Foxglove Moments

Foxglove Moments

Storm surge.

Light layered between darkness.

Sunset seems steeped in significance.

Or maybe just one of those days
when anything can be a metaphor for something else...

I really need to stop fretting about the next four years.

 

 

 

 

 

March 31, 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

    Some days the sun doesn't simply set.
    It takes the world with it,
    and this valley becomes
    a shimmering chameleon
    of changing color and mood rhythms,
    a creature of the night
    slowly waking,
    mysterious, lurking,
    freed at last by the departing light.

 

 

 

 

March 24, 2016


They are collecting pieces of people at a Belgian airport.

A child is tortured to punish his father.

God has been appropriated for a dubious political campaign,

and a thuggish clown wins another presidential primary.

At times the world seems too much with us,
and too much to bear.

 

Yet this day will also offer blossom antidotes,
beautiful, brief,
the relief momentary,
but it is enough, it is enough,
before the world comes rushing back in.

 

 

 

January 9, 2016

Recently, on a dreary afternoon
in the bleak of winter
and snowbound by a sudden storm,
I, writing at my desk,
experienced that uncanny feeling of being watched.

Pausing my pen, I turned with growing apprehension
to the glum gray light outside my window,
and there did behold two glowing orbs staring out of the dusk at me.
"Fiend!" I cried. "Infernal fowl who haunts my dreams!"
(Okay, maybe I was getting a little overdramatic.)
"What message bring you from that other world?"

I braced myself for the specter to speak the dreaded curse of
Nevermore.
Or maybe, Anymore?
Furthermore?
But it spake not. Neither did the apparition depart,
but kept its unholy vigil outside my window,
staring, forever staring with its red zombie eyes

...which actually turned out to be the ruby underparts on the hummingbird's throat.
But still kind of spooky.

 

 

 

November 21, 2015

 

He remains serene whatever the season.

In Tales of Tokyo, Jason goes walking by himself at dusk along the coast of Matsushima. Overwhelmed and weighted down by the woes of the world and by the pain, misery and loneliness that seem our human inheritance, he comes upon a stone Buddha:

"Imperturbable and serene in heat and cold, the Buddha sat there with that secretive smile, like one who knows but isn't telling; and Jason wondered, can one really live in this world and know such peace, such calm, be so undisturbed by life's disappointments and its sorrows, so untroubled by its desires and temptations, without being made of stone?"

When I walk this hillside and come upon a buddha, I wonder this still.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  1. Hummingbird gripes overheard at the window
  2. Autumn's Passage
  3. The Origin of All Religions?
  4. Happily (now) watching the leaves fall where they may

.

Kelvin Utopian Novel Winter March Tokyo Thanksgiving Rhododendrons Austrailia Utopian Library Squirrels Road Lilies Community Trees AIDS Valley 2015 Buddhas Foxgloves