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.
