In true appreciation of your continued reading, encouragement and critical interaction my gift to you for the holidays is:
No politics today.
No social justice issues today.
Nothing complicated or sad today.
A poem about how to be hopeful with the help of nature.
Here’s a collection of images from a hike up Wahkeena Falls last week, into the mist with a sprinkling of snow. There was beauty and the reminder that there are always more chances. If you had told me in the hospital at the beginning of the year that I would hike some miles up the steep hills of the Gorge by the end of it, I would have declared you insane.
Mist
It amazes me when mist
chloroforms the fields
and wipes out whatever world exists
and walkers wade through coma
shouting
and close to but curtained from each other
sometimes there’s a second river
lying asleep along the river
where the sun rises
sunk in thought
and my soul gets caught in it
hung by the heels
in water
it amazes me when mist
weeps as it lifts
and a crow
calls down to me in its treetop voice
that there are webs and drips
and actualities up there
and in my fog-self shocked and grey
it startles me to see the sky
by Alice Oswald (elected as the first female professor of poetry at the University of Oxford in 2019)
Here is to crows, blue skies and actualities. I will see you in the – happy – new year.
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And in case you still need more support to get through these next weeks, I urge you to try the following relaxation exercises. If Bruno Pontiroli’s models can do it, so can you! Possibilities abound!
Since all the animals reminded me of Camille Saint-Saëns’ Carnival, here is his Christmas Oratorio, equally enchanting. Merry Christmas.