Winding road
Hugging the river
Water pipes and
Briar thatches
In love with the
Autumn sun
On the Road to Waterton
Tag Archives: stillness
Tree I Know
In the marsh at Dancing Willows: Photo by Noelle
Quite some time passes when I am in the company of a tree I feel I know. Some I do, as in I have grown up with them or pass them often on my walks. We have that familiarity of time and company. Others simply stop me because I KNOW them, deep at the center of me. Maybe they feel the same. A sense of deep woodiness at the center of their being about me. I walk among them, along creek beds and down into the marsh, running my hands on their bark. Rough and rutted I scratch my back like a bear. I understand Muir’s passion to protect them. I, too, find it hard to return home. The company they offer runs as rich and deep as their roots.
Alice
For a moment, I thought I was Alice, as its great maw gaped at me. Ah to tumble down into the dark and see where it should lead. Maybe to find Wonderland. One never truly outgrows the hunger for adventure and a new storyline, do they?
Crack in Stone
Ancient the stone that cracks to slip my spirit free into an open sky.
Wood: God and Man
The Embrace: Rock and Tree: Photography by Noelle
Mouth of the Storyteller: photography by Noelle
Whether God or man there is always a rich story and deep beauty in the grain, that calls my feet to root into the earth.
Tree Line
There is no doubt I love to walk summer trails, but there is something about the wood in fall and winter that stirs me deeply. The shadow and light play differently at the longer light angles. There is a feeling, too, of all that once was and what will be hanging on each branch like flowering ghosts.
Fire Tops
I waited in the early morning darkness
Breath billowing out in long streams
Finger tips wrapped tight in fisted hands
Dug deep in pockets
The shift in light was so subtle
Suddenly I could see the higher branches
Two crows peered at me as though I intruded
Naked feathers, naked sight
Then it licked the tops in fire and light
My heart beat faster than the shutter
The moment was brief to catch with camera
Yet as quickly as I began, my hand was stayed
Sunrise is a communion I often forget
A flicker of awakening to the earth and the mind
In activity I am artist but a bit asleep
In stillness I awaken as part of the art.
Images from a Train: Town of Long Gone
A storm rolled in over a small midwestern town. Shops long closed from economies long gone invited the melancholy. Brick offered a break with its beauty, but few passed by to take in the charm. In the late afternoon, a brooding rain came to a dying village, watering stories long gone, too.
Images from a Train: Vacancy
Vacant were the eyes that stared back at me from rotting sills. A wave of isolation and loneliness pervaded my thinking and I pulled back a bit from the train window. I felt the desertion like oil seeping from toxic barrels sinking into my chest. Small town death, I mused and the end of the family farm.
Then the briefest flutter of something at the top window of a grain elevator caught my eye and the thought of a barn owl nesting in the eaves came to mind. How easily this lead to the sound of mice squeaking below the warped floor boards and the pondering of a raccoon sleeping atop an air vent. Bees work to winter in a broken tractor engine, as geese munched on the grasses growing from past year’s feed. My inner vision shifted, just a hair, and I looked more closely as the peeling paint rusting pipes. Something about the decay creating a curious beauty that was consuming all that passed before me.
I see now it was my own isolation and loneliness that I saw in the darkened windows. It was my own decay that pervaded my thoughts. As the pigeons left the rooftop of the silo and squirrels darted along the fence of the abandoned feed lot, I saw it was not life that was missing from these places, it was fear of death that was haunting me.
Images from a Train: Train Yards
Passing through the loading areas of train yards is a bit like passing through a graveyard. Stories that once were, now wrappers blowing between empty coal cars. I wonder who comes to work in these lonely spots? Who sponges the graffiti and loads the tankers? Nothing moves upon the gaveled lots and so much seems left in shadow.
We all travel in circles of others. People who are connected to us by locale, family, religion, and work. When I look out the window of the train I see many lives I have no association with. Hands covered in train grease and punch clocks that mark their hours. A hundred years ago we lived in towns where we knew everyone and what most people did. I look out at these yards of old train cars and filling stations and wonder are there really ghosts moving between the rails? Is there nothing in the shadows or do I simply lack the eyes to see?
Meditation Travelogue 
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