October already! Aspen have turned golden and dropped leaves already in the mountains. Cottonwoods are bright yellow here in the suburbs. The breeze stays blessedly cool even as the sun heats up.
Two new and different items in this month's Seeker. Thomas Acampora, a high school senior from New York City, is authoring a column called "Reflections in a Blind Eye" in which he plans to offer thoughts on the nature of life. He's on the debate team, helps edit the school magazine, sings in the choral group, and otherwise overworks the computer late at night. Please welcome him.
One of my co-workers at The Wilderness Society wrote a piece about the value of wilderness...or nothing... and sent it out to the folks from TWS who went to the Yale Conference on the Go(o)d in Nature and Humanity that I wrote about last June. I liked his line of thought and the way he attacked it, and asked if I could share it with Seeker readers. It's somewhat different from the usual since he's an economist with a wicked sense of humor.
He and several other TWS staff people from the east came out to a Wilderness 2000 conference held here in Denver. Afterwards about a dozen of us went car-camping in a beautiful piece of the landscape, which energized my creativity, since I was one of the fortunate participants in the camping adventure.
I met another new-to-Seeker writer in the "anti-career" emails, when I read her brief description of her life in one day's posting and invited her to elaborate a bit on it. Brenda Wentworth's "Dark Night" is one person's searching. Then, as I was working on Seeker this weekend, I got an email from a writer who has some insight into what Brenda seems to be searching for. M. Tamar's "Surprise Yourself" may help jumpstart your creativity.
The pond behind the College Hill Library hosted a great blue heron and a kingfisher today, searching for frogs and fish. And a coyote watched me before retreating into the field beyond the official open space area...the field that seems to be sprouting a few orange stakes.
I'll leave you with:
THE HERON
a huge shadow crossing the lawn
spoke of a great blue heron silently flapping overhead
so huge a bird in the sky
with curved neck and spiked beak and trailing legs
tall in the still pond
silent fishers and froggers
whose wings from tip to tip are longer than a tall child
whose steady wing-flaps follow a straight line from river to pond
and stout body withstands the wind's buffets to stay on course
not tossed about like crows
(June 1996)
Peace...think it, dream it, live it,
Cherie