and slip back into the waters

hello dear readers!
blue mountains constantly walking is...walking elsewhere. please update your bookmarks/subscriptions/brains/etc. to:
http://ericawatson.wordpress.com

thanks!

once blue is acquired, it eclipses green

When a name for a color is absent from a language, it is usually blue. When a name for a color is indefinite, it is usually green. Ancient Hebrew, Welsh, Vietnamese, and, until recently, Japanese, lack a word for blue. To name the color blue the Assyrians turned uknu, the noun for lapis lazuli, into an adjective. The Icelandic word for blue and black is the same, one word that fits sea, lava, and raven. Goethe's blue is the color of "enchanting nothingness."

-Ellen Meloy

the way light changes in september astounds me, and this year it's been a bright, crisp blue light with sharp-edged shadows like razor blades on the mountains. most of the last two weeks, the sky has been cloudless, the air still and, until recently, relatively warm, though the sun climbs less each day. i spent last week out in the park with c, and on wednesday i climbed most of the mountain usually enveloped in the grant creek wolf closure, south of the road. ice lined the creek at its base, and the tundra was encased in a thick, decisive frost that my feet punched through with a crunching sound until i reached the scree towards the top, frozen into unforgiving steep slopes. (it reminded me of "cinder sledding" on the volcanic mesa near our house in northern AZ as a kid, on days when enough snow fell in town to cancel school, but in the high desert where we lived, it was clear and dry and cold. with a self-righteous sense of recreational justice, i was determined, like my forest-dwelling classmates, to spend the day sledding (it occurs to me now that they were probably just watching TV). i brought my plastic sled up on the cinders, often frozen underneath, and in a sort of pathetic imitation of winter sports, scraped my way downward over bare cinder and rock. i remember ripping the knees of my favorite pair of purple stretch pants.)
i'd forgotten my sunglasses, and the sun obscured my view of the ridgeline above me. my knee hurt. a north wind had risen as i'd walked, and i found myself suddenly uncomfortable with the reduction of color to brown land, blue sky, and very little else. i sat down on a semi-horizontal semi-stable rock outcropping, turned away from the blinding sun peering over the summit, and ate a sandwich. a small group of sandhill cranes flew below me. and then i descended, not feeling defeated so much as abstractly uneasy with the way the sun shone on the mountains. "be careful," c had said as i left toklat on my bike, and i laughed at him, at the idea that i needed warnings about bears, wolves, clumsiness, cold wind. it was difficult to explain that i'd turned back mostly because i was overwhelmed by blue light.
the next day was windy and cold. we drove to wonder lake, and i mostly sat in the truck sketching leafless birch trees and watching for cranes overhead. there were whitecaps on the lake and all the roadside tundra ponds, and we watched the cranes circling, holding steadily in place as they beat their wings against the wind, and then would suddenly give up, abandon their formation, and float backwards with the wind. i was entranced with the apparent futility of it, with the choice, to the extent that migration is a choice, to fly on that particular day, and in this blue light. i fell asleep in the truck, blinded and overdressed, in a gravel pit.
in an essay in the sept. 13 issue of high country news, george sibley writes of the similarities and differences between humans and cranes, suggesting that, perhaps, both species have ceased to evolve, that we've maxed out at evolutionary adolescence:

So there is something that works, sort of--for cranes. I am Homo sapiens sapiens, thinking, thinking about how we might invest our big brains to help ourselves the way we are able to help the cranes. Well, my analogy just cracked, I think; I was about to say "the way we are able to help the cranes invest their big wings in a fundamentally incomprehensible (some might say ridiculous) transcontinental flight to breed in a cold place they won't stay in long before flying back..." Is the adult state of Homo sapiens sapiens going to be something like that? Something that--cranish? It's worked for the cranes for a long time. Does it matter that it's only beautiful?

when c looked at my pictures of those days, he asked about the color filter settings on my camera. but they were just blue days, pure blue. and there wasn't really any way to hide from that.

I cannot expect to know the true names of animals, or how to call them to me, or the proper way to carry their tongues near my heart. What I really want--others confess this longing too--is for the land to possess me, to name me. Thus the compulsion to recite all the names inscribed in the field guides, even though the world does not require me to unscroll the register of names, to labor at Adam's task, to trace the handwriting scrawled across the universe. But I try to remember...a(n) [paraphrased] observation by Northrop Frye: "People spend a lot of time trying to figure out who they are. The real question is not who am I, but where is here?" And so I answer:"

-Sherry Simpson, "Natural History, Or What Happens When We're Not Looking"

go through the ear and to the center where sky is

(written, mostly, on sept. 11, 2010, finished on the 12th because i had some whiskey and had to go to bed.)

A Wished-For Song

You're a song
a wished-for song.

Go through the ear and to the center
where sky is, where wind,
where silent knowing.

Put seeds and cover them.
Blades will sprout
where you do your work.

-Rumi
(originally in Persian. tr. from translations by Coleman Barks)
(courtesy of dan)
----------------------
"well, you know how your politics tend to kind of go latent here, but i do in fact have them," my friend f said a couple years ago. we were talking about latin american justice struggles and globalization, topics which were, at one time, common enough for both of us but the details and urgency of which after a few years at denali had been mentally replaced with excessive knowledge about this years' (and last years', and the year before that) blueberry crop and whose car broke down where. and on anniversaries like this one, i always think of these imagined separations between worlds as we see them, and what, if any, part of my consciousness is suffering at not having actively, visibly protested or campaigned or spoken out against (or for) anything in years. i get those emails from the obama administration telling me to organize a rally in denali national park, and i laugh at the absurdity , though i kind of think people would show up just because it'd be something to do, if there was beer and cookies. i worked the polls on the august 24th elections. it was a great time to catch up and knit with some other marginally-employed women, and it felt like one of the least politicized activities i've done for money all year. bringing some sort of baked good was part of the job description. "the best part of voting!" tw said as he walked out the door holding a slice of m's cranberry bread.
september 11, 2001, was, by all accounts, a beautiful fall day at denali. those few with access to news media formed the grapevine through which that morning's news traveled. a friend who was driving bus in the park told me years ago of trying to decide if and how to break the news to hikers he picked up on the park road, not knowing what meaning the events would have to them in the context of a brilliant blue sky, red and gold subarctic tundra, the alaska range filling the near horizon. what makes something matter? for whatever reason, and it must have been more than the presence of TV, i felt an immediate personal connection to those who died in new york that day, to the people of the vague assemblage of middle eastern countries whose names were tossed around like dice in those first weeks following the attacks, to the voices around the world who knew what could--and did--come of this and spoke against it, and i immediately responded and engaged: shock to rage to empowerment. and i don't know why being 17 in flagstaff, arizona, allowed me to feel those connections more directly, more acutely, than i do now. i try to stay informed, if not active. i boycott certain companies out of habit. i sign online petitions. it's a pathetic form of activism, really, but the immediate world is just so full that the rest of it sometimes fades from sight.
i worked with a woman this summer, m.d., energetic, radical, just out of college. one of my increasingly rare nights at home in my cabin on the hill, i invited her over for wine and kale chips and we talked about revolution, about shifting paradigms and capitalism. she came to me at the perfect time: i needed someone in my life to remind me of these conversations, to bring them into new places, to use words like "hegemony" as she sits in my rocking chair, her dog curled up next to the woodstove. she echoed snyder's words: the most radical thing you can do is stay home. she grew up in fairbanks, and returning home from dartmouth college and seeing the taiga, she said, "it just looks right, you know?"
we talked about subsistence and sustainability, about neo-colonialism, the peace corps, berry picking, monogamy, and the brilliant red of low bush cranberries against lichen in the fall. i lent her the ethical slut and the lay of the land, and she reminded me that idealism and contentedness are not mutually exclusive. she got me thinking again. i want to find somewhere between latency and praxis where, perhaps, these gorgeous subarctic fall days will signal not the distance from the rest of the world but the intense beauty the world can and does contain, where cookies on election day will be a subtle disarming of the political status quo, small scale signs of some kind of sustainable peace.

say night is a house you inherit

2 dogs, half-interested, are watching me. one, old, limping, deaf, lays on her bed near the door. the other, young but not a puppy, sits on the couch where i've repeatedly told him not to be, head flopped over at an unnatural angle, one eye open. it's not my couch and it's not my house and these aren't my dogs, but i'm pretending, and i'm pretty much convinced.
when creating a reality, is there any more to it than that?
the old dog just lifted her head, looked at me, looked at the wall, yawned.
limped to my chair, limped to the door, stands there now, whining.
"it's ok," i say. she can't hear me. but i'm convinced either way.

how it was late, and no one could sleep

l e-c and i just read this poem and wrote for 10 minutes in response to it. my writing follows siken's poem, and l's can be found on her blog.

Scheherazade

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
Until they forget that they are horses.
It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means
we’re inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we’ll never get used to it.
– Richard Siken
----------------------
tell me how the light will fade, with time or distance, so we'll have to make our own, and noon will be anonymous as any other hour. this room has no south-facing windows and i crane my neck to see the moon. it seems unlikely that extremes cancel each other but you tell me they do. i could get used to it, this light, this dark, this room. my dreams have moved in. tradition dictates that i should follow, with all my candles and shadows.

and what we can't forget of other houses

last night, walking down the hill.
and what can i say that li-young lee can't say just a little bit better? read this as an extension of the last entry. or don't.

Our River Now

Say night is a house you inherit,
and in the room in which you hear the sea
declare its countless and successive deaths,
tolling the dimensions of your dying,

you close your eyes and dream
the king's bees build the king's honey
in the furthest reaches of your childhood.
Wouldn't you set your clocks
by that harvest?

And didn't you, a sleepless child
saying to yourself the name
your parents gave you over and over,
hear both the ringing sum of you
such sound accounted for
and all the rest, the dumb
throng of you, that never answered to a word,

that stands even now assembled where
your calling brinks, the unutterable
luring your voice out of its place of rocks
and into a multitude of waters?
But what was it I meant to say?

Something about our beginningless past.
Maybe. Maybe our river, dreaming out loud,
folds story and forgetting.

night is a river bridging the speaking and the listening banks

Discrepencies, Happy and Sad

We've moved into a bigger house.
Now our voices wander among the rooms
calling, Where are you?

And what we can't forget
of other houses confounds us
as we answer back and forth, Over here!

It's a little like returning to the village
where you were born, the sad bewilderment
of discrepencies between
what you remember and what's there.

No. It's more like a memory of heaven.
Voices coming closer, voices moving away,

and what we thought we knew
about life on earth confounding us.

And then that question
from which all the other questions begin.

-Li-Young Lee, Book of My Nights
-------------------------------------
for various reasons involving doctor's appointments, a broken down front end loader, and a 3 year old's birthday party that lasted later than i expected, combined with what has become my weekly migratory routine, this is the first night in 12 that i've been home in the cabin on the hill. somewhere around day 8 i broke down in tears because i missed the sound of the river as you drop down the bluff away from the soundscape ruled by the highway and the airstrip, the pots on the woodstove, every little scrap of paper taped to the log walls and loaded with significance, and that here, when the power goes out, it doesn't really make much difference. a few weeks ago, i was talking to one of this cabin's many former renters at a bluegrass festival. he may have been flirting with me, and i may have been enjoying it, and he said "yeah, i wasn't too into that place, it was kind of a pain in the ass living there," and i stiffened, said "it was nice talking to you," and quickly moved on.
i'm asserting myself at the other place too, in subtle and not subtle ways, but what i'm getting at is that choices are hard. there are so many ways of feeling "at home" and i'm finding that it's impossible to have them all at once. "houses confound us."