Falling

Metallic blue-black wasp perched on cluster of tiny white wild carrot blossoms against blurry brown background.

British poet Alice Oswald has a collection called Falling Awake. It’s an excellent title, and a compelling read. I’m considering what falls in fall. I feel myself tumbling. I fell off the blog-wagon and bumped my tailbone and then my elbow. Ouch! No one noticed. The gathering of nectar continues, the formation of melon flesh, the shaping of tunnels through thick dead grass. Air falls away as a giant puffball swells. A ripe chokecherry drops from its stem. What falls? Everything, everywhere on the surface of earth,or, as Nigel Calder wrote in Einstein’s Universe, “falling is the most natural way for objects to behave and our main mode of travel through the universe, aboard our planet.”

Moment Made Flesh

The day’s fractal surfaces are books, bodies, matrices of snow and leaf, water in its shape-shift from ground, breath, river, tide, and leaf-exhalations to sky; its drift and drizzle from cloud to earth. The day’s fractal surface unfolds, reveals itself: shattering, dappling, mirror-ball mosaic of light racing towards us, a wave of radiance. The day’s … Read more

The Ever-Moving Air

Last summer, I had the pleasure of spending several days on West Ironbound Island with artists Erin Donovan and Susanne Chui, on a pilot residency project created by the Kingsburg Coastal Conservancy. Our time was spent getting to know one another amid the island’s sounds, places, stories, and its more-than-human inhabitants. Although our time on … Read more