As the bay-wing sang
many thousand years ago
so sang he to-night.
A brother poet
this small gray bird (or bard)
whose muse inspires mine.
One with the rocks and with us.
To be inspired
a thousand years hence –
be in harmony to-day.
See Walden (“I heard a robin in the distance, the first I had heard for many a thousand years, methought, whose note I shall not forget for many a thousand more”); May 23, 1841 ("All nature is a new impression every instant”); August 19, 1851("Nature rests no longer at her culminating point than at any other. If you are not out at the right instant, the summer may go by and you not see it.”); A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, A body awake in the world.; A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, I am a rock
My photos from this time of year show the columbine is already out (in some profusion at that ledge near the view) but I haven’t seen any this year. I asked Jane at the view last night and she speaks of the dryness but says she’s noticed one somewhere near the house. This morning I’m reading Henry‘s account of becoming aware, while otherwise engaged in some sort of work, of the immortal song of the bay wing sparrow -- how it transports him and how a good part of the experience is the reminiscence that the birdsong brings of farmhouses and summer days and sunsets, and how in order to have this experience “1000 years hence”-- this reminiscence and spark of inspiration -- one must be in the moment now.
Musing about all this now walking the dog, I unexpectedly see one ragged little columbine near the path and it brings back a flood of childhood memories when I first discovered this flower and how I felt at the time it was so much a part of me and my summers. This moment now. This columbine by the path-side.
zphx 20220512
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau
"A book, each page written in its own season,
out-of-doors, in its own locality.”
~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2022
No comments:
Post a Comment