Specimens, Days

A weekend spent outdoors, mushing two days from the yard on Stampede & then skiing a seven-mile loop from my front door in the Village. & in the meantime, playing music with good friends, cooking some fine meals, & generally finding myself fulfilled from one moment to the next. I’ll be brief in saying so, but given the pending holiday & my pending trip down to Texas for a week, I’ll say only that I am unspeakably grateful to be alive & to inhabit this life among all the others I could have lived. Happy Thanksgiving, friends & family alike. Whether or not I ever find time to articulate it, those that I love are a constant company to my thinking & living & being. Also, a few new flickr pictures & the mushing blog goes forward too.

I am looking at this curious photograph of a 94-year old great-grandmother holding an eleven pound premature baby who spent the first four months of his life in the hospital & who still requires quarantine due to the fragility of his lungs. & though I know the child’s parents, he is a stranger to me, as is the frail old woman. & her eyes regard the child with a tenderness that seems to speak in years, while his own fawn over distances making shapes & conjuring the world into the familiar. What life will he lead? & then, towards its end, palsied, fragile all over again, what child will he hold in his shaking hands? & where, I wonder, always, where does that living go, that meaning that seems to call from us with such blazing intensity? All of these days fugitive & irretrievable, & then as we age our fingers seem to clutch tighter those things that intimate our own mortality. A child’s eye full of vitality. The wild countenance of a threatened moose buckin...

& 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...

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...

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...

Several days now successive of bluebird skies & sharp light & the underbreath of winter through the scattering yellow leaves. That auratic sense that only autumn can provide, of the soil smell, & the swaths of crimson, & the cranes flocking south & everywhere, everywhere, the crisp sun. Season of mist & mellow fruitfulness, for Keats. & for me always that attending sense of crepuscular gratitude, if that quite makes sense. How full its fleeting moments, simply because so urgently fleeting, & into & out of such a rich kind of beauty. Maybe it’s how time seems to lay itself bare for autumn, & how the heart clamors across that landscape. Or maybe I’m doing some temporal accounting anyway. But I feel my childhood bodily come autumn, feel its fugitive joys & its small ruptures in all of their original tenderness. & I feel the scraping wind, & the sunlight settling over the plains, cut in crooked, palsied shapes by the boughs of the oaks ...

Here the autumn sweeps in again in its dappled vermilions & russets & blazing golds, & the crisp light sieving the world in fine shadow. The frosts beginning in the morning, temperatures hovering around freezing & rising only slow & languid through the waning daylight. & autumn here absurdly beautiful. I walk slack-jawed & awed by it. Yesterday, we walked towards Carlo Ridge, forgetting moose hunting season began on the first. The trail splays out, ten feet wide, rutted with horseshoe prints indented where the mud gives & pulls their legs down. We turned & headed back to what may be the most plentiful patch of blueberries I’ve found. The dogs, after observing us picking, have taken to berry eating, & slowly, methodically, plod bush to bush nibbling carefully to avoid the dun leaves. Willa’s paws show streaks of stained purple. Moose, I think, may well have swiftly developed a keen addiction, given his particular vigor & voracity among the ber...