SPIRIT BREAKFAST

This morning I had the huge dawn fortune of going out into snow-cleared air and walking past all the fence posts with their high snow caps and beyond them the views of frosted mountains, the Lake like wet granite glazing off to mountains on the other side, then mountains beyond them, and beyond all the unrisen sun casting pastel glows and purple charcoal shadows out over everything as the mountains allowed, all hanging still in the silence of the air, just hanging all around out there, timeflake by timeflake: Lake, sky, mountain, air, all that spectacularity just being there and doing nothing in particular, just the everything it always does, seen or unseen, praised or unpraised, loved or unloved, the same everything that matters to the seeker who is the living soul within a body that, just risen from the winter of night in deep need of a spirit breakfast, to feast upon such colors and lights, scents and silences, distances and shadings, nearnesses and brilliances, topographies, delineations, and so in snow boots I alone in all that majesty walked, slowly, down, through, white, toward something that had to do with - a matter, I was sure, that in other moments I have deemed important somehow, and when I got to the car, which was mine, I opened the door with the key I happened to have at hand and started the engine as I remembered, shook my head to get back closer to this life of time and moments, having just been for some immeasurable measure among heavenly things...

Songbird way up in the sky - saw sunrise first

EARLY DAWN DREAM

In the night, the August night, I barely awoke from a dream about deer and the world was still of the dream; I heard the sound of deer taking careful steps through the high grass in my garden, then there was a soft crunching as of deer browsing on my prospering verbena or my surviving basil, their chewing so intent that I arose and peered out the window in the first hint of dawn and was able to see a morning's dream: a summer dawn rain falling in soft waves, with a rhythmic, tender sound like the slow chewing of lush, new-grown leaves, as from the house eaves came a slow regular dripping, like the soft steps of deer though high grass in a dream to which I returned at once, awakening later to find the basil and verbena not only intact, but fresh from dreams of rain...