains of Utah, he ended up on the Los Angeles City Council and retired to an island in San Francisco Bay. He calls me Rose and asks if I have a family. "No," I lie. This is the United States of America and I am married in only two states.

I come home to the green. St. Francis said, "Speak to me of Love," and the almond tree blossomed. This is the United States of America and the almond is blossoming.

Eschatalogy

I pluck
bones from coyote
scat.

the strings
of my guitar
vibrate
the litter
on the forest
floor.

the pups
eyes
open to the sounds
of deep dank
dirt.

the notes
pull
hard
inside my fingers
grow green
with rain
crow calls
blue jay answers
hawk soars
over
all.

Coyote scat
a knot
of guts
two rodent ribs
and the strings
of my guitar.

Migration

I step into the darkness
of not knowing
in the driving rain
I stumble upon
a migration
of salamanders
returning to the waters.

Do you love me now?
I ask.
Will you love me
even after
I am gone?

The monarchs
return from Michoacan
to comfort the migrants
tumbling into vans
in the Blue Ridge dawn.

You love me now.
You say.
You will love me
even after
I am gone.

We are all immigrants
of habit
rain drives us in
the sun calls us out.

Prayer flags flap
in the cold wind
forsythia bursts
open the garden
and rocks
bubble up
from the ground.

I love you now
I will love you
even after
you are gone.

GOLD

Wood frog eggs
cling to branches
in icy waters
as fiddleheads
push through leaves
flat with the weight
of deep snow
dwarf ginseng begs
me to watch my feet
and marsh marigolds
splash yellow flowers
through a wetland
vibrating in green
so long in coming.

It is a cruel trick of Nature
to shower us with so much abundance
after so lean a time
and then take it all away again.

Gold rises
from the roots
of an old apple tree
flowers
and says,
"EAT!"

Possession

I drink from the darkness
of the Big Dipper
lives unnoticed by sunlight
coyote pups
born in the dank of the earth
as the tail of a beaver
cracks like a shotgun blast
in the still water
at three a.m.
I am possessed
by the cacophony
that breaks winter
and announces
the triumphant return
of breath.

I have only
my own senses
in the blindness
of night
no bones
no skin
nothing to hold
my soul in check
except the liquid crystal
that breaks from the lungs
of creatures
smaller than my thumbnail.

I am caught
by the reverberations
of eternity
in this one moment
of possession
in the deepest
space between
two breaths.

The Thaw

It is April 9 and the temperature has yet to reach sixty. The sun is strong as I head out through the first snow drops in the garden. I shield my eyes against the glare of the snow. It may be spring elsewhere, but here in Snowy Hollow it is still winter.
The snow has turned from a solid block of ice into big pellets of corn snow that I fall through up to my knees. It feels good against the warmth of the day. I stop at a spring to look for signs of salamanders and wood frogs, but it is still too early. The waters from this spring that burble down a small waterfall into a brook are the headwaters of a watershed that runs into the Connecticut River and finally out into the Atlantic. I wonder if I drop a leaf into the brook, will it make it all the way the ocean?
I follow the brook down to the pond. It, too, is still frozen. I remember the eighty degree spring day that I sat beside the pond and watched the ice melt. Frogs would jump from the water onto the ice and slowly freeze as they tried to make their way across. It was a lesson in cold blooded biology unravelling before my eyes.
I continue along the brook as it turns into a series of beaver swamps. I am looking for skunk cabbage, but there is none yet. The only sign of the oncoming season is a few marsh marigold leaves. This is a land in transition. What was once a brook is becoming a pond as the beaver expands the wetlands in these woods.
I look out across a large marsh. A blue heron is perched on its nest in the middle of an icy expanse. Two pairs of mergansers hang in the open water beside the icy edge and a few geese strut across the ice towards them, honking in defense of their territory. The spring battles are about to begin.
I follow the flowing water to the river and walk the gorge road. The ice is thick and it makes the going difficult. The waters of the river are raging. They carry the sediment of these hills to the ocean. They are so high that the waterfall at the bend has disappeared into wild rapids. I imagine myself swirling in the power of the water and lose myself to the deafening roar. This is the sound of winter's last stand! I open my arms to the sky and raise my voice to the river. This is Spring!

Energy Is the Bottom Line

I walk through the woods on two feet of frozen snow, looking for signs of spring. The brook is rushing and seeps are appearing. There are raccoon tracks in the mud around the open water. I am hoping to find skunk cabbage poking through the detritus of winter, but it is still too early.

This is the hunger time. The easy prey, moles, mice, chipmunks, and squirrels are safe in their holes under the ice. Hawks and owls are visiting bird feeders. Raccoons hang out on peoples' decks. Energy is the bottom line. I follow coyote tracks. A pair has direct registered across an open field. One stepping in the other's print. They are headed for a bird feeder. There is no exploration in their path. They have no energy for curiosity. They have pups on the way. They are hungry.

I look at the trails of the three dogs I am walking. They are all over the place. They can afford to expend energy. They are well fed and live in a warm house. In fact, I am walking them just so that they will expend energy. Two of them even have their long coats cut short. Their lives are so different from their wild cousins. Their rituals are not dictated by survival.

I think about energy. Food. Oil. Water. The resources necessary for survival. I think about Maslow's hierarchy and how it is impossible to attend to anything beyond survival if the basic needs of food, shelter, and water are not met. I remember watching a woman at Shoney's All You Can Eat Buffet somewhere in North Carolina last week. She was a slight woman, dressed in her Sunday best. She sat alone, eating very slowly, savoring each bite. She kept going back to the buffet to fill her plate. I wondered if she had saved the seven dollars just for this buffet and was eating the only real meal she had had in a long time.

I hear on the radio that a gallon of milk costs eighty-five million dollars in Zimbabwe. Eighty-five million dollars. People mix non-dairy creamer with water and plant corn in the median strips along the highway. They eat dirt. Food is a political weapon. Energy is the bottom line. These are the hunger times.

My wife tells me I should write about happier things and I am drawn once more to the beauty of a winter snowfall and the solitude it brings.

Like the bear, I can sleep another day.

Postcard from Smarr

In Smarr, Georgia, chickens ride Interstate 75 on their way to slaughter as humans complain about the smell of their food and a man is shot dead watching TV in a gambling house full of undesirables. This is SMARR. Safety and Mission Assurance Readiness Review that can leave no room for error in a world ruled by billboards and the hot oils of massage parlors where the gals give head like volcanoes and the chickens gasp at the trucks funneled between six hundred and nine protesting churches all building a bridge between Jesus and the northern aggressors with their powder horns full of judgments that loom in the Sprawl Malls Accelerating Religious Revolt . If it is true that the behavior of an organism is a direct reflection of the environment it interacts with we are doomed to a foreclosure of spirit in this universe of Hooters and Fudpuckers.

Rumble Road

Four thousand soldiers dead in Iraq
Four thousand mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters
lost protecting my freedom to ride
Rumble Road I 75 in Smarr, Georgia
where I can get Smart Lipo
and call 1-800-DIVORCE

"JESUS LOVES US AMERICA
TIME IS RUNNING OUT
LET'S TURN THE NATION
BACK TO HIM"

I drive past trees
strangled by Kudzu
while every twenty minutes
a child is diagnosed with autism

He who throws dirt
loses ground
to the red clays
of South Carolina
that are parched by drought
and the vampires of sprawl
tell me to Buy a Gun
for America
and Come worship
just as you are!

Just as I am?
Does God love me?
Does the Savior know my name?

Guns don't kill people
Drivers with cell phones do!

Buy a gun for Freedom
Stop in at the Cafe Risque
for a massage
by an Asian, a Latin, or an Indian

In God We Trust
and United We Stand
with the 4000 soldiers
who died for our sins.

4000 dead protecting
our freedom
to love.

What?

From the Flatlands

In the flatlands of Georgia the wind chimes yielded to air raid sirens as my wife and I sought refuge in the bathroom. I played guitar in the darkness while tornadoes knocked out a power station north of us on the great savannah where last week sixteen workers were burned to death as a sugar refinery spontaneously combusted on the edge of the intercoastal waterway where we counted seventeen alligators in the dying salt marshes.

I played classical guitar for two drunk truck drivers in a garage off Mapmaker Lane. "Why don't you just wail on that thing?"
"It's a classical guitar."
"Pick the hell out of it."
"I can't pick a classical guitar. The strings are nylon."
"You can't pick that thing?"
"Nope."
"What good is a guitar you can't pick?"

It cost 61 cents a mile to drive a flatbed last week. One of my trucker buddies paid $681 to fill up his truck that morning. He took a load of pine boards north, passing a load of pine boards headed south. "How crazy is that?" he asks. "Everything you eat comes on a truck." Everything.

Diesel costs $4.16 a gallon in Ravine, Pennsylvania, where a magnet in the Truck Stop reads, "Virginia is for Lovers, but Pennsylvania has Intercourse."

I had the best damned Po' Boy Hoagie I have ever tasted at a pink stucco roadside stop named Steffens Restaurant in the middle of nowhere Georgia. It was crammed with local boys with their camo and beer bellies. We ordered Sweet Tea and tried to hide our northern accents. We sent our compliments to the cook and the waitress looked surprised and said, "Well, if you liked it so much you'll just have to come back!" I wish we could.

It's the Economy, Stupid. The Economy. Everywhere, Everybody is talking about the Economy. A store owner in St. Augustine is wondering whether she should sell her business now before it gets worse. "It's gonna get worse," she says. It's hard to get a room because people are living week to week in the cheap hotels. One paycheck ahead of homelessness. The big building projects in Flagler County, Florida, are on hold until the economy improves. Where do the workers go? Where are the jobs? Trust in Jesus. The Lord will provide. That's how we get through. My wife and I look for a statue of St. Anthony at the Mission of Our Lady of La Leche. Our dollars go to support anti-abortion groups. It's the Economy, Stupid. The Economy.

It has been days since I have tasted silence. My wife watches an Australian play with a rattlesnake as I sit with my laptop and read about how St. Augustine of Hippo, an Algerian pagan, conceived the ideas of original sin and just war. We are on a beach of shells at the edge of the continent where the Spanish conquistadors searched for the fountain of immortality and founded the oldest white city in the western hemisphere. Today as the oyster catchers play tag with the waters, the turtles are dying, and the traffic drowns out the sound of the waves.

It has been days since I've tasted silence.

Road Trip

I go outside to check out the new moon. We still have a good two feet of snow. The air is cold and the woods are quiet. I revel in the silence. It is so hard to pull myself out of here and enter the world of cars and sprawl and people. I know that I will not feel this kind of quiet again for at least two weeks, and maybe much longer because winter is fading and there is no season as deep and still as winter and it's been a good winter, a real winter filled with all the work and satisfaction of snow after snow after snow. Who knows where the season will be when we return from this road trip. Who knows where my head will be after encountering a good slice of America in these pre-election, economically crashing, global climate changing days. It will be an adventure. A vacation in the Key of E-major.
Tomorrow at six am, my wife and I will hit the road with our music and our laptops and head south with thousands of spring breakers.
Tonight, I stand in the woods and drink in the silence...
There are compromises one must make to maintain conjugal bliss, and leaving these woods is one of those moments! Dixie here we come!

To All You Musicians

To all you musicians out there. I just wanted to share some words from Scott Tennant of the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet and the author of Pumping Nylon, A Classical Guitarist's Technique Handbook. He writes in the conclusion to Pumping Nylon: "Music is the most powerful of all the arts. It instantly stirs up emotions, conjures visions, and offers glimpses of other, higher dimensions. It arouses men to battle; kindles amorous passions in lovers; soothes a baby to sleep; comforts us when we grieve. It engages our hearts and our minds, and can bring out the best that we are. One can safely presume that not a single emotion, nor any human or natural event, has been left undocumented by music.

As musicians, our objective is to command the elements of music as best we can in order to tap into that other dimension. It is our access to heaven, if only for a while. But while we are there we can take all who are listening with us. If just one person is uplifted by our playing and walks away feeling better than before he came, we have made a difference. A healing has taken place.

I very much hope....that you do not lose sight of the larger goals: to be able to express yourself freely on your instrument and to turn every note you play into great music. When you can do these things, you cease to be just a guitar player and become a healer and magician."

Play on Musicians! Music can change the world!

6.4 Billion Raindrops

At 4 o'clock in the morning, it is raining hard. I listen to the drumming on the roof. I hear the sound of water dripping everywhere. Icicles fall from the trees. Streams are opening in the snow. The thaw is here! It keeps me awake.
"The earth is 4.6 billion years old." I repeat it like a mantra. "4.6 billion years." 4.6 billion thaws. 4.6 billion orbits around the sun. 4.6 billion solstices and equinoxes. 4.6 billion.
Tick tock. Tick tock.
Oxygen made its appearance 2.5 billion years ago. The first invertebrates swam in seas unknown to us 505 million years ago and then disappeared 66 million years later. And then insects came and diasappeared. So did amphibians, reptiles, conifers and dinosaurs. Birds and plants. All came and went. 65 million years ago an asteroid collided with the earth and everything weighing over seventy-seven pounds died. That would be me. And then around 55 million years ago, the first two-legged creatures walked. 2 million years ago the supervolcano at Yellowstone blew and buried New York state in sixty-seven feet of ash. Life comes and life goes. There is no new thing under the sun. Tick tock. Tick tock.
I turn over. The rain still drums. Ancient ice cores tells us that before the industrial revolution two hundred years ago there were abut 280 parts per million of carbon in our atmosphere. A hundred years later, there were 315 parts per million. Today, there are 350 parts per million. Fewer than 4 out of every 10,000 molecules of air are carbon dioxide. The CO2 that you just exhaled will be in the atmosphere for years and will travel the breadth of the planet. Methane will cause 16 to 17 percent of global warming. It comes from farts and belches. Nitrous oxide, laughing gas, is 270 times more efficient at trapping heat than CO2. It stays in the atmosphere 150 years. Tick tock. Tick tock.
The rain falls. The water runs. The icicles drip. It is spring! The woods I sleep in tonight were not here when my father was born. The coyotes that I track are immigrants. The beaver ponds I walk have been created in my lifetime. The only constant is change. There is no new thing under the sun. The earth is 4.6 billion years old and it is raining hard. Tick tock. Tick tock.

A Real Winter

A black brook carves the white snow
This is my black and white world today
Robin is dying
and I am alone with the waters
in this dark hemlock grove.
I cannot move into my morning
I am stuck in the black and white
breathing the life of the winter air
as Robin is dying.


"This is a real winter for a change,"
my neighbors proclaim
at the Post Office and the dump
the General Store and the library.
A real winter.

I think back to the last two winters
of rain and brown, mud and darkness
depression, restlessness, and the longing
for a snowstorm to blanket the sorrows
of my view and fill me with the energy
to go among the wetlands and the woods
and be a part of the life of this place.

A real winter
when my muscles are strong
from shovelling snow and tracking.
A real winter when silence settles deep
into my bones and all that moves sleeps.
A real winter.

I ask my wife the weather keeper
when was the last time we had a real winter?
1995? 1987? 1978?
I read that the winter of 1636 was a good one.
710 million years ago
the planet froze to the equator
600 million years ago
life disappeared into the whiteness
of Earth's albedo.
Were those real winters?

From solstice to solstice
the light waxes and wanes
we watch the landscape change
we bring fires to darkness
and we crave the rebirth of spring.

I want to yell at the trees today
Robin is dying
and there is nothing real
except the air that I'm breathing
and the black and white of this time.

LUNACY

Lunacy gallops into my dreams
in striped pajamas
"What's that?" she cries
"It's the moon," I say.
"The moon."

We race on snow
frozen solid like concrete
barefoot in our pajamas
drawn by shadows
bluer than ice
and trees dancing
across a canvas of darkness
whispering prayers of madness
we are alive!

We are alive!
We are alive
in the winter sky
moonstruck
with werewolves
and owls
and fishers
coyotes and bats
diamonds on ice
melting into deep pools
of promise.

There is no dance
like tripping with crystals
in the shadows of night
stepping to the beats
of our minds
singing the laughter
of wonder
as the snow weds the light.

We are alive
sliding barefoot
in striped pajamas.

Canis Latrans

My tortoise shell cat, Lily, climbs into my lap. She will not let me write. She demands that I stroke her chin and forehead, stimulating all those scent glands that were she a wild cat, she would be rubbing against trees and rocks. Instead, she is content to mark me as I tell her about Coyote. It is important that she listen because she is prey and Coyote is predator. It is a primal, inextricable relationship.

Canis latrans is an ancient being. Older than the wolf, Coyote has walked this planet for some sixty million years. Long before our own arrival, Coyote first appeared in a time called by those who chronicle eras, the Eocene. Coyote evolved on the open plains of the North American continent after the decline of the dinosaurs. They flourished from the Arctic tundras to the high plateaus of Central America, advancing and retreating with the glaciers. While all that remains of the sabre-toothed tiger of that era is a fossil, the ancestors of Coyote that feasted on that tiger's flesh still roam the landscape.

The appearance of Coyote in these eastern hills is still somewhat of a mystery. It was not until 1957 that the existence of the first coyote in Massachusetts was confirmed. The tale of its travels from the central plains west and south and finally north and east is one of adaptation and interbreeding with other canids. One hypothesis has lone coyote dispersers mating with feral dogs. This coydog was the first of the eastern coyotes. This scenario, however, is unlikely since such a breeding does not result in a strong viable species. The habits of feral dogs do not support the proliferation of the species. Coyotes are pack animals and they rely on both the male and female to raise midwinter litters. Male dogs are not motivated by paternal instincts and single parenting is risky business in the competitive world of the coyote. Such litters would have low survival rates. A more probable theory is that the western coyote bred with the eastern Canadian wolf. This makes for a larger coyote than its western cousin and would also account for the different colorings of the eastern coyote.

I continute to tell Lily that there are fewer coyotes in the woods this winter. There are not nearly as many tracks as in past years. I have also seen more snowshoe hare and red fox prints. I remember the dead coyote that I carried out of the brook last spring. It had been shot. I also remember the farmers that I met early one morning. They were shooting coyotes at the edge of their fields. They were protecting their livestock. Hunters have been out killing coyote to protect the deer that they hunt in the fall. Coyote is on the most wanted list and in many states, they are hunted year round. They get no respect.

I tell Lily that she is in far greater danger from the coyotes than the livestock and the deer are. Coyotes take house cats. Still, I believe there is a place in these woods for the wily predator. It fills the niche of the wolf and the cougar and man. We are all predators and prey in the natural order of things. This competition for survival is what strengthens the species.

Lily sits up and stretches. She kneads her claws on my legs. She jumps from my lap and heads to the front door, scratching to go out. I open it and let her into the wild.

Tracking Coyote

I look out at an inch of new snow. It makes for great tracking. "I am here," I tell myself as I strap on my snowshoes. "I am here to track Coyote."
I was captured by Coyote in the spring some thirty years ago when I first wandered these hills with my old dog Gabe. We were following a logging road when we came upon a litter of coyote pups frolicking. Gabe didn't see them, but I stopped dead in my tracks and my hackles went up. The coyotes stopped, too. We stared at each other. I imagine I was the first two-legged they'd ever seen. Slowly I turned, not wanting Gabe to pick up their scent and become interested. I began to sing as I retraced my steps and the coyotes fanned out around us and escorted us all the way home.
My imagination was captured. The eastern coyote began speaking to me and I have been on its trail ever since. It has sung below my bedroom window and answered my calls from the summit of a mountain. I have watched a pack in the dunes of Provincelands and I have carried a bloody coyote out of the stream where it died. I have read about all the coyote extermination efforts and how Coyote just keeps on going on, producing more offspring as she becomes more threatened. I have delved into the mythology of Coyote--the trickster, the shape shifter, the grey ghost--and I have gained a great respect for this creature that is so much more than just a wily scavenger. Coyote is a sacred force that speaks from a world that is endangered and Coyote refuses to die.
As Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz write: "Coyote and his kin represent the sheerly spontaneous in life, the pure creative spark that is our birthright as human beings and that defies fixed roles and behavior. He not only represents some primordial creativity of our earlier days, but he reminds us that such celebration of life goes on today, and he calls us to join him in the frenzy. In an ordered world of objects and labels, he represents the potency of nothingness, of chaos, of freedom--a nothingness that makes something of itself. There is great power in such a being..."
I spot a coyote track in the snow. It is a direct register. The hind foot falls directly into the front footprint and it looks like a one-legged creature trotting through the woods. The prints are good. There is a visible X in the middle of the paw. Her path is straight. She is not curious, but headed somewhere. I follow her up to the top of a knoll. She stops and surveys the landscape. This is her world. This is my world. We are both here today in the new snow. I take a deep breath and head home.

Gallop Poll

A gallup pollster
comes galloping galloping
through my telephone line.

Do you have a minute?
he asks
and I chime,
Oh yes! Oh yes!
seizing the chance
to speak my mind.

Are you happy?
he asks
on a scale of one to ten
I say
Oh yes! Oh yes!
I'm a ten!

He pauses
and asks again
A ten?

Oh yes! Oh yes!
A ten.

How much money
did you spend yesterday?
he asks.
None,
I say.

None?
he questions again.
None
I say
again.

Did you ride in a car?
he asks.
Oh no
I reply.
Did you watch TV?
he asks.
Oh no.
I reply.

Are you happy?
he asks again.
Oh yes! Oh yes!
I give it a ten

Do you practice
a religion?
he asks.
Oh yes
I say.
I'm a pagan.
A pagan?
he asks
Oh yes
I say
A pagan.
I don't know
where that fits
he says.
Is it
Christian
Jewish
Buddhist
Muslim
Agnostic
Secular
or Atheist?

What about other?
I ask.

No
he says
that can't be right
Pagan is a religion
Oh yes
I say,
It's a ten.

Let me get this right
he says
You spend no money
you go nowhere
you watch no TV
you're a pagan
and you're happy?

Yes, I say
a ten.

A ten
he replies
A ten.

"The most radical thing you can do with your life is to be happy." Dr. Patch Adams

Geology 101

GEOLOGY 101

Igneous
Metamorphic
Sedimentary
Metamorphic
Sedimentary
Meta igneous
Meta sedimentary
Conglomerate rocks
Conglomerates rock
Rocks rock
Wal mart
GE
Bechtel
Exxon Mobil
Halliburton
Rocks rock
Igneous
Metamorphic
Sedimentary
Chaos
Cooking
Cooling
Churning
Elementary
Ignorance
Metamorphoses
Into conglomerate
Rock
Conglomerates rock
Landslides
Earthquakes
Mudslides
Waves and waves
of churning
crumbling
transforming
Geology into theology
Geology
Theology
We are in
for a very dangerous ride.

Igneous
Metamorphic
Sedimentary
The miracle of life on Earth
happens here on Earth
Igneous
Metamorphic
Sedimentary
Elementary
Rudimentary
Ignorance
Rocks
Rock.

In the Beginning

It all begins with geology. I stare at the frozen snow and see how it is carved by the wind and shaped by the change in temperature. I read the layers of this winter's storms in the changing textures of the ice crystals. It resembles the lay of land. It is a microcosm of the earth.
It all begins with geology. The ancient stories are written in the rocks and the shape of the landscape. 4.6 billion years of stories. Languages lost and folded upon each other. Frozen and scorched. Fluid and solid. Spewed into the sky and forced into the depths of the magma that underlies the ground we stand on. Mountains rising and disappearing. Oceans closing. Continents colliding and sinking. This is the story of Earth.
I try to grasp my own insignificance in the face of all this. I think of the way that John McPhee decribes it as I look at my hand. "With your arms spread wide to represent all time on earth, look at one hand with its line of life. The Cambrian begins at the wrist, and the Permian Extinction is at the outer end of the palm. All of the Cenozoic is in a fingerprint, and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file, you could eradicate human history."
I break it down as I gaze at my outstretched arm towards my right fingertips. This is all the Pre-Cambrian geological period. In this period, the oldest algae fossils appeared three billion years ago. The first signs of life. The oldest rocks on earth are somewhere near 3.8 billion years old, and the moon rocks 4 billion. The oldest rocks in the Berkshires are a mere one billion, probably around the elbow of my left arm. As I work my gaze down to my wrist, time compresses. Animals appear in abundance, mountains rise and erode, and the dinosaurs disappear just as the fingers of my left hand branch out 250,000 years ago. And still life changes. The land changes. And still there are no humans. The ice ages that have scarred the surface of the land that we see today emerge in the period represented by my nails. And still there are no humans. In all of the outstretched topography of my arms that represents the history of this planet, there are no humans. Not until the very outer edge of my finger nails do we walk the earth.
I think about it, and I think about global climate change and how, yes, we may extinguish life as we know it, but we will not extinguish life, and we will not extinguish the earth. We are just one small speck in the gigantic spectrum that is held in the stories of the stones.
It all begins and ends with geology.

Common Sense

"Will the time ever come when, again, Nature become the Teacher of Man?" I come in from the woods this morning thinking about Thoreau's question. I have just spent a weekend in Northern Vermont studying animal sign and forest ecology. There was no snow there. It was very eery. No snow in the beginning of January. The woods were deep in mud because the four feet of snow from the previous week had melted in the record temperatures. We shook our heads. Global climate change.

Today as I head into the woods on the morning after a new snow, I am surprised to see snow fleas (achorutes nivicolus). These insects, also known as springtails, always seem to me a sign of spring since they emerge on the warmer winter days to feed on leaf mold. I don't usually see them in January, but then there is nothing predictable about winter anymore.

I think about Thoreau's question and the fact that it was posed in the 1840's some one hundred and seventy years ago. The natural sciences were in their infancy then. There were no computers, no doppler radar, no electron microscopes, no electricity even. What was catalogued about Nature was observed on two feet and mostly with the naked eye. Thoreau's world must have been much quieter than ours and yet he still had to retreat to Walden Pond in order "to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

Thoreau's question has haunted me since I first encountered it in high school when I read Walden. It is still so fresh and so real. I think of his solitary shack at Walden Pond now an island in the midst of suburban sprawl as Massachusetts loses forty acreas a day to development. I think of the species on this planet that will be extinct before we will ever know they existed, and all the manner of flora and fauna that are struggling to adapt to a new natural order as we enclose ourselves in temperature controlled environments and relate to each other through electronic keyboards.

I remember when I first gazed upon Mt. Katahdin. I had spent two months walking towards it on the Appalachian Trail and first saw the summit with sixty miles left. I was awestruck. Thoreau had a similar experience on his first encounter with Katahdin. It inspired him to write, "Think of our own life in Nature--daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it--rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?"

Indeed, who are we? Where are we? Today the leaders of India and China have met. They agreed that they really have the right not to think about cutting carbon emissions because they deserve to have the same lifestyle that the more developed western societies have, and I think of Thoreau. He knew nothing of melting glaciers and too warm winters. He knew nothing of the decimation of the rain forests and the green house effect. He never heard of coral reefs bleaching or acid rain on his own northern forests. Global climate change still had more than a century to unfold. The species had yet to reach the tipping point. His voice is still a cry from the wilderness. He knew then, that in order to survive as a species, human beings need to make Nature their teacher. Unfortunately, we no longer have the luxury to choose to be disconnected from the source of our own lives.

Who are we? Where are we? It's all just such common sense.