lake walks

some kind soul fires up his pickup truck every time it snows here, and plows a path all the way around turtle lake. nobody knows who he (or she) is, but we all flock to the ice every day, bringing dogs, cross country skis, children in sleds, ice fishing gear, snow machines.  we greet each other, admitting that it is cold out, but that it is better to be out under the low angle sun than indoors. every day, i pass our cattail bed on my way out, and my way in, feeling part of something both ways. part of a community on the way out. part of a family on the way back, to dinner, a fire, a glass of wine, and conversation. there is an exhilaration to cold weather that i don’t know i would find anywhere warmer than the 45th parallel.

cattail leaves in winter

the great eraser

the deeper we get into winter here, the more we look forward to snowfalls, because they cover up old, dirty snow, trails, and tracks. they erase the past for a while, and we get to start fresh.

cedar tips in the snow

leaded glass

my eye has lately been caught by winter stems with elegant negative spaces. i’m not sure why. maybe i’m ready to resume seeing not what is, but what might be.

unidentified winter twig (probably burdock)

power of poetry

i can’t stop thinking about amanda gorman and the power of her words, which seemed work through her whole being as she delivered them and became an expression of something dependent on words and more powerful than words. i saw someone on instagram refer to her as having “solar wattage”. i would agree. she was blinding. i made a little poem today, a haiku of sorts, in asemic japanese, in her honor, using my kind of language, and coming from my whole being to hers, with thanks for giving me hope after so several hopeless years.

asemic exhale

this is what it looks like after holding your breath for five years, and then letting out a slow, centered, conscious, regenerative, lung-emptying, jaw-slackening, shoulder-slumping, eyes closed, blow-out-all-the-candles, fucking exhale.

unidentified winter weed seed stalks