Catastrophic Currents

Posted on by Alexandra Schaefers

I leave the house today solely on the advice of many past outings where what seemed like a deep depression lifted into a light melancholy and became joy just by going for a walk. I trudge up the narrow side street into Spring Garden Park without any such relief but decide to keep going.

This mood began after my counselor pointed out how much pressure I put on myself to find success as an artist and my secret belief that such success would spill over into my personal life saving me from having to find friends in an aloof town and date so many Mr. Wrongs to find Mr. Right-enough. She wondered if it wouldn’t be beneficial to make art into more of say, a hobby.

I hate the word hobby but I was feeling failed enough in that moment to take up this suggestion. Why wouldn’t I prefer to just make the art I want to make instead of trying to develop a consistent body of work, market it, submit it to galleries and sell it. I have never loved these activities and clearly prefer the stability of waiting tables.

I walk along Dolph Street considering if I have the vitality to make it all the way to Woods Memorial Park. This fatigue I’m under is not subsiding and the cold wind is quelling any benefit I should get from the brilliant sun and blue sky.

After cleaning out the studio to focus on my passions instead of commercial interests I found myself grieving as if having lost a love. Sobbing often and uncontrollably was a very new and alarming thing for me but I had always wanted to be one of those genuine, heart-feeling individuals. Here was my chance to feel and hurt and love.

After I cross the highway I walk down the gravel streets wondering what my former therapist would say about this. (Yes, the one I had a giant crush on.) He had such a quiet spirit it radiated an intense and tangible compassion that had a certain pithiness to it. As though his life was a large ship with a cracked hull that he beached on the shore and loved as-is instead of repairing. There it filled with seawater, rust and starlight. It sank into the sand and each night’s black sky.

I walk down the trail into the park immersed in this vision when I look up and see that the trees are unusually luminous as though they are also considering starlight and seawater. As though they have something to say about a life that does not include the word failure even as their lost branches break into the soil at their feet.

I bask in the beautiful light of the trees and as I approach the mandala the Fairy of Woods Memorial leaves on a drain cover by the trail I notice a Varied Thrush on the ground. It’s been a while since I’ve seen one and delight in his dapper orange brows and the deep gray crescent across his breast. He sees me and flies into the branches above the circular arrangement of flower petals, pine-cones, seedpods and winter berries.

I once met the woman who keeps this mandala. She had a mischievous, uplifting presence so it wasn’t a surprise when she mentioned the local paper deemed her The Fairy of Woods Memorial. I looked up the article at home and curiosity lead me down an internet rabbit hole where I discovered a performance she did about an abusive relationship with a spiritual teacher. It was so touching that she would reveal such a large crack in the hull of her life. Yet doing so allowed her to mend, to help others being drawn into or getting spit out of similar catastrophic currents.

Having had some less-than-glorious relationships with guru-types myself it was healing to watch. So now I walk through the woods, my imagination filled with both a rusty half-sunk ship and an expertly patched fairy-skiff darting through swift rapids.

As I walk back through the neighborhood I get deeper into the day’s boat theme considering my long-held belief that it is important for humans to have a mystical canoe made of things one loves. These help us to stay afloat in the great mystery of life even when our identities, religions or loved-ones fail us. I made a canoe of art and words and believed that, even if I had some other calling I had missed, it was good and right to have utmost respect for my canoe.

Suddenly I feel my feet in the dirt by the road, the sunshine all around empties my thoughts for a few moments. Each step feels to be a gift, an opportunity to be here in this one tree-lined street, on this giant planet, in my own pithy aliveness.

Arrogant spiritual teachers don’t have to be abusive to cause damage. They have a way of espousing freedom while allowing only one right thing to live for. Even years after the fact I live in their shadows afraid that the little ideas I like to elaborate into grandiose spiritual adventures aren’t right enough to be worthwhile. It’s just as much pressure as believing I need to actually sell art to have a meaningful career.

Why wouldn’t I respect these travels? Paddling between my ego and heart, asking question and collecting bits of wisdom that don’t always fit together. Perhaps this excuse to admire seawater and starlight, to celebrate sunlight and neighborhood walks is my own kind of right.

Embracing Inefficiency

Posted on by Alexandra Schaefers

I left at 7:25 am, walked against the flow morning traffic along the gravel edge of my street and hopped onto 32nd after crossing Capitol Hwy. It’s peaceful now, just neighborhood houses with luminous pumpkins glowing in the thick fog alongside outrageous spider webs, comedic skeletons and other Halloween bric-a-brac. Thirty-second street jogs around at Florida then crosses Vermont into a part of the neighborhood I’ve never been in. I descend into the dark greens, glowing yellows and oranges of Autumn admiring the quaint homes of an old woodsy neighborhood. I take a staircase in and out of a little gully to Beaverton-Hillsdale Hwy and cross to a path through Hillsdale Park which spans Trillium Creek on a narrow, chain-link covered bridge. The fencing has collected an impressive crown of maple leaves under the dark forest along the creek making it into the kind of tunnel where one would expect to find trolls or woodland sprites.

The terrain steepens and I note that this will not be the same low-key bit of exercise as my amble through Gabriel Park the other day. I climb the railroad tie steps through a narrow passage between one-off homes in Southwest Hills, stop to check my notes to the map, and continue upward to Council Crest. The trees at the crest are layered by distance and fog in a stately veil of gray. I walk through them along a leaf covered path to the Hilltop intersection then plunge into another swath of urban forest on the Marquam trail, traffic noise steadily picking up as I get closer to Sunset Hwy.

I have to admit that I’m tired and this might not be the most realistic way to get to the Arboretum on a regular basis. That wasn’t the hope but it would be nice to never have to drive. It’s 20 minutes by car to Hoyt from my house but it feels like a harrowing trek with all the traffic and impatience. This walk is far more enjoyable. In part, I planned to do this as an experiment in not being so captured by time. So often on my walks I feel hurried to get back to the studio to work.

The last couple walks I took after embracing inefficiency were so luxurious and relaxing I know that I need to do this regularly even if I can’t exactly sell my car. I cross Hwy 26 and step into the Arboretum 2 hours and 10 minutes after leaving home. A little farther to the meadow behind the Forestry Center I stop to take a rest under a maple. Juncos flit about overheard, yellow leaves dart from their branches into the unknown spaces below, filtering through the limbs then landing on the ground.

When I start walking again I am suddenly unable to absorb the beauty spilling out of every inch, so many textures, lines and colors; dark seed pods creating dense rhythms against the embers of glowing leaves on an intricate lace of limbs, everything soft in the damp air. The black Walnut stops me in my tracks; just the leaves on the tips of the branches remain, a delicate, earthy yellow, gracefully arced and sparse like a Phillip Glass composition. Each main branch makes it’s own angled pane in the sky in differing shades of gray. Fog is a much better painter than I will ever be.

The tupelo trees have shed most of their leaves, just a week ago they were full and red and brilliant.

The gerding maple, with yellow leaves so pale they look erased, feels to be halfway between here and eternity, juncos camouflaged on the trail dart into the grass as I approach. They seem to be everywhere in the park at once.

When I am too tired to wander anymore I take the MAX train to my favorite coffee shop and draw what I can remember of the walk but mostly I want to do it all over again.

A week later I do. This time the sun comes out as I arrive at Hoyt. I lay down in the grass under the London Plane trees, sinking deeper into a day with no agenda. To rest, to have nowhere to go at any specific time is a mind-altering experience with no unwanted side-effects. Each junco and robin sailing above, each leaf twirling wildly in the breeze are like fables of lost truths generously stitching themselves back into my being where I lay, half-erased like the leaves of the gerding. The manuscript of everything I want to do with my life fades into eternity, each ambitious plot erased into one line of a richly questionable poem.

 

 

Three Walks

Posted on by Alexandra Schaefers

Gabriel Park

Today I wander out into the day with a singular desire to immerse myself in beauty. I leave in the mist and walk to Spring Garden Park mostly preoccupied with my thoughts but walking along the soft trail of cedar chips though the grey-green landscape feels quaint—of some other, better century. I head to the Village, stop by the restaurant to pick up my paycheck and deposit it in the ATM a block away then wander towards Gabriel Park feeling even more quaint for having accomplished a necessary errand by foot.

Gabriel Park is majestic The wooded area along the creek holds layers of colors and textures that are especially thrilling in Autumn when the canopy rusts down and bares the rough branches, the dark air of the wood, the diligent generation of soil from leaves and twigs.

Fall is so lovely I want to walk along every path of the park. I plot out the best course from the end of Nevada street and immediately begin ignoring my surroundings in favor of mentally arranging my life so I can do this all the time.

 

Occasionally I notice my transgression and focus instead on the grace of the hills sweeping the skyline,  a crow’s silhouette slipping overhead in its usual poetry. The sun breaks loose right at the edge of the cedar grove where the chickadees and cedar waxwings talk among themselves above the tiny trace of a creek flowing through the lowest point of the park.

Back in the streets, the cacophony of starlings on the electric lines, juncos hopping along a stone wall chipping in the company of a single crow while robins chuckle loudly across the street.

 

Woods Memorial

I didn’t mean to walk to Woods Memorial. It seemed a good day to be unambitious but Dolph street found me not ready to go home, “I may as well walk to Woods Memorial.” I think.

It’s not as far as I’d imagined so I descend into the park towards the creek and walk up the Staircase Trail to the empty, forest-lined street on the other side. I’ve never walked this trail to its end before and I’m enchanted with this empty street. The dense forest on the other side, the little grassy area near the trailhead.

The Little Trail takes me back to the creek to head home while the sun comes out over the houses on Marigold Street and lights up the yellow leaves in the tops of the big-leaf maples.

It is not a small thing to me to be out in the soft grey day, the Autumn sun breaking lose in a splendor of green and gold with silvery edges where the rain lays. I live for these moments as though collecting tokens in a game. Each one leveling up my existence from a struggle with a jerry-rigged psychology to a human element entwined with the weather, geologic history, paths of deer and every being’s song.

Multnomah Village

I don’t notice the day turn to dusk out the giant windows of the restaurant as I stretch my multi-tasking ability past it’s fullest capacity, orchestrating people’s food and beverage consumption in a giant obstacle course of dishes, sharp objects, scalding liquids, and elaborate requests that need to be typed into a computer designed to be a cash register—all timed by at least 13 different people’s sense of patience and need.

Mostly it goes well but there are always moments that try me. It goes best when I make an effort not to judge people according to my own, very personal, set of pet peeves and deflect the same directed at me, but I am no Buddha.

Tonight I tried to stifle a sneeze while taking an order and it came out sounding like a very purposeful and exaggerated clown fart. The lovely, put-together woman at the table gave me a long, icy look of disbelief which seemed to say, you are too gouache to be in my existence, I’m filing a complaint with God immediately. Even absurd moments like this take energy to let slide so I am pretty wound up by the end of each meal.

At the end of this shift, in which I failed to notice the day slip into night, it is soothing to walk out into the black air of the rainy neighborhood, the gentle cadence of water meeting the street and roofs, big wet drops plopping out of trees in a melodic timbre. There is no challenge to be in this song as I walk the narrow streets under trees in the damp night before I make it home.

Diligently

Posted on by Alexandra Schaefers
In the senate justice turns to parody. In the woods rain turns to damp earth without any untruth.

It’s raining at Woods Memorial. I’m out-of-breath after riding my bike up the hill along Spring Garden Park. I haven’t ridden much since the hot weather we had in summer and now I have just enough strength left to enjoy the quiet forest trail—robins chuckling here and there but mostly just the sound of rain.

It has been a tough week for all of us who support minimum standards for employment. I believe Dr. Blasey Ford, but even if I didn’t I would still be appalled that an unstable, vengeful and paranoid man who can’t answer simple questions coherently now has one of the most important jobs in the country. I would not hire him to look after an unwanted pet.

The trees don’t appear to care. It’s not that they aren’t impacted by the decisions government makes. They clearly have more important things to do that never required evolving the kind of thinking center humans have. They stand in one place breathing, making shade, providing shelter from the rain. This comes in handy for me today. After making one really drippy sketch on the trail I find a dry spot under a lush tree, sit down and make some more sketches on reasonably dry paper.

It is strange that someone as educated as a judge wouldn’t take the high-road, wouldn’t admit to drinking too much to remember all of his actions, wouldn’t own the obvious disrespects he expressed in his year-book. I could forgive someone who engaged in ill-repute during high-school and college if they apologized, demonstrated how their understanding of women’s humanity has since evolved, publicly denounced the social structures that allowed such barbarism and expressed gratitude to feminists for diligently moving us all forward into a more just society.

Politics are not my strong suit in life, nor even my mediocre suit. I still vote, write letters to representatives, occasionally join a march. I’m not convinced this is enough but instead of doing more I draw trees. Today I am making very loose line drawings. I used to fill up sketchbooks with off-hand renderings of trees floating in space, no attention paid to their surrounds. I then started a project of making 100 tree paintings that would include the landscape and foliage around them. Since finishing that study I’ve been struggling to come up with a new body of work, a new way of talking about trees.

Today I decided to go back to my old ways, just loose drawings of trees, their structures and anything else that catches my fancy. It feels good to draw without thinking and I see that the project changed my voice. I can’t help but include things besides branch structure. I’ve learned to see the importance of the tree’s community. I’ve come to love the places that hold the trees, the places the trees protect with shade and cover.

I just received my voter’s pamphlet, I hope you are registered and planning to vote. In the meantime we could consider our other suits in life. How we can be honest about our wrongs to evolve a more sophisticated thinking center, how we can breathe and provide shade for each other.

One Specific Place

Posted on by Alexandra Schaefers

I went to the arboretum this morning just after sunrise, above the shadowy deciduous trees the evergreens stood glowing green-gold in the light as the crows flew over in black-gold wings, the robins chuckled, and a morning dove flew quietly into the maple.

I feel unusually content as I walk down the slope toward the flames of trees in yellow leaves. The ground feels soft, as if this is the one place in the world I am invited to be in right now, that there is one specific place I belong in each moment but I am rarely there except this morning.

I walk to the Tupelo trees, my Autumn favorite. They are sporting a few red leaves already. I would love to come everyday to watch them turn. If I had a bucket list the one thing I would put on it would be to take the entire Autumn off, to wander around all day admiring trees changing colors.

This is just the beginning of the season, I spent the first full day of Fall walking along the Clackamas River with a new fellow I’m very fond of. Like a lot of people, I think it is Fall the moment I feel a little chill in the air and see leaves turning colors. He holds off on such celebrations until the actual equinox. This year I paid attention as the leaves turned and the air chilled and find myself agreeing with him. Autumn is still my favorite season and part of what makes late summer so enjoyable are the signs that Fall is encroaching.

 

I walk along the Maple Trail listening to a northern flicker and a stellar jay. I sit down on a bench for a while basking in this surprise contentment. It is amazing how much I wear myself out just trying to live a genuine life. I once met a woman who had lived for years at an ashram in India; she thought humans would do well to give up the idea that living a life of joy and peace should be easy.

I think of all the trees and plants and wonder what it feels like to grow—is it ever uncomfortable? Does it strain their peace in spring to produce so much new fiber in such a short period of time? Perhaps they enjoy the tumult because they trust it is their nature.

I sit down in the Beech Grove to do another study and decide to cast off the unfortunate ideas I acquired while trying to be enlightened in my 20s—that making an effort to develop my own life is contrary to living a peaceful and meaningful life.

It’s not natural to live like it’s Autumn year-round, the trees know. In Sprig they surrender to the hard work of making leaves and when Summer yields to the Autumn chill they surrender to the delicate task of letting them all go, each landing in the exact place it has been invited to rest. Perhaps I will find more humility in doing the tremendous work needed to be successful with my inborn talents than I have smugly settling for a less turbulent mediocrity.

In the Beech Grove

Posted on by Alexandra Schaefers

Tuesday morning in the arboretum the juncos are busy collecting food off the ground occasionally chasing each other into the bushes. The firs and larches are filled with their calls alongside chestnut-backed chickadees, a brown creeper, stellar jay, song sparrow and a nuthatch. I can’t tell you if it was a red-breasted or a white-breasted nuthatch because I’m just learning the songs and I haven’t spotted the bird to see.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a song in the trees that I am not sure of, it could easily be juncos but I want to catch someone in my binoculars singing it to know for sure, unfortunately my neck hurts after extra shifts waiting tables and I’m unusually fatigued. I sit on the grass far enough from the trees to be able to look into them without craning my neck and soon thereafter settle into a nap without having solved the mystery.

I’m supposed to be sketching the beech trees and getting familiar with the grove in an existentially deep way so that my next painting can also be existentially deep. Instead I want to soak up the sun in the meadow and maybe cry a little for it being the time of year my father died, for all the tiny things going awry in life, the large things going awry in society, and the grand conflict of wanting to be a human who has a retirement plan and follows their passion and helps humanity and lives a simple, earthy life.

The wind picks up and it’s cold like it came in off a snowy mountain slope and just thinking about being in the mountains makes me so happy I feel like it’s ok if this moody nap in the grass is the last thing I accomplish. It reminds me of my back-up retirement plan which is to wander off into the woods just before senility sets in. It probably won’t come to that but the option gives me an unexpected peace when I start fretting about the future.

I haul myself off the grass and head toward the Beech trees. Determined not to succumb entirely to the trials of mind I consider appeasing my humanitarian urge by assuming that after death my paintings will be discovered as useful to a society struggling to embrace it’s humanness. However unlikely, it is as calming as my back-up retirement plan and may just free up enough space in my noggin to allow a more genuine usefulness to develop. Now all I have to do is balance a passion to create with a passion to be simple.

I sit down in the Beech grove to draw. There are not as many bird songs here so I sit and listen to the sound of Beech nuts falling into the cover of dried leaves on the ground—some of them opened like woody stars—and the sound of the green leaves above fluttering against each other in the late summer wind. It is a song that holds all the love of the cold mountains, the preciousness of life and another mystery I cannot decipher.

I draw one tree, it’s a slender thing with just a few major branches all growing upwards. A young girl walks through the grove with her grandma, “What does the tree say?” the girl asks. Grandma doesn’t have an answer to this lofty question until the girl points out the tree has a tag on it. “American Beech” Grandma says and they walk on. My pencil feels strangely heavy and I realize my quandary has just as simple an answer. I have a nature to follow, a song that happens on its own when the wind comes through. Someone else can make a tag labeling the kind of human I end up being.

After Bugs

Posted on by Alexandra Schaefers

 

Having been in Portland for a few months now I am not surprised to find Tryon Creek State Park’s overflow lot completely full at 9 am on Saturday. Back in the day the front lot might be close to full but this is a little overwhelming. The visitor’s Center trail heads are busy with runners, families with strollers and hikers. Clearly we need more parks and natural areas so we can all have peaceful quality time out in nature instead of being on a highway, it’s nice to have more gaps between encounters.

I head down the Maple Ridge Trail to the spot where I did some studies yesterday because I realize I need a few more. I’m just getting my feet wet in an endeavor to make large paintings in the studio based on extensive studies made on-site. This will be an inbetweener, making more studies than normal to get an experiment going and see what it’s like to paint large.

There have been several 90 degree evenings this summer when I came to Tryon Creek with my paints and was unable to get myself to paint, it was easy to rationalize with all the mosquitoes that settle on a person who sits still in the woods in summer. Bug spray kept them off me but they were still buzzing around close enough to be a menace.

I knew mosquitoes weren’t the real issue though. I went for a one night backpacking trip along the Salmon River with my paints thinking that a day trip would be just the thing to inspire me. I made some drawings but instead of painting I spent a lot of time sitting by the river listening to the world. The bugs hovering above the water, zig zaging across the open space, the Lorquin’s Admiral butterflies fluttering from one rock to another then off to a tree branch, the kingfisher passing through in search of a good spot to fish, the ravens and their throaty calls, one landing in an evergreen and hopping up the boughs one by one like a ladder.

The deep sounds of the river flowing around the large mossy rocks cleared out my head and gave me space to answer all sorts of questions like how to arrange my studio schedule around a constantly changing work schedule when habits have always been my lifeline out of inertia. I also decided to to get more involved in my studies of a place prior to making paintings, to not just address a scene’s visual material but to be present there, observant, as connected as my divided brain allows me to be. To then collect all the material into a large painting in the studio at home.

At night back in my little camp a bat flew past, lurching after bugs with amazing speed and grace. It made dozens of laps through the area, passing above or alongside me each time. Where did this bat spend the day, I wondered enjoying its erratic shadowy presence, trusting its own blind technology to not collide with me even as I moved about to brush my teeth and change into soft fleece for a cozy night in the hammock.

I’m not sure how to get that relaxed and involved in a place with so many humans milling about as at Tryon Creek but the challenge is just what I need to feel inspired again instead of forcing myself to continue producing the same kind of work as I had been.

I pack up my studies and wander down the hill to the creek admiring all the orange blossoms in the undergrowth, the bare packed dirt that develops around any interesting feature like a particularly large fallen log or a uniquely shaped tree that begs to be climbed into, the yellow and orange leaves that collect around the edges of rocks in the creek.

The ravens who live here squawk at each other as I cross the park and I wonder if I could ever love the loud and brash antics of people the way I love the antics of birds. A group of women in spandex has been out of sight behind me on the trail for sometime and one of them is bellowing her part of the conversation which is sizable. I stop by the creek to let them pass while an even louder group approaches from the opposite direction, young boys with blood curdling yells.

Society has such a task balancing everyone’s needs, the need to play, the need to be quiet. I wish I could be like the bat who went about its business unconcerned with the human in its way, seemingly content to wake at dusk and hunt for bugs the same as every other day.

August

Posted on by Alexandra Schaefers
August

Designed for Flight

Posted on by Alexandra Schaefers

I’m in Corvallis for the day with an hour and a half of free time before meeting friends at the coffee shop so I drive to Bald Hill and start up the trail along Oak Creek toward Fitton Green. I love the dry grass meadows of summer and the barn swallows perched on the fence in their deep blue wings and forked tails. It’s been so hot it has been hard to enjoy the usual adventures of summer but today is a little cool, clouds above even.

I enter the woods and the drama of oaks cloaked in moss baring their long twisted history of always vying for light. A deep brown moth flies out of the brush pirouettes above my head and lands in the leaves along the bank on the side of the trail.

Moths have my heart. Drawn blindly to destructive sources of light I feel we are kindred spirits.

 

Once I was pulling English ivy off the shed at my brother’s. The ivy held a lot of dead leaves and sometimes one would flutter upward past my face as I yanked the vines loose. It was eerie; these fluttering things were them same ocher and shape as dead leaves yet they seemed alive, soft, defiant of gravity.

I slowed down and paid more attention thinking maybe a sly bird had been living in the ivy but what I discovered were moths. What a magical thing to be so ethereal as to be almost imperceptible. And what a magical thing to be in the midst of them as they are loosed from the side of an old shed.

Then there was the evening a moth dropped out of nowhere and landed on my coffee cup as I tended to a broken heart. The fluttery thing in me that looked at his web-site portrait from a list of recommendations and said, I’m going here, despite my intellect protesting that one should not seek counseling from a man one is attracted to before even arriving.

 

I likened it to a moth, that draw, and marveled at its intensity for seeking loopholes, for ignoring the one-sided nature of our conversations, for believing with such convenience that he was a lonely insightful writer with few possessions who played upright bass, loved nature, wore fedoras and would be a very sensitive and affectionate partner despite being a hermit.

My intellect considered this might not be accurate. He might not own a single fedora. He might be partnered. He might have the sort of integrity that would not allow him to pursue a client. My intellect considered that if he didn’t have this integrity my fantasy actualized would be a thing going very wrong in my life. The moth, however, had it’s own mysterious agenda that did not involve such practicalities and my intellect became a tiny afterthought barely tethering me to reality.

Eventually he mentioned a wife. I kept my cool— intellect had prepared me for this. I went to the coffee shop later to mourn the necessity of reality when an actual moth appeared and perched on my cup, white, furry, seemingly unaware of my presence. How could I not read something poignant into this?

 

How about: beings who willfully scorch themselves on artificial lights are soft and designed for flight.

Even at the time I knew what transference was, that it was normal, that it would be safe to talk about the attraction in a session if I wanted to, that I could choose another counselor. But that was scary and the moth was compelling. The draw motivated me to work and his affirmative statements cashed out in my soul at a value of 1000 times than had they been issued by an unattractive colleague. Also it kept me from getting back together with my ex-boyfriend.

It must be an intense sensation for the caterpillar to liquefy itself in order to acquire wings. So my normally rational, self-contained personality sat over coffee that evening with a moth trying to embrace this departure from sense and maturity.

Today I climb through the oaks to the top of the ridge and lay on a split log bench in the sun. The cool air and dry leaves along the trail remind me of Autumn and evoke the feeling of eternity infused into each moment and molecule. It is a beauty almost imperceptible and defiant of life’s gravity. It is a beauty that makes me feel rich and loved despite all my troubles with these ordinary parts of life. I hold this ethereal wealth all the way back to the trail-head becoming part of the meadow’s population alongside the swallows and bugs, no longer a detached observer.

Some people believe that our quirks, our troubling oddities contain the most precious parts of ourselves, things so delicate we hide them in tight cocoons to make sure no one will ever have the chance to despise them. This moth-self in all it’s intensity to dream up a perfect and epic love has something important lurking with her in the dead leaves of the ivy. What can I do besides slow down and pay attention while I pull down each idea that ever made me ashamed for holding my own epic source of light.