July 3, 2021 NAPPING in the Redwoods
After puttering & sputtering all morning I was finally making progress on my presentation for IACEP-2021
Then I took a break, poked at e-mail and Facebook like poking the embers in an almost extinguished campfire. I spotted Mary Oliver’s Poem, “Sleeping In The Forest” and it stirred an old memory of sitting down in the Rockefeller forest while Kathy & Bruce kept walking slowly ahead (a common habit of mine when hiking, like when I was a Boy Scout, I always lagged behind, looking at stuff while the rest of my friends forged ahead). I sat on the soft fragrant redwood forest floor… I closed my eyes and it was as night. I never know how long night lasts, but how can that matter, and as the poet wrote:
I thought the earth remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.
– Mary Oliver (poet seer)
