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Showing posts from October, 2010

October 29

& now the snow, falling in a frenzy through the night & dissipating into slow, meandering flakes now, turning in the discernible breeze against the languid grey of the sky. Enough that it clusters & holds in odd patterns about the burls in the birches, or tendrils out along the spruce-boughs to where they cluster in cone. & that smell it brings, a kind of metallic, airy cleanliness borne aloft in the fine gusts. & now we watch it & gauge its accumulation & look at the dogs & beyond at the gaping miles of wild untended & we wait for it to hurry along. I’ve decided to document this first year of trying to learn how to mush. It seems too singular an enthusiasm to disperse among the rest, or maybe too dominant a one to let determine the general hue of things. I have this for you, my four beloved readers: www.amushingeducation.wordpress.com Or I have it for myself, in any case. There is little there just yet, but over time, I hope it proves one of the ins

October 14

Winter like a fledgling, the first tenuous flakes of snow sheening us here, the first intimations of real chill. & already, those last vestiges of autumn covered over, subsumed in the gloaming. Winterlight. Winterdusk. Winterdawn. They are their own things entire, & inexplicably, profoundly beautiful up here. & an odd time for me personally, stepping into the season that so drastically came to alter me last year. I feel the visceral memory in me yet, the quiet, the patience. & then look up to see my heart content this time around, joyful, present. All of those months last year when in the yawning silence it was only my own feeble whisper I could hear. & startled, then, at the sound of it, the little, fragile thing. A bird’s tiny bone. I think on what endures, on what is yet extant from that long season, & suppose what remains somehow sacred & central. From that beehive that murmured once & then fell resoundingly quiet, the small flame at the center batti

October 2

There was a run I did last year along the rim of three lakes during which a golden eagle flew directly over my head the entire time. He never forged ahead or lagged behind, & when I would stop to regard him he would perch on the bough of a spruce & regard me back & then wing along when I would run again. & last winter it happened several times that along my runs in the snow I’d properly packed I would stop short twenty feet from a wolf, & we would stand there for a moment & look at one another, eye to yellow eye, & then we would continue along, the wolf into the copse of willow, & I along my path. One of those winter runs I heard a plaintive bleating from across the way & looked in time to see three wolves bringing down a young caribou. I saw their dark forms silhouetted there against the pale snow in the hushed light of the morning, just inside the tree line, writhing in a violent torsion. & I have come upon grizzlies that were magnanimous or ap