#couterie forest

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The Mind Concetrates

The mind wanders. The material concentrates.—Rae Armantraut , “Thrown” Concentrates only when the mind ceases to wander and the eye if the poet pauses at an object of curiosity or wonder, when the material is, ike the repertoire of the comedian, the material. Through focus. we conjure. My unquiet mind is as restless as the Mississippi kites hunting  mosquitoes when I arrive at the forest. There…

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My Five 5 O'clock Shadow

Yellow Crowned Night Heron in Couterie Forest Why I go back to the park sometimes at 5:00 or 5:30. We’re good acquaintances. He sometimes visits the bench where I read earlier in the day, or salutes me with his head when I pass.  He’s not giving up a good, shady spot if it’s just me.  He only startles and bolts  if I accidentally sneak up on him. In the evening I sit at the bench across from his…

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Open Toes at the Wrong Party

“I went out to the hazel wood,Because a fire was in my head”— “Song of Wandering Aengus,” W.B.Yeats So I went out to the forest and forgot to change my shoes and decided just to walk in my slides wearing these open-toed bamboo brace things for my Achilles, trying not to catch anything between my toes. I also forgot to change out of my pajamas, my beloved polyester stripey Dollar store Gangsta…

Open Toes at the Wrong Party

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Automatic Walking

I have an incorporeal compass insidewhich, when the trail splitsor crosses, knows which way to goas if the life inside chooses fromamong the countless greenshow to visit the feathered cousins&I visited green heron andsaw the egret atop the piling anhinga just a flash of wingshis sharp call across the lagoon &Soon City Golf Park will send the menin a green duck boat filled with poison to kill the…

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Going Quiet in yhe Forest

For a forest friendGoing quiet in the forest is exhilarant living.Leave your sugar frosted lattespeaker phone in airplane mode.Choose wild cherries and passion flowers.There are thrills in trills in the trees,the slow dance of coasting birds,frog song conga lines at dusk.Go quietly and with someonewho stoops to toad stools; stops, looksand listens with hawk-sharp senseswhen birds swoop and sing…

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Reading Poetry to the Anhinga

I’ve done something to my achilles, possibly pushing way too hard into barefoot shoes, although at 69 it could be any number of things. I have, for example, somehow developed duck-footedness and often sit with my feet balanced on their ball, an anxiety thing that probably doesn’t do my achilles any good either.I was pushing towards 2 miles every day walking in the forest arboretum or the wilder…

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Back to the Island

When the days are empty of work except for what I choose–reading and writing, some chores, the garden–I take long walks in the forest arboretum not to raise my heart rate but to lower it, to follow–after the admonition from yoga–the breath of everything. Lately my thoughts roam unleashed there,  thinking of natural beauty in other forms, and of desire still easily kindled even at my age with the…

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The Only Worthy Lotus

Walking is meditation if it is morning chorus and kaleidoscopic green. Not stillness. Not silence. Not transcendence. Follow instead the breath of everything.  I don’t want to escape this world but instead to live deeply within it. I don’t want to approach the lotus unless I can wade in to admire it.  Walk widdershins around the best trees. Resist the dominant habit of humanity. The interleaved…