Hi darling, very windy out today, the house has been rattling & shaking, the chimes clanging ferociously. All sunny and mild and still up in the aerie though, as I sit down to muse and type. It was spooky at the church today - I stopped in briefly to run through next Sunday's hymns - phew, they're all doable, quite easy, I won't have to practice quite as much as I did (with one) last week. It was so windy and the old wooden church is so creaky and permeable, that I got a little spooked, as if the place were a bit haunted, or someone was coming in, an intruder -- but no, not at all, it was just the wind swirling around the ancient place.

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I responded to a CL ad this morning. The poster, from Amherst, had written in the form of a poem. I haven't heard back, and maybe I don't expect to, so I'll just include it here - in the spirit of 'found art', and my response...

I seek a fellow thinker,
For humor and discussion,
For showing things we've never seen,
For sensual percussion,
For sharing thoughts and dancing spots.
Or having fun, connecting dots. . .
I offer out a counterpart.
On solid grounds with open heart.
With needs refined and ample time,
I humbly do submit,
forever to the end
A solid friend,
A broken trend,
Two lives about to mend

my response....

When a verse such as yours holds such power to charm
A Belle, though not of Amherst, figures – what’s the harm
To respond with lines she hopes will be pleasing
For she too seeks a fellow thinker – her true love - without ceasing.
Alas, distance will prove a formidable barrier
To disjoin us corporeally – so let these words be the carrier
Of warm wishes across Valleys, not just Pioneer - but two
With Berkshires between – beloved mountains! – though in this context - to rue.
So this Belle, of Hudson, lifts pen, and wishes
That Amherst were closer, or gas less dear, rail more expeditious….

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Sweet love, here is another bit of miscellany, recollections of my walk Saturday morning, on the capacious grounds of the magical Persian-inspired estate. It was such an interesting nature walk, mostly focused on wild edibles -- very very healthy, and unprocessed, so long as they're picked at the right time (each plant has its 'moment'), and of course hasn't been doused with chemicals, such as pesticides. I eat quite well, I think -- but I realize -- not well enough - I don't eat any seeds at all, hardly (e.g., pumpkin, sunflower), not so many nuts... I'm realizing what a legacy of incredibly healthy foodstuffs are our birthright in this God-given world... those plants, as food & sustenance, really do have healing properties, in the most profound, holistic sense.

At any rate, at one point in the excursion, the leader (a very very knowledgeable woman of edible plants in the wild - including their lore, practical uses, her own experiences with individual plants, etc., etc. -- the breadth & depth of her knowledge quite astonishing) charged the little motley group to disperse for a few minutes, and for each of us to find a single plant, growing thing, that somehow spoke to us, caused a reaction in us. At one point in our venturing along a gentle woodland trail, a couple of the participants, standing at the edge of a precipice beneath which lay a rippling pond, pointed out the tiniest diminutive wildflower in bloom, that I would never (in my de facto seven-league boots) have noticed. The tiny blooming thing was no bigger than a thimble, a simple white efflorescence, one here, one there, growing out of the wintry brown hard scrabble - like miniature Queen Anne's lace (those large majestically airy heads) -- which always remind me of beautifully-set diamond rings -- so these were -- actually about the size, perhaps, of a diamond ring, simple, ornate, precious, tiny...

So a bunch of us hovered, teetered on the eroding edge of this sharp precipice to admire this tiny miracle of a plant!

I had been struck by that one, and then moments later, when we scattered to lose ourselves in our own explorations of mind meeting nature, I was now attuned to seeing, and looking for, the truly diminutive, easily missed excrescence -- and before I'd taken many steps, was stopped & felled by the most exquisite single wildflower – of a different type - in bloom, on its own tiny exuberant scale, again emerged out of the hardscrabble. I don't know what it is - no one in the group knew - hepatica was one woman's guess - since it wasn't an "edible" it was out of the range of the specialized expertise of the guide...

Later, back at the 'education center,' we were each given some rudimentary art materials to paint an image of the plant that had caught our eye & our imagination. Which was a nice moment, afterward, when we went around in a circle and shared our images. Each one was different! Each person had been struck by some unique detail -- flowering terminal bud on twig, unfurling fern, the fractal complexity of yarrow leaves...

I was happy to see what everyone had managed to depict with really the most frustrating set of overly-basic primary-colored watercolors, pencils... our images didn't approach the sheer perfection and subtlety of the individual plant details that had struck us... and yet our expressions were beautiful, and so diverse, it would have been nice (I wish belatedly) for our images to have been arranged, patchwork-quilt style for a moment, and recorded all together, as a snapshot and rendering of that rare moment, when a number of strangers got together, to appreciate nature, and make a bit of art....

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Sweetheart, I am missing you, and I really need to tweak this, if only to format the images better.... this isn't a perfect, spare, eloquent Cornell box of a post -- it's more like the nature of my messy dresser-drawers...

So I will let this go - and probably I will instantly regret it - in the sense of - oh it would have been better this way - I should have tweaked that

So I'm closing this chest of drawers -- now you've peeked into the jumble of contents within

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Sweet abiding thoughts of you, my dearest

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and I think of you too - who I sense to be about
I hope all is well with you --
despite all