The Speaking Earth
To learn to listen to the speech of other than human beings is a journey into the unknown, at least for most 21stcentury people, myself included. One luscious spring day I was working in my office, a closed-in screened porch. The green world was a few feet outside my open windows and I could hear the nesting birds in all their springtime busy-ness. Birdsong was raucous, the creek tumbled along noisily, swollen by spring rains. The voices of treetop winds, the waters, birds….the warm beckoning of new spring sunshine. All of them were calling to me, “Come join us.” Yet, I sat at my work, telling myself I was closer to the breathing earth than most. I encouraged myself to be grateful, as I completed one task, then another. Finally the chorus of voices broke through my habit-worn mental constructs…the to-do list, Freud’s super-ego, the Puritan work-ethic. I flung myself out doors, bursting forth like all the green-energy arising around me. Pacing one step at a time, listening, noticing, smelling, touching. Suddenly I saw the one who had orchestrated such enticements, the one calling me to come sit a while and chat:
Jack-in-the-Pulpit
Ideas, siloed like wheat
that is lifted out of native soil,
away from the microbes
who make bread into flesh
~ ideas exiled in sterile
towers of thought ~
tethered to the desk,
she writes.
All the while
in pungent
pine-carpeted forest
amid hickory
poplar
wild cherry
birds sing evensong.
Cicadas are Tibetan monks
droning intoning.
Forest’s persistent
emerald light calls out
an invitation.
She accepts.
Eyes flooded
with rippling green
orienting by touch
a thrill raises
tiny hairs on her
bare arms.
There stands
Jack-in-the-Pulpit,
a head taller than
humble moss and creepers.
She listens to
his wild sermon:
“We are God’s thoughts:
we travel through
chemical collaborations
enzymes
proteins
sugars.
We are the sustainers
cycling
enfolding
harnessing nourishment
offering the forest’s bread:
oyster mushroom
poplar’s tulip
wine berry
paw-paw
hazelnut
We are holy ideas-in-motion.”
Now indoors
vital thought forces
come surging from her pen.
Like lightning
they catalyze spirit,
pump life-blood
into concepts
too long preserved
in the salt of separation.
They bring new words
to roam across the page
like migratory herds.
Or are they starlings
flying in perfect unison
to sing the mind awake?