Morning Amblings

Wood fire stove, warm, cats lounging, inside looking out to brown, beige, fir and spruce-greened countryside and woods. A chickadee’s munching on a suet cake outside the window on the bird feeder we just put out. Sofia is avidly watching the munching progress from her perch on the back of our green easy chair, a chair whose nether regions have easily (relentlessly) been frayed into a cat scratch post. Our pond has its first full skin of ice today which has baffled the geese. “What gives? What happened to the cool, liquidy, splattery stuff we like to bathe and flap frolic in?” I’m inside for the day, writing, breaking up the writing every once and a while for a short walk about outside. The cold weather makes me smile inside and out, it awakens something tickly, don’t know what, don’t care. Similar weather growing up in Indiana made me feel bleak. There was a sameness to it. What’s the difference here? Maybe the spruce and fir, the break-up of the brown and beige. Also, the hilly countryside, our rise up back. Maybe a different time in life, appreciating it all more, the moment, the seasons in this ‘50’s season of my life. Whatever, that smile wells up from deep within me and I so appreciate it. Gladsome tidings.

Opposites and contraditctions, I’m attracted to that. Cold without, warm within. Growing older, feeling younger. Writing about depression and suicide, having a greater zest for life. (That may come from the act of writing itself. If I don’t have a creative outlet of some sort, it’s as if a valve has been shut, a flow interrupted, an essential connection severed, oxygen taken out of my blood, breath held.) I marvel at life. It is marvelous.

This morning I woke with Richard early and meditated, stoked the fire, fixed coffee, fed the cats, saw him off and then went up to the goose house to set them free from their coop, had our back and forth wing-flapping dash “hello!” to the day. They accompany me about the property as I wander up the hill and then over to the pond to see its fill progress. Yesterday – or it might have been the day before – I saw an old board washed up near shore and remembered a piece I had begun the week before. Here it is in its unfinished state:

“There’s a board floating on our pond, a board we neglected to pick up from the bottom as we were cleaning out debris during our recent excavation. Every morning it’s in a different place. At first I was disgruntled by the sight of it, peeved, then I felt mocked – all signs of an evolved, unreactionary, at one with the universe state on those particular days. Now (at least for today) I’m seeing it as a floating meditation, something very eastern; I think I should write a haiku or 3 for it. I shall.

Board floating calmly
Nothing else for you to do
Just bored with nature.

Floating like “Wilson”
Dreaming of the open seas
And skinny Tom Hanks.


A lone floating board
Weathered by water and storm
Do you yearn for shore?

I could never float
Never got the hang of it.
I preferred submerged.

Under the surface
That suited me much better
Trying to sprout gills

Looking up at sky
And the underside of boards
Goose butts go by too


Floating on top’s fine
‘midst the reflection of trees
Dream from where you came.”

Thanks for taking a morning amble with me. Have a good day.