mississippi gulf coast
Twelve Oaks Residency 20
To be uncompromising against a wall of life always asking us to bend or break, a levee of self-possession, never cracking, and never topping her walls. To be uncompromising, like nature in her seasons - summer, winter, they will arrive, they will. Maybe mild but never absent and always moving on.
(This life among people, inside and televised, maybe ain’t right.)
Understanding comes first from other people, and then from experience.
Solitude finds unity.
Does your work show how joyful you are?
A person knowing where to find the ecstatic, but living attic minded instead.
Roughly:
“Experienced something where i was that moment and then i exploded into the cosmos and
i was the bird and the bird was me and,”
i knew - i think - and i really do believe.
“Folks are scared to name Providence, or God, or the Creator” (pointing out we are all creators)
“Nature is the face of God.”
“Providence is neutral.” (To you.)
Out here simply stumbling into awareness. In balance/in Eden. Walk around your mountain, see it all.
“Accept your own authority. It is your story to tell.”
Find the place that you are granted. I went out in the woods and hugged a pine tree the other day. These old oaks have so much warmth in them, and so much strength and stability. These trees have always been around me and with me, and i did really wrap my arms around a scaly brown pine and it stood there, but i believe it must be too old to be embarrassed, and it might be too rooted and loved by Providence to have ever been embarrassed.
When was the last time you had a moment of pure existence.
Thinking then, later, often. Measuring up and measuring down and rounding off. Thinking about ecstasy where it meets humans, and how you aint gonna find it inside a house, probably. So much time taken for granted. Faulkner wrote that we often have exhausted our chance at life before we are done living.
Little bradford pear blossoms coming out one by one and two and three, those grey woods on the side of the path, worn with winter, making a brave and calculated step into spring. You can see by all of this that Providence has been directly under the house and gone out towards the road. She doesn’t ask anything of the oak trees, they have their own time and Providence & the trees both agree. Winter and spring are still holding hands before winter has to return underground, return to Providence’s back to sleep through the summer and dream into the fall.
We saw a tree standing down near the water, an alien plant vining up its trunk, all it’s arms outstretched in praise to the sun and to the season. Sunset, for a moment, prehistoric red and bloody and old, birds calling the same as they been doing for centuries. We can’t picture the woods anymore like they used to be, all swampland and patient. But we can see the sunset every day if we bottle up and go.
The water is often so still. We would have missed its glass, it’s complete mirror, if it weren’t for the pelican, all perfect just about the surface.
Worried all the time, waking up in the sunrise-light in bed, worried - but whatever is strangely scratching on the roof is still on the roof - and i am safe still in bed.
Twelve Oaks Residency 9
There’s been gospel all through the house. Music quiet in the evening with raccoons scuffling around, maybe on the roof, my heart in my throat at two in the morning. But it’s just age old nature and her daughters, the trees dropping leaves & limbs in the wind, the raccoons and all of their kin out looking to eat. The trees and their canopies covering us at all times, in the pouring rain, where everything gets to be so glistening & bright, and new paths sure enough open up.
we was in New Orleans in November or December. And i was out in the French Quarter, the whole Mississippi river keeping me from home. And looking at those buildings. Tiresome just to get back. Tiresome to walk in all the pastel colors on the dirty pavement, and the tourist music shrouding in the humidity. I looked up with tremendous regret & sadness, that i had lost all of my love & wonder for a place that used to be my only dream.
The oaks here gave me new eyes. Sometimes those eyes come in on my heels, leaves all over the ground. Now in this time, this year, New Orleans echoing all of it’s ever-present love and even the terrifying river bubbling in chorus on the pavement shores. The colors & the light & the sound all vibrant and beautiful & embracing. Ducks and their partners all across the water, canadian geese loud & proud, a heron stretching his neck to croak low down across the river. Pelicans all strange and lizard-like on their piers. The river is high but the land doesn’t seem worried. They reckon they’re all the same.
We are here always at our crossroads, there is left & right, up & down, sky & ground. We are at another crux of winter & spring. Summer seems to still hold us in it’s loving arms. All of the tender green things are bravely curling upwards. Winter and it’s passing hanging down & skeletal, pine diamonds rainy & saturated. Brush washed down with water & tide & calling. All of these paths always opening to us if we are out looking for it. Vivid in the rain, living in the rain, all of these trees an umbrella, forgiving their weather-mother and letting some through down on us, happy and spattering in the water and mud. Trees is blushing with spring.
I was afraid and i am still afraid to lose my sight like i had with New Orleans. To go home and see Louisiana is another harsh shake. To be here at Twelve Oaks sure seems like heaven within all comparisons. The rain carried us back to Mississippi, just like a portal, again. We came through safe and glad. New eyes came to greet me, all the leaves, in the woods, in the rain.
We are here in the quiet resurrection, the restoring of life to death among the plants and animals. It is so silent out here. Birds and squirrels and other creatures quiet in their winter. The rain muted by the trees. The resurrection swelling from beneath our feet, spring is always promised, but before it is spring, it is mighty cold and mirrored, everywhere. All of nature watching and all of nature knowing just when to come through.
Blossoms just as beautiful in their pre-blossoming.