WE ALL CAME FROM THE COUNTRY

I grew up in a city, under crowded circumstances, but when you're young everything is food of a kind. When I grew old enough to develop a natural taste of my own for a place that would feed my older soul, the country was where I found it.

Whenever I make the trip into the city from the country I feel a loss, I miss the sky, I miss the quiet, the space, the breath of trees, the way nature arranges things, she has good hands. I miss her native friendliness, her infinite language, her random acts of beauty.

In my youngest youth I’d always sensed what I later realized: that the big city was where we still yearn for the Eden that pulls at the tides of our hearts, that city folk use for picnics and vacations, summer homes when they can get them; but that knowledge did nothing to ease the feeling of being away. I couldn't wait to get home.

Now when I return home, the closer I get the quieter the air becomes, the calmer the people and the closer we are to the heartbeat of the earth, source of our destiny among the stars.

We all came from the country.

Light and Dark and Light

Here and there in the grains of the photos that remain from that time you can see the blurred outline of a person, sometimes with a child or even two, walking where the way was once familiar, but that now was the floor of an incinerator the size of their city, that still burned through them even as they walked, perhaps to escape the heat of all the nothing that remained...

At other places in the mass of the ashes of a hundred thousand lives turned into wind and rain you can make out the speck of another one still living, bent over searching, sifting through blackened flakes of what once was life, once a place of daily living, where now nothing stood intact, where all was flat and dark, death in dust and fragments...

After the fires died, first the living came seeking their loved ones, one mother searching for her daughter who that morning had gone into town early so she could pay the rent on her way to work, but the mother never found her daughter...

That mother and all the others - fathers, sisters, sons, daughters and brothers, wandered for days, weeks, the rest of their lives, searching in those ashes of families, passing by those trolley riders who were charcoal statues in their seats, or those still just alive who wandered also, in search of death that waited just days away, unlike the lucky ones who had left those instant pale shadows on the darkened stone of the bridge or building where they'd joined the unseeable light...

All of it on that August morning-- every ash of bone, every unheard scream, every sear of pain or cry for love, every tear of life, every atom of vapor that had been a person, is in our voices now...

AUGUST 6

Hiroshima Child

That nameless child

lying there, not yet ten

will die soon after filming

but now as calm

at the heart of terror

as bravery can be...

Lower face

torn away by the bomb,

her eyes still bright with life

and innocence

turn and look upon you

with all the trust

there ever was

CORNERS OF THE WORLD

Living up here you get much closer to folks than you do in the crowded city, getting to know someone takes time and there's less time in the city, each person gets a picosecond if noticed; involvement is deeper when there are fewer, as there are up here, we're sort of united by our scarcity.

What got me started on this was a recollection I just had about Mr. and Mrs. T., who lived in town where they had an old family business, but had a house up here in the mountains where they spent most of time after he retired. I often used to see them out in their sloping garden by the pond, a beautifully detailed garden in every season-- they were out there planting, trimming, raking, picking tree litter out of the moss, taking care of their place, making it elegant, keeping it neat like a clear mind, which such activity helps impart to the doer.

When we first bought this land I used to see them walking all around up here. They'd walk very slowly arm in arm, leaning on their canes because they were quite advanced in age, but a couple times a day they'd go on long walks together, often passing through our property, and I miss seeing them. They took good care of their little corner of the world, which is one of the things we should all do while we're here in this tremulous paradise...

'Taking care of my little corner of the world'... I know that's a bit naive, I know that there are problems with crowding, hunger and poverty, but the solution that is equity and peace can only be achieved by each of us honoring our little corner of the world, taking good care of it, sharing what it gives us and leaving it better than we found it...