Gossamer Naturalist

Category: Love

  • Liminal Velocity

    This is a piece I wrote at this time last year. Liminal space is the space between, the transition zone between one thing and another. There is always space between the forest and the wetland, a mixture of both where a completely different set of ecological interactions take place. Just as there is a liminal space between us.

    Liminal Velocity

    Home is the liminal space 
    Between dream and reality
    Like the space between a swamp and a fen 
    Where the speckled alders and cattails grow together.
    A space you occupy
    Where we meet in the in between
    Of late summer chorus and early mabon fog

    The liminal space
    That land between the rose garden and the industrial blocks
    Where we roam and witness lives 
    Without really being a part of them
    Liminal Velocity
    The instant between the story you tell me
    and my brain processing the words- 
    and losing them
    in the high of seeing your smile again.

    The liminal space
    Between having a voice and the 
    Silence of a lichen 
    Is not so wide a canyon
    As the illusion projected on the screen.
    It is a pinch of genetic code, and political gain
    Taught by worlds with borders between
    Urban and wild
    And you and me

    Liminal space,
    like the sandy shore between my feet and the mantel of the Earth
    where things grow and death becomes life
    decomposing to a base substance we call dirt.
    Soil, a rush of petrichor between the rain and the sun.
    blending together with the sound of your laugh
    like one essence of laughter and smell, 
    a dance between sensation.

    Liminal Velocity
    The space between 
    my perception of you
    and the reality of you-
    different forms of the same perception-
    is the same as the space between the sea smoke
    and the inland sea herself.
    The one perception we share.

  • Gravity Holds

    Gravity Holds

    Every step we find ourselves in dreams-
    Of the moment the snow fled from the freshly covered
    Winter boughs
    Towards the ground that holds us so tight
    The gravity of Gaia pulls so much 
    Softer on each crystalline snowflake
    Than she pulls upon our aging imaginations.
    So trapped by Moloch as they are
    Encased in screens and responsibilities.

    Our minds soar like forming hail
    Down through the clouds, then up again,
    Then down again, and so on until 
    We have so much icy weight that to the ground our mind returns.
    Falling and falling in 
    And within the winds. Towards
    The withered stream, held by toxic soil.

    Gravity holds me tighter than your touch
    Folding and unfolding both on the level of the strings 
    That make the universe
    The strands which weave us together
    For only a stitch or two,
    Before splitting apart into new patterns 
    And old.

    I meant to post this yesterday, or the day before. But each time I thought about what to say to accompany it, adventure pulled me away. A ski at Tettegouche, where my Mother’s ashes rest. An unexpected opportunity to teach. Each bringing to a space of new discovery outside the realm of everyday gravity. I want to use this blog space to share my work regularly, predictably, in the grounds of the everyday routine, the gravity which holds us to our lives. That gravity isn’t a negative energy. It’s just that I cant let it control me while I live a space so magical as this.

    That’s what this piece is about. Holding that gravity as a friend, rather than a prison guard. And letting the orbits that are our relationships to others run their course naturally. That is something I am still learning. In Love I hold and hold those with whom our orbits meet only briefly, and try to force the gravity of our lives to stay orbiting together when they would’ve naturally drifted apart. When do we hold on? When do we let go?

    Lake Superior in the Late Autumn