Evening Layered Chinook Clouds, Upper 2 Medicines, Glacier National Park

The photograph below, by friend Russ Westlake of Enterprise, Oregon, gives you a picture of my project, WHITEBARKS OF THE WALLOWAS. I'm just recently back down at my Office in happy Eagle Valley processing all the images from a 54-day 2x circumambulation -- on mt bike & on foot -- of the whole of the Eagle Cap Wilderness. Whitebark Pines, as we all know by now, are in trouble. Victims of a hotter, drier climate.

The podcast featured here brings together recent work from a QUARTET of websites I run. Or try to run, anyway. It's a lot of work. And the digital world changes so much more quickly than anything I do in the Natural world, it leaves one feeling a bit dizzy, I'm afraid. Be that as it may, the composite features a header RINGTONE trance music called, TRANSALPINO, followed by a "tre sec, sotto voce" meditation on the ever-increasing violence of the world. From there, it's music, Rilke in English and German, soundscapes, and the best of Dutch poetry I know in new English translations. It ends with an essay on nonviolence. Enjoy! And don't forget:—don't sit around and listen to it in some depressingly lonely, dark, room. Hit the download button, top right. Get it on an mp3 player, and head for the hills! That's what I do!

THE HOUSE OF CULTURE

In the House of Culture, the roof of spirit is always the
first to go. Then the foundation of meaning, left exposed to
wind and rain, soon begins to fragment and crumble. The
walls of learning and education, however, sometimes remain
standing for centuries, reminders of what has been, with their
empty windows starring out into the distance like the unclosed
eyes of the dead. The question we cannot help but ask
ourselves is: “Why did no one take care of the roof?”

NO SUGAR ADDED

“More coffee, honey?”

“You bet.” She wasn’t old enough to be saying

‘honey’ to anybody, let alone me,

but coffee, even of the pale left-over

dishwater variety served like holy water

along roadsides everywhere in the West,

puts me in the mood to be forgiving.

I looked for some sugar to add some taste,

but couldn’t find any.

I admired her lithe movements, running shoes,

darting between the crowded roomful of busy tables

like a fingerling in a clear stream.

“More coffee?”

“You bet.”

It took me the longest time to figure out

that what I saw on the old TV above the bar

wasn’t synched up with the loud music.

Like politicians we elect by force of a lack of choice,

we’re inclined to compose more harmony after they

are safely in office than the disparate facts might

reasonably allow us to assume.

How age does make us experts in the beautiful,

the beautiful flower of youth, which, like the flower itself,

seems so wonderfully unaware of itself, of even

the most vague and remote possibility

that it itself might ever fade.

I like that.

But how the bitter of age makes us see the cracks in a cup.

I admire her crow-black hornrims,

a kind of protection, I suppose,

relics of a past rounded and mellowed by the miracle

of a big band’s sound now playing in the background,

and an impulse to protect the trust

of an innocent smile?

Flower. Honey. Yes. Now I see.

“Yes, please. I’ll have some more.”

I’ve always been slow

to make connections.

THE LITTLE CLAVIER please preview 150 of 631 pages
w/ my black & white photography [opens in new window]

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