Winter 2012 .

Volume 3 Issue 2
2
Writen River is a literary journal published by Hiraeth Press which focuses
on poetry and non-fction prose exploring nature and our relationship to it.
Published quarterly in digital format, we strive to encourage the discipline
of eco-poetics and return the voice of the poet to the body of the Earth.
Eco-poetics is poetry in which the energy of the ecosystem fows through
the poem, creating a writen river of words which ebbs with the creativity
of the entire Earth commun ity. Writen River marks the confuence of many
streams and many voices as they fow back into the nourishing ground of the
watershed.
Founding Editors
Jason Kirkey
L.M. Browning
Editor
J. Kay MacCormack
Issue Design
Jason Kirkey
Cover Art
Miya Ando
Writen River is published by Hiraeth Press.
Hiraeth Press is a pub lisher with a mis sion.Poetry is the lan guage of the
Earth not just poems but the slow fap of a herons wings across the sky,
the light ning of its beak hunting in the shallow water; autumn leaves and the
smooth course of water over stones and gravel. Tese, as much as poems,
com mu ni cate the being and meaning of things. Our pub li ca tions are all po-
etry, whether they are poems or non fc tion, and refect the ideal that falling
in love with the Earth is nothing short of rev o lu tionary and that through our
rela tion ship to wild nature we can birth a more enlight ened vision of life for
the future. We are pas sionate about poetry as a means of returning the hu-
man voice to the poly phonic chorus of the wild.
We pub lish a range of poetry and non fc tion ded i cated to exploring our rela-
tion ship with the earth. Our titles refect our mis sion to par tic i pate in the re-
creation of our cul ture in full par tic i pa tion with the earth com mu nity. Our
non fc tion titles rep re sent a diver sity of per spec tives on the topic of ecology,
spir i tu ality, and place- based lit er a ture. Each of our poetry col lec tions, in their
own way, ask what use are poets in times of need? answering in voices of riv-
ers and stones. Our books are food: come browse our col lec tion and nourish
your self.
Winter 2012 . Volume 3 Issue 2
Writen River accepts unsolicited submissions. Our
Journal primarily publishes poetry (any form as long
as the verse is theme-relevant), nonfction, (essays, au-
tobiographical stories, and travel writing), interviews
and book reviews.
Please send a short cover leter, biographical statement
and a Microsof Word document (.doc or .docx) at-
tachment of:
Up to 5 poems not exceeding 15 pages. Please
send a query leter and an excerpt if you would like a
long form poem to be considered.
Nonfction work of 5000 words or less.
We prefer electronic submissions. Tis is currently our
only method of accepting submissions. Please use the
submission form on our website at: www.hiraethpress.
com/writen-river. We review submissions afer the
deadline has passed so please be patient if you submit
early.
Submited works should be previously unpublished.
We are open to publishing a limited number of po-
ems/essays may have appeared in print or online, but
the author must hold sole rights to the work. We do
accept original artwork/photographs. We request that
images be scanned with a resolution of at least 300 dpi.
Simultaneous submissions are permited; however, we
ask to be notifed promptly if your submited work is
accepted elsewhere.
note: If your work is seasonally themed you should
consider our issue deadlines below.
Writen River Submission Deadlines
Winter Issue: October 20th
Summer Issue: April 20th
submission guidelines
3
contents
5 Leter from the Editor
6 Touching the Burning Infnite Light
Feature Interview
12 Sipping Tea in the Pure Land
What is Zen Really Like?
Where I Am Most At Home
What Is
Old Mountain
14 Scarecrow
New Shoots
Musan Cho Oh-hyun (trans. Heinz Insu Fenkl)
15 Coastal Rainforest Silhouetes
Scot T. Starbuck
16 Te Pond Has Clear Imaginings
Autumn at Itako
17 Te Pond is as Small as a Prayer
Martin Willits Jr.
18 Blue Heron
A Rock
19 Aging
Jesse LoVasco
20 Te World as I Found It
Martin Burke
24 From one astray, seeking soul-stice
Erynn Rowan Laurie
25 Te Grass Holds the Afernoon Together
26 Song for Hidden Shorebirds and Grass
Confuence
Te Upper Meadow
Joel Long
30 . . . or night.
. . . nothing else.
J.K. McDowell
30 Nooya Lake, Misty Fiords
31 Full Moon While Flying dfw
(Dallas Fort Worth) To Richmond
Diana Woodcock
34 Spring Tide
Christine Waresak
36 Stewardship
Genevieve Leet
38 Wild Netle
Lesson #1: How to Listen to a Bird Sing
Laurence Holden
41 Autumn window no. 3:
Vulpes Fulva, Key of Bfat
Deer Has Full Tail: New Moon
Carved of Cedar
Gwendolyn Morgan
42 Tin Ice
45 Whooo
Jamie K. Reaser
48 Te Nothing Here
Tyra Olstad
49 Trees
River
Brendan Sullivan
50 When It Does Not Increase
Nicole Parizeau
51 Fox
Vine
Michael Bazzet
52 Coopers' Hawk Caught
in the Library of Congress
53 Yosemite Phenomena Never Seen By Muir
Daniel Williams
54 Joshua Tree, California
Colin Dodds
55 Falling Forward
Teodosia Henney
57 Where Tere Are No Roads,
Te Road Not Taken
Laura Story Johnson
59 Preview of Creatively Maladjusted
Teodore Richards
60 Contributors
4
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14
15
17
19
24
26
28
32
35
36
37
38
40
44
48
51
52
41
55
56
Photography and other art by
Genevieve Leet, Jamie. K. Reaser,
Angeliki Savvantoglou, Russel Streur,
and Pamela Petro.
See pages for photo credits.
4Photo A. Savvantoglou
5
Letter from the Editor
I
step out of the house into the Solstice night. My mind is full of my grandfathers recent death, anxiety
about the future, and many unanswered questions. Clouds veil the crystalline stars. Tere is no clarity. But I know
what I must do. I crave the woods. Entering the small swathe of pin oak, Quercus palustris, behind the house, I setle on
a log. Toughts cluter within me. Taking a deep breath, for the frst time I notice a sharpness in the air. It pierces my
inner haze, causing me to pause. Ten Rilkes lines run through my head:
If we surrendered
to earths intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.
Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.
. . .
Tis is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
His words wash through me, and without thinking, I fnd myself sinking to the forest foor, legs sliding under a
thick layer of oak leaves. Te earth is so solid, holding me. I can smell that oak smell, the moist decay of humus, and the
dormant sleep of litle seeds. I can smell winter in the wind, but the cold thrills me, reminds me that Im alive. I shiver.
Ten I see it. Mist. Its like a living creature, curling and gliding around the smooth sapling bark and dead winter twigs.
It feels like Ive never seen mist before. It is so fesh, so real, so alive. Tats when I realize that the woods are singing. It
may be the bleak midwinter, but down here, amidst soil and leaves and stones, I hear a hum, as branches shiver in the
wind, and litle crunching noises rise from amongst the acorns and hickory nuts. I hear a bird cry, as though startled. I
hear sof animal breathingin and out. Its my own. Everything has slowed down. I lay there, burrowed like a squirrel
in the red brown oak leaves, and imagine that I am snow melting into the ground. Breath rises and mingles with the
mist. And then, looking up through the laticed arboreal ceiling, I notice the frst glimmer of stars.
Dogen said, When you fnd your place where you are, practice occurs. In this winter issue of Writen River, weve
interviewed Miya Ando, whose artwork marries together the spaciousness of meditative practice with a sensitivity to
nature and place. Each place has its own special quality, yet psychology shows us how easily we become habituated, our
senses dulled to the aliveness unfolding around us.
Eco-poetics is not just about celebrating the earth or exposing the short-sightedness of industrialism. Eco-poetics
for us is about practice. Its about the words slipping of the page and running through your body and heart like a
rivera writen river. Its about shifing our everyday perceptions. Tat tree outside your window isnt just a tree. Tere
is no other tree in the world exactly like it. And there is no other place in the world exactly like the one you currently sit,
breathe, and inhabit. Eco-poetry then is about directness, about cuting through the haze of our over-crowded, dulled
sensory experiences to revise and revision our relationship with place, bioregion and earth. Eco-poetry, as a practice,
can shif our perceptions of the world from hackneyed habit to honored habitat. Be where you are, wherever you are:
indoors, outdoors, wilderness, suburb or inner city. Waking up to where you are, however beautiful or painfulthat is
the way our world can change. It all just takes . . . practice.
With mono no aware,*
Jenn

* A Japanese word. See page 7, this issue.
6
Touching the Burning Infnite Light
the art of miya ando
7
W
e live in a high velocity, technocratic, and a (sometimes)
loud and harsh world. It is a world increasingly charac-
terized by violence, environmental degradation, psychological
stress, cultural marginalization, urban anonymity, and a mind-
numbing overload of digital imagery and information. Living
within such conditions can have a detrimental impact upon the
human psyche. Under such duress, arta universal human lean-
ing shared across all culturescan serve as
a salve for the heart-mind.
Art, both East and West, ancient and
modern, causes us to pause, to contemplate,
to returnif for just a momentto a slow-
er, more natural rhythm. Art also invokes
experience, specifcally within the inner life
of the viewer. When that art isby its very
naturespacious, contemplative, minimal-
ist, and evocatively mind-like, the viewer is
naturally invited into a meditative process.
Terein lies healing and illumination.
With such art-making, and within such
art-viewing, a person may even experience
a sudden fash of deeper spiritual insight.
Tis is one of the key features of what the
late Tibetan meditation master Chogyam
Trungpa called Dharma art; and, this was
my own experience the frst time I saw the
art featured in this article. With my frst
glance, something elemental and primordial reached out to me.
Te year was 2010. I dont recall what I was looking for on
Google, but as my eyes scanned the smorgasbord of images be-
fore me, I saw a photograph that suddenly stopped me dead in
my tracks. Without knowing anything about the artist, I imme-
diately utered the phrase, Mono no aware (pronounced mono,
no, ahwahray)a Zen-infuenced literary concept frst coined
by Japanese scholar and philosopher Motoori Norinaga (1730-
1831).
Mono no aware does not translate very easily into English. Lan-
guages are diferent because diferent cultures think and concep-
tualize diferently. Yet, there is a universal human realm that con-
nects us all and that is the realm of emotion; and, it is on that level
that mono no aware gently fows in.
Some of the most widely accepted phrases used to commu-
nicate this deeply spiritual and aesthetic Japanese term suggest
that it means an empathy toward things, a sensitivity to ephemera,
awareness of impermanence, or a deeply felt comprehension of the
transience of all phenomena. Even more so, what the term truly
points to is the resulting tender feelings, including gratitude for
the preciousness of things and the melancholic sadness that can
result from having such a stark and precise perception of that all
things will eventually pass from existence.
As I gazed at some of the images you now see placed like step-
ping stones before you, I realized that many of these pieces stirred
memories in me of landscapes Ive wan-
dered through; horizon lines I have looked
out at while meditating near a shoreline, or
mountain ranges that are dear to my heart.
Still other images conjured pure emotion,
washing me in a haunting atmosphere I was
unable to articulate with words. In all cases,
something about this artists work has a
strong sense of mono no aware and seem to
invokein visual formsomething of the
kensho-experience (sudden illumination)
of Chan/Zen, or a quality of wabi-sabi
another term from the Japanese tradition
of aesthetics, which suggests beauty shining
through a rustic sense of minimalism and sim-
plicity.
It is no accident, then, that I frst reached
for contemplative and aesthetic terms from
the Japanese tradition to describe these
works. As it just so happens, the artist is
versed in an understanding of these terms, both from an intellec-
tual point of view and as an internal experience as an artist.
Miya Ando is part-Japanese, part-Russian, and the direct de-
scendant of Bizen samurai sword maker Ando Yoshiro Masakatsu.
She was raised in Japan by sword smiths-turned Buddhist priests,
and grew up in a Nichiren temple in Okayama, Japan. Afer her
early years in Japan, another phase of Miyas childhood was spent
in the misty redwood forests around Santa Cruz, California.
Friends, all is burning.
Shakyamuni Buddha,
Te Fire Sermon, Samyuta Nikaya Sutra
Nichiren Buddhism (: Nichiren-kei sho shha) is
a branch of Mahayana Buddhism rooted in the teachings of a 13th
century Japanese Buddhist named Nichiren (12221282). Nichiren
Buddhism emphasizes Te Lotus Sutra, which teaches that all people
have an innate Buddha nature and capable of ataining enlightenment
in their current form and present lifetime. Part of their practices in-
volve the recitation of the Namu Myoho Renge Kyo, I Take Refuge in
the Great Law of the Sutra of the Lotus, which can also be translated
as In the Name of the Great Mystery of Life, as expressed by the Lo-
tus Sutra.
8
Now, Ando lives in New York City, where sheto a large de-
greecontinues working with the materials of her ancestors;
namely, steel. However, rather than fring, pounding, bending,
and shaping the steel into swords, she uses steel, pigment, brush-
es, and the fre of a blowtorch to express her artistic vision in con-
temporary forms.
I had the opportunity to connect with Miya to discuss her
background, her artistry, and some of the themes and infuences
that fnd their way into her work.
WR: Writen River
MA: Miya Ando
WR: You have a compelling lineage, Miya; both the fact that you
were raised in a Nichiren temple, and that you are a descendent of
swordmakers that carried on samurai tradition. From the point of
view of cultural and spiritual identity and consciousness, how do
these energetic forces infuence you on a day-to-day basis?
MA: My exposure to Buddhism occurred very early. Since I was
a child, Buddhism has made a strong impact on my perception of
the world, as well as my art practice. I feel a deep af nity to the
Japanese word otonashii (Quiet). It is from a place of deep quiet
that I create, and it is a place of deep quiet and refection that I
invite people to visit through my art.
Te other half of my childhood was spent living in a redwood
forest in Northern California, completely surrounded in nature,
miles from the nearest store or gas station. I consider this exper-
ience to be equally infuential and complementary to my time
living in Japan. Tey are very diferent countries and cultures,
but each place and each culture has ofered something to me. As
a result, I now see that the practice of harmonizing and fnding
beauty in disparate things has become an artistic and philosophi-
cal pursuit. Simple forms and non-denominationalism interests
me greatly.
WR: Your spiritual and cultural roots are undoubtedly an import-
ant part of who you are. What is your artistic lineageyour men-
tors, your infuences, and the fgures from the past that inspire
you?
MA: My Japanese grandparents, with whom I lived, have always
been my moral compass. My grandfather was head priest of our
temple, but also my caretaker. Te connection of family and reli-
gion has been signifcant in my life and have drawn me to make
certain choices in my artistic expression.
Let the mind fow freely
without dwelling on anything.
Te Diamond Sutra
9
WR: Due to your Japanese and Buddhist roots, the tendency of
some could be to pigeonhole your work as modern Japanese art
or contemporary Buddhist art. I want to resist that because your
work stands on its own as a captivating and unique manifestation.
At the same time, the links with your ancestral background are
undeniable. To what degree do certain principles of Japanese and
Zen aesthetics infuence your work such as wabi, sabi, wabi-sabi,
mono no aware, etc.?
MA: I have been strongly infuenced by the philosophy and aes-
thetics of Zen reductivism. I appreciate very much the idea of par-
ing away all except that which is essential and I seek this also in
my thinking and execution of my work. Mono no aware is a won-
derful concept. I have been investigating the idea that all things in
life are ephemeral and transitory and this force, being universal,
has always been a subject mater of my work. Hakanai (feeting)
is one of my favorite words and is a feature of some of my install-
ations.
WR: Tere is a phrase I have heard that: Some Japanese are
Budd hist, but all Japanese are Shinto. What is your own relation-
ship to the kami and how do the ancient nature-honoring tradi-
tions of Shinto infuence you and your own relationship to nature,
the elements, and the seasons?
MA: In my childhood, living in the redwoods in Santa Cruz, I had
a particularly close relationship with nature. Tis, coupled with
my experiences in Japan, and being exposed to a culture that has
such a deep respect and reverence for nature, has been a strong
infuence on my being and also my pursuits as an artist.
I have always loved the Shinto idea that stones, trees, mountains
and natural forces such as wind are sacred. When I was a child
and learned that Shimenawa meant that there was a spirit present
inside of a particular tree or stone, I was delighted beyond belief.
(note: Te shimenawa is a large braided rice straw rope placed
around certain holy trees, stones or above archways around Shin-
to temples).
Seeing the spiritual power of nature and natural forces myself, it
makes perfect sense to me that Shinto would recognize and make
sacred these forces. I have such a respect for the Japanese aware-
ness and sensitivity and adoration of nature. Its really ubiquitous
in Japan, from the architecture that allows one to live with nature,
to interior design elements like the tokonoma (a recessed alcove
in traditional Japanese homes and teahouses), which is a place
to display fowers and scrolls for that particular season. Te at-
tunement to nature and harmonizing with nature is really second
nature to me, personally, but as an artist I also fnd it as an inspira-
tional theme in my work.
WR: On that note, something we learn from your biography is
that you divide your time between the quiet, pristine environs of
the redwood forests around Santa Cruz and the vibrant pulse of
New York City. How do the distinct energies of these places infu-
ence you as a person and an artist?
MA: I lived in California when I was a child. Now I am based in
New York full-time. Santa Cruz is like Japan in that respect for me.
Tey are both flled withstrong, beautiful memories and they are
both in my heart wherever I am. I think otonashii, quiet, is inside
the self; it doesnt truly mater what the surroundings are.
WR: Are there other places to which you feel an exceedingly
profound connection? If so, what makes the spirit of these places
particularly important to you on the level of your heart-mind?
Im thinking of how Basho, the wandering haiku master, had a
deep connection to a stretch of land near Natagiri Pass, which he
explores in his various travel journals, Narrow Road to the Inte-
rior; and also some of the other spiritual-creatives of Japan felt
a deep relationship to a specifc place which they nurtured, and
which nurtured them; like the Zen hermit, poet and wisdom
clown Rykan Daigu (Great Fool) who felt a deep afnity to
the bamboo and hardwood forests around his hut Gogo-an, or
the crazy wisdom Zen master Ikkyu, who frst developed the
Japanese tea ceremony, or the poter, painter, poet, and martial
artist Rengetsu (Lotus Moon)
MA: Yes, the redwood forests still are the most magical to me. I
was just in Santa Cruz flming for a documentary that the flm-
10
maker L. Young is making about my work. Te forests are so com-
fortable to me. Every time I return, it takes my breath away. Te
fog and mist, in particular, is magical and mystical to me. Tat
said, I also have a strong af nity to Miyajima, which is near where
I lived in Japan. Tere are torii everywhere (red gates associated
with Shinto shrines that signify moving from the profane to the
sacred). It is such a spiritual place to me, and for many Japanese
people.
WR: One of your most well known installations is the 9/11
Mem orial in London, commissioned by the 9/11 London Proj-
ect Foundation as a permanent addition in England. Crafed from
polished World Trade Center steel from Ground Zero and the
9/11 atacks, you were actually given the opportunity to create a
piece of sculpture from the rubble.
What was your own personal experience of 9/11 and what was
your experience on the artistic and emotional level working on
the 9/11 Memorial in London?
MA: Creating the piece for 9/11 was very taxing on an emotional
level for me. I worked for two years on the monument and the
entire time I kept praying that I make something that had rever-
ence for the victims. I prayed that I was able to make something
that was respectful. My concept was simple; to polish to a mirror
fnish the World Trade Center steel. My hope was to create some-
thing non-denominational and put forth light into the world. So,
I made a highly refective piece.
WR: One of your most recent installations, commissioned by the
Fist Art Foundation, is called Obon (Puerto Rico). It also deals
with the theme of light. Share with us the initial inspiration of this
site-specifc, large-scale exploration.
MA: I was inspired by the ceremony of Obon, which occurs in
August in Japan. Te belief is that ones departed relatives return
to the home for 3 days. On the third day, the spirits return to the
spirit world and small boats with candles are foated down rivers
and bodies of water. I have always loved Obon, in that it is about
respect and memory.
WR: Seeing the images of the long strand of leaves, each emiting
an eerie luminous blue glow, I had my own association of a blue
spirit road of the ancestors. Truly fascinating. Share with us a bit
more about the materials you used, as it is a defnite departure
from your use of steel and metals of various kinds.
MA: For Obon (Puerto Rico), I wanted to create something
in Puerto Rico which introduced some of the ideas surrounding
the theme of the tradition of Obon, but I also wanted to create
this using unexpected forms and materials. So, I used phosphor-
escence instead of candles because the phosphorescence absorbs
light from its surroundings and emits a glow continuously. I love
the idea of a sustainable light source and I have had interest in
light as part of my vocabulary as an artist for quite some time.
Also, I used leaves from the tree known as Ficus religiosa, which is
11
the type of tree, sometimes called the Bodhi Tree, under which
Buddha atained enlightenment.
WR: So, there is the theme of light again; the lights of the an-
cestral festival of Obon, the light of Buddhas enlightenment, and
the phosphorescence or light of nature. Its not only wonderful,
artistically, I like how it really is a teaching for the eyes to behold
but communicated on levels that are more visceral and primor-
dial rather than rational.
So, what is next in the luminous, light-flled world of Miya Ando?
Do you have any specifc upcoming shows or gallery openings
you would like to tell people about? From an artistic always-in-
process point of view, what is stirring for you as far as inspira-
tions, directions, and possible creative expressions?
MA: I am currently in the studio working on pieces for a solo
exhibition at Sundaram Tagore Gallery next spring. Te work is
inspired by my continued interest in states of transformation.
WR: Tank you, Miya, for your work and the light you are shining
into the world.
To learn more about the work of Miya Ando, visit her website:
htp://miyaando.com, her Facebook page: htp://facebook.
com/MiyaAndo, her Twiter stream: htp://twiter.com/mi-
yando, her artist profle at the David Lynch Foundation, hosted
on YouTube: htp://youtu.be/oJlVHY8OHqI, or visit her gallery
showings and other appearances in the following:
Sculpture Magazine, Fall 2012 issue
Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Miami, June 2013, Solo Exhibition
Bronx Museum Biennial, New York, June 2013
ArtPulse Magazine, Fall 2012: Review of Obon [Puerto Rico]
Old Mountain (Ch: Lo Shn, J: Kozan) is an American-born
poet, part-time Zen hermit, and full-time follower of Te Way.
His interests include soaking in hot springs, drinking tea and sake,
walking, and napping-meditation in that order. Currently on his
reading list are: Sky Above, Great Wind: Te Life and Poetry of Zen
Master Ryokan by Kazuaki Tanahashi and Master of the Tree Ways
by Hung Ying-ming. Currently on a retreat from digital media, he
can sometimes be reached at: bodhiyatra@gmail.com
All photos L. Young except where otherwise noted.
12
Old Mountain
Sipping Tea in the Pure Land
Bird song, waterfall
Hot tea poured in the mountains.
Nothing else needed.
Where I Am Most At Home
Quiet autumn day.
Pines swaying neath a gray sky
Sak at sunset.
What is Zen Really Like?
Zen is what Zen is.
It is not like anything.
Outside, Inside, One.
What Is
Whats the greater fraud?
What is? Or your idea
of how things should be?
13
Photo Russell Streur
14
Musan Cho Oh-hyun
translations by Heinz Insu Fenkl
Scarecrow
He waves at the passing age,
At the man walking by
Tis scarecrow, laboring with a smile
A year of bounty, or a famine year,
Take a walk along the paddy dikes
Mine, yours
See the feld, the autumn wind?
Not a sole possession, yet I, too, a smiling scarecrow
Is what they say I am,
But clear my mind, spread my two arms wide, and
Everything, even the skyall just a single step away
New Shoots
Te sky, the eyes light, open once more at the point of breath,
An ember born again where a stars light glanced
Today, at last, the green waves of May come surging again
Photo Genevieve Leet
15
Scot T. Starbuck
Coastal Rain Forest Silhouetes
We could teach the boy what we know about fshing
but it will be more fun, for him and us,
if we watch him in silence behind these trees.
He will fall through deadwood, scrape face on devils club,
lose footing on river stones,
and eventually land a gasping salmon.
His shout will echo in old growth.
He will eat red fesh with a pleasure he has never known.
He will be a silhouete like us soon enough.
Photo Russell Streur
16
Martin Willits Jr.
Tis Pond Has Clear Imaginings
It wants to empty itself
of all earthly concern, to reach
an unique, passing insight,
a clarity, unspoiled by carp or
freckled tadpole, splaying across
the water in long, lingering, laziness,
it wants more of itself, more purity
of the divine, the inspired,
to be thoughtful and thought-provoking,
to twingle when disturbed, to blush
when refecting upon sunrise,
to stand perfect as a heron becoming light,
it wants seven impossible things
before waking, it yawns serenely,
it holds its own breathlessness
Autumn at Itako
Based on a woodblock by Kawase Hasui
Note: Itako are blind shaman
Our boat of ghostly rains merges deliberately
into a stream of darkness. It is a song
of setling-down. Te kind a mother coos to her baby.
Te river is messaged and its skin ripples.
Te moon light is a part of this song.
Noise whispers across water as a dwindling star.
Let go of the oars. Let them slip into the evening,
and trust that you will be taken somewhere.
Anything else is ripples that fade into nothingness.
Te oar is already into the lost. You are barely moving
and yet you are moving, like a mother swaddling a child
into a blanket of clustered stars.
What is the diference, when you are so loved,
that the wrapping takes the length of a song, and not less?
Te songs cross a lake with the same current as moon light.
When we grow older our songs unravels it wrappings,
the boat lists, the stars are further from our cupped hands,
but our whisper is a mosquito heard in the absence of a lake.
What startling secret can you let drive in stilled water?
When a distant voice calls for you to come home,
will you answer that plaintive cry?
17
Te Pond Is As Small As a Prayer
Too small for discovery
or ruin, barely more than a bears snout
unexpected and forgoten
and lef to its own conclusions
the smallness of it all,
protected by an amulet of blue light
something to singe the tongue
if spoken
it could remain undisturbed
in forever hibernation
it could keep its prayers to itself
and remain radiant
only a whisper
inside.
Photo Genevieve Leet
18
Jesse LoVasco
Blue Heron
I spoted her on the stone that sat beneath the willows,
pruning her slate gray feathers like an old queen,
sliding her beak down the creases of her satin gown.
I was eating an apple
still and quiet
except for the crunch,
leting the wind roll my kayak in on the water.
Bending low she listened, tilting her head,
discerning whether my slow approach
was a threat. I had entered her parlor, where privacy
was the treasure of her existence.
Could she sneak a bite of fsh in the mauve milk weed
and goldenrod she was moving through?
Several times she pecked and swallowed something small.
I followed the lump in her throat roll down like a snail.
I gave a thoughtful glance to a dragonfy zig zagging
a kingfsher swooping low,
and a mallard duck gliding by,
but returned my gaze to the heron and her regal gestures .
Rolled in on a wave to the edge of her boundary.
Te invisible cords were severed.
She ducked
and opened her great stretch of wing toward the sky
as she painted a low slow stroke to circle me,
take a closer look at the intruder,
to see if I was ofering my core.
A Rock
Tis rock is part of
a wall
surrounding a stone tower.
Shall I sit on it,
scrape
the fowering carpet or
bend down close,
see
how many small forests
it has fostered in this
miniature world?
Perhaps they are
stars
and this rock is a planet,
shall I look for the
moon?
How many ways does
creation
tell its story?
How many things
die
before they are known?
19
Aging
Growing old,
Te memories of youth are holding on
like a spring shoot on a dried out tree.
Te number of years doesnt equate
with the behavior.
Im a seasoned woman,
expected to know.
Fold the napkins just so,
atend social events,
wear elegant clothes,
pour sweet wine in crystal and sip slow.
Instead, I scavenge the hills
and hollows, crawl
on earths dark mud
to gather lichen and pinecones,
seeds, nuts and sticks,
remnants of the blowing wind.
Wrap the long wool scarf
around my neck,
marry the wilderness.
Photo Genevieve Leet
20
Martin Burke
i.m. David Gascoyne
To build up, not pull down
To be makers, not destroyers
1
Te house is silent, the world is mine.
Rain atempts no dialogue yet speaks incessantly to the world.
My ownership is fctive but even the not-real sustains me
Not again loneliness but over-simplifcation.
Only the world at its best approaches the purity of this moment
In a way nothing I do ever will. Te house is silent, the world is mine:
My ownership tells me this is the Buddhas poverty.
2
Like that
Blue sky and the hard sheen of the river
And the skys glance in the river
Hold it
And hold to it
And do not take your eye from it
Where what it is given
Must be received
And imparted in waters tradition
And
Two drawings which say
Tis is the way the world is
And this is how you should see it
And I see it both ways
And see no contradiction
Clarity in the wind
And clarity in a charcoal stroke
And clarity, hopefully, in a spoken word
Tat the not-spoken be spoken
Te not-seen be seen
Without embellishment
Just blue sky on the rivers sheen
Composing a minds tabula rasa
Te World as I Found It
Te river assuming my gaze
And holding me to the conclusion
Conclusion?
Tere is no conclusion
Where the gist of my shadow
Is absorbed in the rivers steady sheen
And I in its tide towards

And then it was December

Walking the hard-packed leaf-mould paths
Of Lappersfort wood
Where the intention was to be a maker
Not a destroyer; to, countermand the ice
And honor the solstice light
Tat its mark might be upon us
And make a strong song. And Marcus like a troubadour
Calling to that green life underneath the ice
Tat the suns eclipse be undone. To be makers
Not destroyers; that summer fnd its solstice honored
And its mark be on our minds that we might forge
A new tradition.
When was it diferent?
When did I not acknowledge Shivas dance as my own?
3
To winnow the air for its seeds of light
To usher in by such the verbs of living
Afermath of rain in a sunlit square
Birds scatered as we approached
Ten returned to feed from our hands
Gent in the shadows of evening
Te world like a hammer striking the gong of the mind
And the sound-waves making new formations
Assembling a moment which said
Whatever you say next will speak me
And speak it does
21
Becoming an inheritance without preconditions
Where everything said winnow the air and remake me
And the only transgression is not to begin
Nor confess that such is beautiful and imbuing.
And the river saying follow and my shadow saying I will
Until I could not tell one from the other
Unless I know what this river knows no day will ever be mine.
4
Can it be told all of it, or part of it
In the truth of it as I know it-
Words with the fre of a comets fre-tail
With shards and shrapnel from the sky
Burning my lips
As I waken to a world the I Ching says
Is generous under heaven
And hyacinth, gladioli and chrysanthemum proclaim
As the land of expectation and fulfllment
Te world is its own otherness
Target held in a hunters eye
Or that of a weaver working lissome moments to a thread
Tat I might live this moment
So as to live beyond it
Where the dark is no more than that absence in which
Adam waits for Blake
And not even a doodled page irrelevant to the day;
Like a gap in a stone wall leading to a tree
Where if I am an intruder I am so at the trees bidding
Which does not begrudge the pilfered leaf
I dip in ink to write with
So that it be told without alteration to the world
Outranking the clipped dialects of critic, theorist
Bored practitioner of un-expecting expectation,
Of looking the others way
When it is the other cheek which should be ofered;
For it is April and the world surprises me again
Where if Blake be denied what can be af rmed
Where stars, friendship, and begeting words confrm
We were not born for fear.
Tus before I know which word to speak
I must forget the lessons of priests
And if I come with apples in August
What can I bring in December?
And winters ice no longer webbing the grass
And her hand resting on my hand
And moonlight shuddering at the frst of many ecstasies.
And I will enter your heart like a thief of hearts
Where moon afer moon, unappeased like a moon-drinker
My purpose will be to have no purpose
Nor need to justify myself to history.
Sweetly
Oh sweetly
Only fre-blessed lips could sing it
Words infltrating wasteland and border
For which if mistakes have been made
Who has not made them
And who can cast the frst stone
Where brotherhood is essential and not at all fragile?
Hail brother Adam
Newly come to the world teachers hesitate to enter
As if Breughel wove it clear and steady
By which they fear their undoing
As spring undoes winter
And a word the connivance of silence
And all be there dust and ash
And splintered verbs and britle mouths
Yet the lyric maintains its sure cadence
Which in many a voice is pleasing.
Listen:
Even the wind is atentive,
Te stillness of water not at all unbecoming,
Te breath of spring has begun its frst canticle
Soon to be a cantata.
Tat music yeast of new weather
And by the river-bank walk
More walkers than I counted yesterday
And for this which the world gives with largess
What can I give in return
When nothing can be given
Which the world has not already given of itself
Tat I winnow the air for its seeds of light
To usher in by such the verbs of living.
5
To make a painting is to make love to the wind
Is to make an occasion of grace from circumstance
To say to the future that the present existed
So, as the wind curls in from the sea
I see that nothing has changed and nothing will
It is always the light which astounds us
22
24
Erynn Rowan Laurie
From one astray, seeking soul-stice
Cascades behind me
Olympics before me
facing west to the seting sun
Kulshan my right
Tahoma my lef
Grandfather Snow-Face
glacier crowned
below me mountain ridge
above me all the sky
peak spirits
stone spirits
spirits of mountains
I ofer cedar, cedar and smoke
ofer salmon ofer rice
ofer pure clear water
mountains sound
range round me
steep face of protection
keep strong lest destruction
throw down the worlds
before me behind me
my right and my lef
below me mountain ridge
above me all the sky
22
23
ir\ ro. i.urii
.v.ii.rii o irox
|+:|| r:ss
24
Joel Long
Te Grass Holds the Afernoon Together
Photo Genevieve Leet
When we are dry, we look so lovely.
When the land is our shape, there is
no shame. I will be quiet from now,
let the shape the wind gives me say
I wanted to say this all along. And this,
is enough. A beetle clicks the tuf
where stem meets root. A swallow
wants my color. I do not blame it.
Perhaps its wings have the skys ambition,
its name, combed a thousand tendrils,
forged in the gas fres root. I know
where the limb clamps on, where the heart
clings to the fallen fence post or willow,
barnacle clinging with its blue ghosts.
25
Tawny bones of last years storm,
the reeds recognize wind as kind,
in rungs of an untuned fute, strange
stations invisible watchmen climb,
transcribers of bird song and bird.
Today birds hide in the ready dimming
warmth of new storm coming, shade
of lint clouds pulled to north, the sun
another retreating bird of fre, breathing
behind the sudden gray. When Im still,
I hear swollen needles in the reeds, silver
birds, killdeer, blackbird. I know grass
cannot sing but ratles a snare against
the singers tone and wind, its mindless
intent, rasps dry grass against itself, hollow
pulse to the afernoon that falls to the empty
hour where every window opens at last.
Confuence
for Roxanne
Twilight trees dream their own light,
fecked with tanager, song that moves.
Shadows come from brilliance, growing
shadow-deep. We fnd our way by touch.
Our hands know the way through branches,
through sky among black branches, know
the way toward where two waters meet
at night, every night that gravity leads them.
Touch like water, blooms the other inside,
current in primrose, penstemon, lily, wild rose.
Silt shimmers down, pull of the planet.

We two fnd the gully, cool braid of water,
jostling nerves beneath the pouring distance.
Stars in water stream through silence.
Motion makes every motion under water.
We cannot leave our shadow, so formed
we are from light, will not leave the river
made when two streams meet in twilight.
Te Upper Meadow
So many visitors have walked through me,
dark and light,
depending on the illumination.
Regina Derieva
A basin of wind strikes sparks, wind-colored,
sun-dimmed a tawny hum. I part; weeds
part. Tassel of brewers daughter, comb
the brown mole, I raise the rim of the sky,
its low limit and muddle it closed, let sky
move through me, mimic me in its mirror
and the fies, night moths drifing down.
If I let waters come, they come through me,
some lesser light threading skin and cold,
motion like falling sleep. Vanishing trees keep
me hidden like memory, a sliver of some day
held, nearly still, a place you were walking,
cricket note, black wing splayed. You never
remember what you said exactly, only scent,
tea, plum. Cinnamon dissolves your tongue.
Song for Hidden Shorebirds and Grass
26 26
27 Painting Genevieve Leet
28
. . . or night.
Each sip is precious, drinking from each others grief.
Souls mingle then are torn apart but fames remain.
Tat fre is a gif. Tis will take most of the night.
Moonlight, silver crescent, sharp against my throat.
What pleas would grant me another day of writing?
Tis happens so ofen, yet I cannot fear the night.
Te Beloved lifs Teresa from the foor.
Winds of passion, the cloak rustles, folds, fowing.
Here, feel this Divine Ecstasy, in the darkest night.
Sometimes the sunlight is more dangerous. A target
So well illuminated, any pause means the end.
Moving among such brilliant arrows I pray for night.
Te fnal alchemy? Tis is far from over!
Te ingredients, the proportions and the timing.
To see the stars, we need to wait until night.
Federicos Heart opened wide to embrace the Moon.
What else could any eyewitness account add?
Anyway Jim, I was not there, day or night.
. . . nothing else.
Te label read elixir in an all caps font.
Te botle was ink blue-black now those sweet worlds of
Night and Darkness, could be captured on parchment.
September, tell me, what is lef to be crossed?
Te trespass was unavoidable but bloodshed?
Darkness, I cannot claim the presentiments.
Are you still writing about darkness? With a splash
Of malt vinegar and a sprinkle of sea salt
Tis twenty-one cent kale is the best salad ever.
Your autumn light is poor at hiding my darkness.
Te South is still warm for a cloak. Sof nightmares beacon,
Perhaps to borrow that old velvet mantle.
Te impending balance of the equinox ofers
Litle comfort this year. We confuse so much.
Te charge, the spin, yet we can survive the darkness.
Tere is the sinking your whole form embraced by the
Dim waters, then the current takes you into darkness.
Are you writing? Living is an art like nothing else.
J.K. McDowell
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J.K. McDowell
available now from
Hiraeth Press
30
Diana Woodcock
Nooya Lake, Misty Fiords
Following tracks and scat
of a Brown (Grizzly) bear,
we made our way from foat plane
to shore over muddy trail to shelter,
surrounded by Skunk cabbage
and fowers of Salmon-and Blueberry
(on which one Rufus hummingbird dined).
A Varied thrush sang to us each night,
rang a wake-up call each dawn.
Day one we canoed the lake
from which granite walls of stone
rounded sheer clifsrose up,
snow-draped this late June (a dolly
of lace to grace the peak), the loon pair
calling, answering their own echo
again and again as we drifed late
afernoon. We, like the loons,
the only pair of our kind on the whole lake.
Sound of waterfalls, Glaucous gulls
crying when we paddled too close to their nest.
Day two, we hiked into summer
through an old-growth forestwhere
Methusulas Beard hung from Hemlocks,
Yellow and Red cedarsto the ocean
where it lived up to its name (Pacifc),
where we sat on mossy ground in a meadow
of Black lilies, butercups, Indian paintbrush
around which snow-crowned rounded peaks
glistened as we listened to the tide rising.
Summer Solstice, what beter way to spend
the day than in the heart of a temperate rainforest.
Afer days of rain, the sun all day.
I paid rapt, animal atention
that I might be put back in complicity
with things as they happen.*
With only one intent, I went
into the forest, onto the lake
to interact with wildlife,
intuit and imagine, be at bears
and loons disposal, communicate
with the vegetable world that I might be
transformedmy autonomous self
joined in holy matrimony
with ecological mater.
Having basked in Systema Naturae
in all its glorybeasts, birds,
plantsI came away convinced
Homo sapiens will no time soon
hold a candle to Brown bear,
Devils club, or loon.
*Lyn Hejinian
31
Full Moon While Flying dfw
(Dallas Fort Worth) To Richmond
Red eye, early July,
returning from Alaska
Juneau, Ketchikan
(Misty Fiords)where I
practiced echo-location,
ontological insubordination,
considered with every step
along the wet, slippery trail,
each dip of paddle into lake
my mortal indebtedness,*
my goal to live as an equal
partner with bear and salmon,
raven and eagle, glacier and
old growth forest; to entangle
myself in intricate roots of
Hemlock and Sitka spruce,
in tendrils of Old Mans Beard,
to be insatiable in my hunger
to know loon and humpback whale,
to treat each moss and lichen,
bird and insect with utmost respect.
What did I learn from my brief sojourn?
Tat I must, at every turn, begin
again in humility and gratitude,
to locate myself in the biosphere,
perceive each species as distant relative.
Alaska taught me what I thought
I already knewhow dependent and
connected we all are. What joy
to recognize the Stellars jay,
orcas at playto get so caught up
in their worlds that my own was no
longer separate. Temperate
rainforest singing its refrain,
bears waiting in the lull of late July
for salmon- and blueberry fowers to fade
and give way to the berries they crave.
A green so lush the only proper response
is a hush of silence, mist over the fords
like ecstatic chords of mystical music
only audible to ears of the humble.
Alaska put me in my place,
its grace reminding me my species
was an aferthought. Caught
in its eye, having no permanent home,
I was taken inmore than pilgrim,
I sought to enlarge my sapience,
to participate in all of her nature
so reconciliation could occur.
And it didbetween me and her
as I leaned out over lakes and Pacifc,
observed and listened while glaciers
glistened all around me, their surging
rhythms ancient, echoing, all-knowing.
*Herman Melville
32
Spring Tide
Christine Waresak

32
Photo Genevieve Leet
33
I cannot see the moon this morning as I walk on the beach. Overcast, windy, cold, and
somewhere behind the clouds a full moon is causing this very low tide. A spring tide,
when the moon and sun are aligned with the earth, and their gravitational forces com-
bine to create tides of exaggerated range.
Its Monday morning, and I can be out walking because I have quit my job, a good
job, and by good I mean decent pay, with benets. But also a boring, exhausting, and
draining job. People dont know how to react when I tell them, not in this economy, not
at my age. They raise their eyebrows. Wow. And I dont know how to explain why I quit
and what I will do with the time that I could be making money.
The beach is deserted except for crows feeding on the small islands of seaweed newly
exposed, and schoolchildren, who scamper between the wet sand at and the tent where
their teacher waits on high, dry sand. Their shouts and screams of delight oat to me on
the wind.
Debris litters the beach. Crab carcasses, hollowed and broken, tangled ribbons of
copper-colored seaweed, bits of shell. Rivulets of water ow back from the higher sand
to the Puget Sound. I search for something whole to take home, to show my husband,
and to put on my shelf, but nothing is whole except the rocks, and I cant even nd an
exceptionally pretty rock. I give up and walk awhile, gazing outward now at the milky
waves.
And thats when I almost stumble on it.
Startling, and I want to say beautiful, but it is not beautiful. Orange with purple dots,
about a foot long, it could be starsh-like except it has too many limbs, maybe 20,
purple-tipped, all facing the same direction, toward the water. The way it is lying, with
the meaty middle near the top and the limbs pointing down, it makes the shape of a heart.
Fascinating and compelling, yes, but too strange to be beautiful. Its a little scary, re-
sembling the spiders of my childhood nightmares, or images of cellular beings under the
lens of a microscope. Things not meant to be seen with the naked eye in the light of day,
which makes them as irresistible as a secret whispered just out of earshot. If I touched it,
it probably wouldnt move, but I dont touch it for fear that it will.
Instead, I pull out my iPhone, take a photo, and send it to my husband. And as soon as
I do, the mystery of it evaporates a little, and I wish I hadnt taken the photo and sent it
to David, not yet. I wish I would have kept it to myself a little longer, let the wonder of it
linger like a dream Ive just woken from but cant quite remember or the silent, stunned
minutes after reading the last page of a great book.
At rst I think what draws me in is to learn what this creature is. To know what is
unknown. But then I realize to know the strange and not-quite-beautiful phantoms of the
sea is not the point. To show them to you is not the point. Thats not where the ultimate
pleasure lies. The pleasure is in something else. It is in the almost nding but never
knowing absolutely. The search, the surprise, and then the mystery. That is what makes
the children on the beach squeal and makes us strain to hear a whisper. That is what
makes me quit my job to do nothing but walk on the beach and scribble in a journal.
If seas exist inside me, what creatures are revealed during the very low tides of m y
being? During a spring tide and a full moon? All I want is a little time to look.
S
ea of marrow. Sea of blood. My qigong
teacher says to calm the seas within me, and I
imagine moonlight on dark, gentle waves.
34
Genevieve Leet
Stewardship
One way or another,
Te choice will be made by our generation
but it will afect life on earth
for all generations to come.
Lester Brown
Ive tasted it; and the water is sour there
where the ocean lips up against the air.
Carboxylic acid. All that chemical vastness
bending the four directions. Te medusa jelly
twisting its streamer like a tatered feather,
foating on a sullied current. Te coral cities
are dim rainbow, all fickered and crumbling,
the empty spaces of a hungry mouth.
Two lost starfsh seek for each other,
following their shadows, one way or another.
Ive seen it; the water is ancient there
where the moisture kisses the briny air.
Teeming and nebulous. Corals spawning
transparent polyps which anchor as ghostly fags
or swirl in full-moon tides. Blooms of adaptation.
Te slippery, colorful blush of scales,
the meats of the sea, delicate and savory
frst fesh, then memories, then ghosts disappear.
A dying language and developments temptation,
the choice will be made by our generation.
Ive tasted it; the muscle of a baby king.
Te sof meat of shark is a mythic thing.
Whos this I to judge? Two foreign eyes,
a student and a guest. Im a puf of carbon,
a thing of gossip, leaves, and litle worth
a pelican dipping its wing-tips into the globe.
Tose who hunt parrotfsh over the pale coral
with nets of vines and rocks to hold them down,
may they then begin to guess the oceans worth?
Which calculations will afect life on earth?
I am born in a time of clocks. Ive seen it;
Te world fumbling towards progress admits
nothing. Emits everything. In the Coastal
Commons Lady Petroleum in her iridescent gown
romances King Coal and his new black shoes.
What trill will whistle when our externalities
return to us? What bell will toll? What future
will reach down for us? We fock together, lick
our fngers, hurry on. Forgeting weve become
the stewards for all generations to come.
34
35 Photo Genevieve Leet
36
Laurence Holden
Lesson #1: How to Listen
to a Bird Sing
Take of all
your clothed and
clammy thoughts.
Sit awhile.
Make nothing up
between the intervals of silence,
but listen to them.
Between each breath
is a song youve forgoten,
is always calling us
to gather to this wild
and shocking world.
Tis music happens to us
before we can ever think about it
this song happens in us
before we can ever say its impossible
to listen before we speak
of nothing or everything.
Wild Netle
Tis wild netle
that is Creation
trembles.
Our touch and words
pinch at the knot there
that is knowing
and not knowing.
36 Photo A. Savvantoglou
37 Photo A. Savvantoglou
38 38
39
Painting Genevieve Leet
40
Carved of Cedar
Photo A. Savvantoglou
41
Gwendolyn Morgan
Autumn window no. 3:
Vulpes Fulva, Key of Bfat
She walks along the edges of music
star-lit before the fog rises from the river
Her black paws are quarter notes
black-tipped tail, white belly diurnal
We see her in the early morning
in the meadow where the Great Horned Owl fies.
Douglas Fir above, blackberry thicket below
Look! She is the color of vine maple leaves
warning symbols on a topographical map
danger! Fire danger high global warming
when we have forgoten the lyrics
the pendulous nest, woven tightly of plant fbers,
our relations. She slips through the grove of Hazelnut
like the mists over Salmon Creek, above the Cascade Mountains.
She remembers the Sumac, the runes of trees,
voices of Spoted Towhee.
Deer Has Full Tail
New Moon
In a time beyond memory: Look for calligraphy pens and nibs. Relearn to write your ancestors alphabet, runes. Wind
and weather spirits, birds, native ornithology. Stillness and silence, migratory. How we walk between shadows, up
mountains, outstretch our feathers and wings. What it is that makes a place, a day, a moment. Te inefable presence of
divinity. Animate, invest, enliven. Te doe and her two fawns stand beside the dry Queen Annes lace on Salmon Creek
Avenue. Good Morning! I greet them as I pass by on my bicycle. Tousands of people march in the city blocks of
thirteen cities around the country for what might be called Occupy Peace. Standing up, walking through the dry stalks
of our economies on the deerskinned fringes of our streets for social justice, peacemaking, hope, courage, common sense.
Our neighbor says we might have protested sooner, louder, longer. She says she has begun to play her mother drum in the
morning. She is siting on the earth for a few minutes each day to recalibrate. Columbia White-tailed Deer return from a
distant time.
According to Corvidae Myth
it was Crow not Raven
who brought light to the people
open a carved cedar box
tell the truth with transformation masks
forgeting about duality
light, dark, good, evil
count backwards and you will fall asleep
remembering the light is in the Crow feathers,
the colors of snowfake obsidian,
black-and-white fne-line geometric designs
light isnt trapped, it is held,
so cherish the shiny silver bracelet
you carried to me at the gathering of tribes
the one carved with Celtic and Tlingit designs
slip the phosphorousinto the water at dusk
in the sea the phosphorous is
the sky shimmering mountains
in my hands
release the story you brought light to the people
the cedar box is open
and Im walking home late in the evening
as if you had just fown overhead
and the bracelet on my wrist
our ancestors alive
takes the shape of your black wings
like desires still to be named.
Carved of Cedar
42
Jamie K. Reaser
Tin Ice
Tere is always one winter morning
that is the frst winter morning
for ice on the pond.
Perhaps it shouldnt be surprising to those
who have lived decades
in the north next to still water,
But, for me, it still remains a wonderment,
an ordinary miracle made possible
by elements conspiring
to wake us with befuddling
predictability.
We have a ritual,
this particular winter morning
and I.
I wait for the sunlight to come,
anticipating the spectrum of colors
dancing among the gas bubbles
trapped in the glassy-crust.
And when it does come,
memory transports me back to my youth:
I am watching small wall-rainbows emerging from
crystalline prisms hanging from lamps
in a home that we once thought
was quiet and tender.
And then Im in my teens:
Te minister arose and ventured
onto the frozen reservoir,
and with the confdent stride of a
once-Olympic skater,
drove forward until he found a place
thin enough to free him
of this world.
Te imaginary me has stood,
for many a winter,
at the gaping hole lef by his
sinking body,
asking questions about beliefs
and vows
and faith.
Now older, I focus on the red-spoted
newts and the snapping turtles moving
in the cold waters below the ice:
No one ever told me they could.
By the rules I was taught,
they cant.
But they are.
Tey are there shu ing their thick legs
and looking, golden-eyed, back at me
with not a glint of surprise.
I love this ice, thin as it is.
It reminds me that
that which can be readily explained
is sometimes
best lef
to wonderment.

43
available now from
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44
Photo Jamie K. Reaser
45
Jamie K. Reaser
Whooo
Tonight the barred owls
ask their question upon
the chill of dusk;
one from the tulip poplar grove,
the other at creekside.
Whooo?
Is what they want to know.
Whooo?
Its a dangerous inquiry.
A warriors initiation right
if you dare seek the answer.
Do you dare?
Do you dare to know
who you truly are?
Coyotes run the crest of the ridge,
yips and howls
formulating the collective voice
of the pack.
Dont listen to them,
they are tricksters.
Tis is what I have to say:
If you go searching for the
answer,
you will Die.
And if you dont go searching
for the answer,
you will die.
If you want to Live,
you must go searching
for the answer.
Te moon will light the way in the darkness,
but only so much as to allow
you to take one uncertain step
at a time,
ofen, backwards.
Youll fnd that what the sun illuminates,
is frequently outsized by its
shadow,
and that the shadow has a life of its own.
You are going to have to
befriend it,
as your fellow journeyman.
Be prepared to leave who you
think you are behind
in the quest for
authenticity.
Its best if you put down the large bundle
of what no longer serves
at the trail head.
Do bring your most spectacular heartaches
and your deepest wounds;
these are the trail markers that
will help you stay on course.
And too, have within you
a most
beautiful verse.
You cannot fully understand who you
are until you have courted the
Beloved with such wild abandon,
that you become completely undone.
Whooo?
from the top of the tallest pine.
Whooo?
from the sycamore at the edge of the mead-
ow.
Who?
from the moment you were born,
has been the question
gifed by those who
want you to fnd your way
Home.

from Sacred Reciprocity: Courting the Beloved in Everyday Life

46
Te Nothing Here
Tyra Olstad
I
mean, 45? the man grumbled to his wife, referring to the speed limit along a stretch of road in Petrifed Forest National Park, It
should be at least 65! Teres nothing there!
Nothing there.
Nothing there? I wanted to ask him, shout at him, shake him, Nothing? Nothing but the sagebrush and the sparrows; the paintbrush,
the pronghorn, the prairie, the sky. Nothing but that big beautiful horizon stretched taut across distant mesas and butes; nothing but the
pufy white clouds foating merrily overhead; nothing but the wind whipping up whirls of dust, nothing?
Nothing. I said nothing. I sat silently, looking out across the landscape. It wasnt my place to say anything just then I had already hung
up my Smokey Bear hat and badge for the day. I had already told hundreds of visitors what they would see and urged them to stop, listen,
look carefully, learn. I had already rhapsodized about the rocks, the wild life, the history, the scenery therein. Now I just wanted to sit and
enjoy the place.
And by the place, I mean the space the curve of the earth, the height of the sky, the miles and miles and miles of pavement that un-
furled beneath my bike tires. It was early evening, mid-summer a delicious time to be out there, with the land exhaling the heat of the
day and the rabbits emerging to nibble on brush. Afer pedaling from the Visitor Center down to Puerco Pueblo about 11 miles and
most of the way back up, I had, as usual, stopped at Pintado Point to stretch my legs and drink in the view. Its my favorite place to pause
and look: to the north lays the Painted Desert thousands of acres of colorful clay hills, sandstone ledges, dry washes, and basalt-capped
butes; to the south, theres nothing but prairie. (Nothing! Everything!) Te land yawns gently away until it reaches the Puerco River, then
rises up toward petroglyph-pecked boulders, fossiliferous formations, and, eventually, the forests of petrifed wood that form the historic
core of the park.
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I love that view.
As much as I love the Painted Desert, I lovelovelove seeing breathing biking hiking and, yes, even driving through swaths of steppe, rich
with plants and animals, wide with horizon, buried in sky. (Its all about the sky.) I know, though, that many if not most people do not share
this sentiment. Id heard theres nothing there-like comments several times before, and studied a long legacy of pejoratives that Euro-
Americans have used to denigrate mixed- and short-grass prairie since the days of the pioneers. (Desolate, Empty, and, most damning
of all, Boring. Meaning: no shelter, no landmarks, no mountains or trees. Nothing.) People come to Petrifed Forest to see geological
and archaeological curiosities and spectacular Painted Desert scenery, not wander through the prairies low shrubs and grasses; unless they
happen to catch a breathtaking sunrise or storm, most probably wont notice much about the drive from Puerco to the next pull-out, except
that it seems to take an awfully long time when traveling at 45 miles per hour.
45 miles per hour! What was I supposed to do, stand up and tell the man and his wife just what they were missing? Give them species
checklists and a lecture on local history? Insist that 45 is, in fact, far too fast? Cry, Pronghorn can barely dash at that speed! Youd be bet-
ter of at coyotes trot, or a kangaroo rats hop; the scutle of a stink bug! Beter yet, leave your car behind take bicycles, boots, walk walk
crawl on bloodied knees
No, thats Edward Abbeys rant, writen on behalf of the once-underappreciated wonders of Arches National Park. Abbey had his
most beautiful place on earth; I have mine. I realized, when I heard that man say Nothing there, that I just have to let some people whiz
through, snap their photos of Giant Logs and move on on to Phoenix or the Grand Canyon or Santa Fe on to the rest of their lives. Te
prairie aesthetic is not something that can be told or taught.
But some people do understand.
Some people slow down or stop at Pintado Point, of their own accord. Tey sit with me. We listen to the grasses rustle and ravens
crraaaw. We watch the sun sink behind the dusky earth, finging reds and golds into the troposphere. We sit silently, or whisper, wow, and
smile.
Smile for nothing.
47
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Photo Russell Streur
49
Brendan Sullivan
Trees
Te secret life
of elm and oak
and thin white poplars -
elegant apostles
on a winter night,
grazing the moon
like tapers in December.
I smell earth
peat and cedar
and the indulgent bulge
of maple,
crafing the air
like a smith
lost in his work.
Chestnuts bear an ofering
and the yearning pall
of pine scents the sky
till its thick with resin.
And they gather
with boughs and limbs
bent like monks at play,
roots tight as ancient drums
to ruminate on stories,
sinewed in fragrant bark
making merry where
the green bends back
the world.
River
cold punches through the river,
webbed silver trails leading down
down to the caves
where we lost the children last summer.
butons lef roaming in the rocks
cleave the past in two,
their tiny holes gaping through
tender fddle ferns
and the cry of white geese
mocking us like snow.
the tide claimed their faces,
rude shallows pulling them down
down to the botom
where the wet could not reach them.
skin caught like cloth in silt
carves the riverbed,
the slender reeds wrapping round
knots of slippery elm
and the glimpse of dank weeds
marking us like ash.
our hands try to remember
how they felt
when we put them to bed that last time,
the sof fannel of their good nights
bunched in our arms like angels,
never dreaming
their toys would wake up alone
or that god would forget
where we live.
50
Nicole Parizeau
When It Does Not Increase
to my mother
What happens to me here,
underwater, has nothing in common
with what you see from shore. We all drown
distorted by surface tension. At depth,
the moon rises like ice. Love
is like the moon; when it does not
increase, it decreases. Lunar maria: Sea of
Tranquility, Sea of Crisis. I see
its time to tap at recent wounds, assess
whats scarred over sufciently to hold our
weight. Every day I vow to call you. Its easy,
like wholesale butchery. I sway
between balm and venom on the continuum of love
and you groom your reef perversely, laying skeletal coral
on top of the living. Tere are two of us walking this plank, each
to her own sea, but there is only one ocean. So we
warm and re-warm the surface of love til the gyres
and tides evaporate and only the moonlit salt remains. With
that, I swim to shore and we wait to cure, as if this long storm has
all been a fantastic misunderstanding. I need
to tell you something:
51
Michael Bazzet
Fox
Te slough by the river is tangled in fox trails, musk
hangs in the air. Ahead, on the trail, russet
futer, then
gone,
over the soundless snow,
along the spine of a log,
each footfall dropping in
a quiet place, leaving redolent
prints for the dog, leaving
delicate bones by the trail. Te fox

hems the fringe, needling voles into their dens, stitching
up the ragged woods
with his daily thread.
Vine
Melon vines twined up the sycamore tree
drooping crimped
blossoms that swelled
into fruit pulled by ripening weight which
dropped
cracked open to feed the endless
lines of ants
simmering into the fesh like
fevered sentences
slashing with hooked black mandibles
at the honeyed sweetness of its opened mind.
Photo Genevieve Leet
52
Daniel Williams
Coopers Hawk Caught
in the Library of Congress
Dept. of Fish and Wildlife January 2011
Tis too another kind of book
a young coopers hawk describing
the rotunda ceiling of the Jeferson
Reading Room with its fight
gray and white lovely power
it swoops and sweeps below
gold and white fanned seashells
the 24 carat cornices and moldings
of American federalist rococo
What a surprise to fnd something
so primordial this accipiter
whose wings and shape have fown
to us straight from the Jurassic
looking down with ruby eyes
at all those colors in neat rows
the blue of Spinoza green of Locke
leather tomes of Shakespeare and
Jefersons journals in yellowed array
It will take two starlings used as bait
to deliver this predator her freedom
a simple idea appetite as lever
BF Skinner winks from his shelf
while a bird back paddles down
setles over humanity at its cleverest
all our dear hidebound cursive
composed of millions of words
over the last two hundred years
Our own survival may just depend
upon this captive hawks escape
all our thinking and writing and
yet we sit helpless to save ourselves
we must learn from simple lessons
she senses our gilded and cruel cage
and wild responds with power and grace
shes hungry for prey and pine forests
for clear space of horizon-less skies
If fortunate she may carry us with her
far away from all stultifying thought
into the full meaning of moonlight
and heartbeat and the joyful scurry
of those newly released wings in air
over no mater how many and
what kind our entombed tomes
of wisdom
53
A thousand cars and trucks parked among
a hundred sparse pines day glow signage
shows them where to park rainbow pools of
coolant setling under them I walk a new trail
beaten into the orange earth crossing a slim
road of black top and then back into grasses
dappled with light and bright with bunches
of fuchsia foxglove daisies and scarlets
a dark shadow moves across the rye and I
look up to see a young bald eagle rise on
air biter with the stench of lighter fuid
its dark body with pallid head my pulse
quickens at so rare a sight at this elevation
seeing such a visual frework I am reminded
of my connection to the wild and to all things
even when upon second glance I realize its only
a raven grasping a saltine cracker in its beak
Yosemite Phenomena Never Seen by Muir
Photo Genevieve Leet
54
Joshua Tree, California
Te disk of the galaxy
runs diagonal to the ranch road
And so slowly
that I can barely stand to listen,
the stars call me cousin
Tey say Im like the motel on the hill
that overlooks the desert and the mountains
but whose rooms all face the pool
Te stars call it an exile and an expedition,
a sitcom and a crucible,
say that bounded by senses, by plain stupidity,
given seasons to think and death to forget,
I may yet form a true word from the infnite
Im eager for more, but the cold
worms through my sweater,
and strange headlights
illuminate the Joshua Trees
I unlock my rental car and climb in
Te car is a body over my body
Te dashboard fashes concerns over my concerns
Te radio plays
Te headlights show no stars
Colin Dodds
"World Clock, Morning and Two Twilights is from a series called AferShadows: A Grand Canyon Narrative. Te zebra-like stripes on
the pebbles are actually photographs of immense shadows cast by rock formations in the Canyon, printed using liquid emulsion and
radically shrunk to ft Atlantic beach pebbles. Te backgroundssand, shot at noontime, and sea grass and ash, shot at twilightrefer
to diferent eons in the Canyon's development. Each shadow corresponds to the time of day it was cast, and the sequence represents dif-
ferent locations on the globe at the same moment. Te triptych functions as a multi-layered sundial, evoking both human and deep time
scales, and our place in the earth's chronology." Pamela Petro
Photo Pamela Petro

55
Falling Forward
Rain paters the roof
of the bus through Nicaragua.
Looking out to the yellow and blue
of mountains, cornfelds, stark trees,
I want to run into it, fully into it,
coming apart as I go, so that I become
liquid, rain falling forward, drops
rushing to cover everything, soak
into the land, make the lush smell
hot, damp, organic- rise
from the ground, the weted stalks.
Teodosia Henney
Photo J.Kay MacCormack
56
Where Tere
Are No Roads,
the Road Not Taken
Laura Story Johnson
Photo A. Savvantoglou
57
M
y husband Shawn was the frst to notice the strange van in a parking lot adjacent to our apartment building. Te
driver was leaning against it, smoking. Wed been waiting all morning on our stoop, staring at the three dozen two
liter botles at our feet: sun-catching kaleidoscopes on the cement. Green. White. Blue. My sister and her friend Liz had
catapulted themselves from their high school graduation in the Midwest to my closet-sized kitchen in Ulaanbaatar. Tere
wed spent hours boiling and fltering water to put into the plastic botles I had been collecting for months. Safe water and
a knowledgeable driver were the only two things we needed. We were ready for the Gobi.
Only the driver we hired never showed up. Wed met with him in advance, paid him some pink bills, checked out his
mode of transportation. He spoke English, an added bonus worth the higher price. We mapped out the two week trip we
wanted to take with him and lef our address and phone number. I stretched out fully on one of his vans three rows of seats
while Shawn secured the departure date and time with a handshake. We had his name, but not his number. No one had cell
phones then. Te morning of our scheduled departure arrived and we waited. And waited. Shawn stayed by our apartment
phone while the girls and I sat outside. As the sun crept above our Soviet block, I prepped myself to disappoint my sister
and her friend. Sorry guys, I guess were not going.
Ten Shawn came outside and pointed at the other van. I argued that it wasnt the vehicle we had looked at, but
agreed it was strange how the driver watched us while he smoked. Shawn went over to speak with him and returned to
tell us that, indeed, it was our ride. He says hes here to take us to the Gobi. He doesnt speak English. I will never know
the events that transpired to bring Batchuluun so briefy into our lives. At the time we theorized that the driver wed hired
passed the job on. But, sometimes I still wonder if, like us, Batchuluun just happened to be there. Ive thought its possible
he just stopped to have a cigarete when an American approached him and asked in broken Mongolian if he was going to
the Gobi desert. Perhaps Batchuluun took his last drag, tossed it to the ground and thought, Why the hell not?
, he answered, -.
Mongolia then was still undiscovered, wounds fresh from independence. Today sparkling skyscrapers bandage the
raw skyline we knew and English has replaced Russian in schools. Tough I would be pressed to recognize our old neigh-
borhood if I were to return, the beauty of the country is that outside of the capitol, everything else remains unchanged. Te
Gobi is a place where you can feel as though you are the frst, and the last, person to ever walk across the infnite desert,
scorpion-like bugs skitering along with the pebbles that roll from under your sandals. Te Gobi is a place where you un-
derstand why Mongolian reporters said a live dinosaur was spoted there a few years ago; Loch Ness monsters lurk on the
mirage-lined horizon. Te Gobi is a place where you can stare up at the sky, the swallowing sky of the Land of Blue Sky, and
disappear.
Te Gobi is also a place where you may have to park your Russian pillbox into the wind, hood up, so that the en-
gine that sits between the driver and the passenger seat can . Batchuluun would go out to smoke while the engine
cooled down, sometimes we would wander around, other times we would sit in the van and play cards to win a chance to
ride on the foor. Batchuluuns van was from the days before independence and the original seats had lef with the Russians.
With the seats torn from the foor like the televisions and tape players pilfered afer the collapse of the U.S.S.R., Batchuluun
had devised a creative solution. He drilled a mismatched van seat into the foor. Ten, to make the whole thing into a six
passenger van, he had drilled two airplane seats into the back. Te bolts were loose and so the airplane seats swung and
bounced over the desert, but the tray tables still worked. We took turns geting carsick in the airplane seats, recovering on
the somewhat more stable van seat, and passing out on the foor, where the heat of the desert rose to meet the heat of the
vehicle, warming, eventually burning through the sleeping bag we spread out. We told ourselves that there were no roads so
we didnt need seatbelts.
It was during one of our breaks that Batchuluun told Shawn about Yolyn Am. My Mongolian was on par
with Shawns, but Batchuluun preferred speaking to a man. While we had planned to see the Khongoryn Els (the sing-
ing sand dunes) in the Gobi Gurvansaikhan National Park, we didnt know about Yolyn Am. Shawn got out our English-
Mongolian dictionary to try to interpret what Batchuluun was describing. Wall of ice, road of ice, I realize now that even had
I understood the words, I still wouldnt have understood what he truly meant until we were there. Tere is no translation for
an ice feld in the desert until you decipher it with experience. We agreed to camp there and, engine cooled enough to carry
on, put our tray tables in the upright position.
We arrived in the late afernoon afer hours of driving, looking. Batchuluun asked a couple of camel herders for
directions, men on horses who scratched their heads and waved their arms about. Afer some time he made Shawn get out
binoculars and point them toward the horizon. Tere were no roads, no gps, no map. Batchuluun found things in the Gobi
by sensing them.
Eventually, mysteriously, he sensed Yolyn Am and found the entrance, fooring it through the gates either because it was
closed or so that we didnt have to pay, shouting over the rumbling and clanking something that justifed his decision. We
58
wound our way into the gorge, beyond the reach of any park rang-
ers or their Mongolian equivalent, beyond the reach of humankind.
Yolyn Am is a valley in the Gurvan Saikhan mountains. Te moun-
tains are mythological towers; impenetrable walls line the gorge
straight out of a Tolkien book. Arriving at a patch of green where
a river widened the space between the hills, Batchuluun pulled
over and parked. Mongolian ponies, wild though owned, grazed
where the low river ran, wider than it was deep. Tey scatered as
we walked through the icy moss, tripstepping from one stone to
the next.
We lef our yellow two-person tent staked by the river and start-
ed out for the . Batchuluun led the way,
cigarete dangling between his dry lips, a jacket open over his sun-
browned, hair-tufed potbelly. Te air around us cooled as we hiked
into a narrow opening in the mountain. Te ice started at our feet,
low to the ground like a melting winter storm. It quickly gained in
height as the gorge went on. Tough it was June, it was chilly. Shawn,
Liz and Batchuluun stood at the entrance for
a while, taking it all in, their thoughts in dif-
ferent languages. My sister walked above on
the ice; I walked in the middle where water
had carved a path just wide enough for me to
ft. Soon she was way above my head where
I couldnt see her. My path constricted, then
dead ended. I had to go back in order to climb
up to join her, fnding a place where my bare
hands could grip the ice, a place where I could
bury my exposed knees into the packed cold
to scramble up. Up.
Te others joined me and we forged ahead into the frozen jaws
of an untamable beast. Hiking next to Batchuluun, I contemplated
the otherworld meaning that a place embedded with time evokes.
A place outdoors. I listened to remember. Memorizing the sound
of my breath echoed against glacier-carved rock was necessary, for
returning to that place, to that moment, was already impossible.
Tis memorization, this consideration of our own existence is
why we seek these places. Walking on time, quite literally, frozen,
the precarious, fragile meaning of it all was, for a feeting moment,
completely clear. I imagine this to be the grounded version of what
mountain climbers seek: the clouds tumbling back to reveal a view
omnipotent. To remain there, perched above the world forever,
would be impossible, so they strain, bodies exhausted, to see by
gulping air, swallowing the experience into a place inside where it
will stay until another of earths wonders calls to it. Listens.
Way leads on to way. We will never go back there. For a long
time I dreamed that we would, but that was when possibility
stretched before me in a diferent life, a life when I believed I would
climb mountains. I may one day return to Mongolia, even to Yolyn
Am, but we will never go back to then. We cant. At a portion of
the ice feld where enormous chunks of ice were piled like build-
ings afer an earthquake, Batchuluun sat and asked me to take his
picture. Later he scrawled his address in my journal so that I could
send it to him. We stayed as long as we could, perched on the ice
until evening made the cold of the cavern unbearable and we hiked
back to our tent.
Tis memorization,
this consideration of
our own existence is
why we seek these
places.
Tat night, our foursome crammed into the two-person tent
and Batchuluun asleep in the van, I listened to the gentle breath-
ing of my husband, my sister, my friend. Tey were the only souls
on earth who knew where I was. With them asleep, I didnt exist.
When I fell asleep, Yolyn Am would sink into a place where the
echo of breathing was just a memory. Te experience of a place so
wondrous that it seems imaginary blurs the line between the self
and the world. When the outdoors engulfs us into a true physical
relationship, when it begs our senses to be aware of the meaning-
lessness and yet overpowering-importance of time, that is when we
become our truest selves. Te beauty lies not in the place, but in
our relationship to it. Each of us will fnd our own undiscovered
breath-catching moments in nature. One of mine was Yolyn Am.
Another was this morning.
My daughter walked barefoot across a beach for the frst time
just hours ago. Watching her baby steps, her round, smooth face
as she opened her mouth at the sensation of sand between her
chubby, uncalloused toes, as she laughed and
marched on toward the water, I felt the fragile
nature of experience. Te fragile experience
of nature. I was the only soul on earth to see,
to know. I caught myself trying to memorize
the feeling of the moment, the sound of the
grey waves lapping at the shore, the warm wet
of almost rain, and I realized I was once more
in the gorge where the memory of an experi-
ence will inevitably feel like a vivid dream. It
feels too beautiful to be real. And in that mo-
ment I cant return to, I hear Yolyn Am.
I awoke that night in the pitch black, squished between my hus-
band and sister in our tent, to the sound of distant singing. Te eerie
melody of deep voices grew louder and the ground shook. I felt the
beating of a hundred horses galloping before I heard it, listened to
the rumble through the thin layer of nylon, through the botom of
our tent deep into the earth, deep into the Gobi. In the middle of
the night the herders drove the animals through the valley, right
past our tent. We all sat up, huddled together, frozen together in
awe and fear. Te horses were so close I could hear them breathing
as they ran by. None of us dared to move. In a mater of heartbeats
they were gone, leaving us to fnally break the magical silence that
remained with a whisper. Was that real?
Te leter I sent Batchuluun came back afer several months,
Mongolian stamped across the envelope telling me the address was
incorrect. It was the address from my journal. He was no longer
there. He didnt exist. I sadly opened the envelope, removing the
picture I had enclosed. I stared at Batchuluun captured, proudly
siting on the ice, and for a long time I wondered. , he had an-
swered, -. And that has made all the diference.

59
T
he work of education, of course, is not to make beter schools, but to make a beter
world. Too ofen, I believe, educators forget this obvious and simple truth. Discussions
about education seldom refect the kind of world we might imagine is possible; rather, they
focus on achievement and success within a given paradigm. Educators seem not to realize
that the way we educate our children creates, reinforces, or shaters the paradigm.
For example, when we assume that the purpose of education is to help students fnd a
job in the global economy, we forget that the global economy is not some force of nature.
Humans created it. It exists because of the decisions we made, decisions based upon how we
view the world, which is based on the way we have been educated.
While what goes on in a school is important in itselfafer all, our children spend most
of their childhoods therethe ultimate relevance of a school is what kind of civilization it
inspires our children to create. A school is not good if its students get good test scores but
are so unhappy, so disconnected, and so unable to think critically that they go out in the world
and commit acts of violence and destruction. Such schools only give more power to the mis-
educated, who become what Wendell Berry calls itinerant professional vandals. I think I
prefer the bad schools.
Modern industrial culture is ill equipped to deal with the crises of this moment. For the
frst time in human history, we face a mass-extinction that threatens the viability of life on the
planet. Tis crisis was largely created by modern industrial culture. Its values can only lead
to more destruction.
I would like to give some atention to what I believe to be the real consequencesgood
and badof the choices we make about how we educate our children. On the one hand,
we have the current model in which the world is the marketplace for global capitalism, the
school a factory, and the child a machine; on the other hand this is a hand is empty, a story
we have not yet told. In part, it is our responsibility to ofer our children a new vision. But we
also must empower our children to become mythmakers, to tell the story of their generation
themselves.
Creatively
x:i:iJus+ri
Available Spring 2013
The Wisdom Education Movement Manifesto
Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
1nroiorr Picn:ris
author ot Cosmosophia
60
Contributors
Michael Bazzet has new poems forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Massachusets Review, Pleiades, Salt
Hill, Literary Imagination and Prairie Schooner. He is the author of Te Imaginary City, recently published
in the OW! Arts Chapbook Series, and Tey: A Field Guide, forthcoming from Barge Press in early 2013. He
lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two children.
Martin Burke was born and raised in Ireland but live permanently in Flanders where he is poet, playwright,
and actor and from which he has published sixteen books of his work in the USA, UK, Ireland, and Belgium.
He recently fnished a successful run of his monologue Beowulf (published by Cervena Barva Press, USA)
and is working on a new show about James Joyce.
Colin Dodds grew up in Massachusets and completed his education in New York City. Hes the author
of several novels, including Te Last Bad Job, which the late Norman Mailer touted as showing something
that very few writers have; a species of inner talent that owes very litle to other people. Dodds screenplay,
Refeshment A Tragedy, was named a semi-fnalist in 2010 American Zoetrope Contest. His poems have ap-
peared in dozens of publications, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He lives in Brooklyn, New
York, with his wife Samantha.
Heinz Insu Fenkl, born in 1960 in Bupyeong, Korea, is a novelist, translator, and editor. His autobiographi-
cal novel, Memories of My Ghost Brother, was named a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selec-
tion in 1996 and a PEN/Hemingway Award fnalist in 1997. His most recent prose translation, Yi Mun-yols
short story, An Anonymous Island, was published in the September 12, 2011 issue of Te New Yorker.
Teodosia Henney is a circus enthusiast who enjoys standing in the spaces between raindrops. Her work
has appeared in over a dozen journals, and has been nominated for Te Pushcart Prize and Te Micro Award.
Laurence Holden is an artist and writer in the North Georgia Mountains of the US. He draws his poems and
paintings from living here. Words and paint just two natural dialects for the same thing bearing witness
to Creation. Just two sides of the same bright coin, tumbling in one great river. His connection is to the land
here, its life, its promise and to its living place, as very much like a river, or even a breath, in our lives. His
poems have appeared in Te Chrysalis Reader, Appalachian Heritage, and Te Reach of Song, thepoetryan-
thology published by the Georgia Poetry Society.His work received an award of excellence from the Georgia
Poetry Society in 2010 and an honorable mention from the Byron Herbert Reece Society in 2011. His paint-
ings have appeared in over 20 solo exhibits, and are in over 200 public, private, and corporate collections.His
art and writing may be viewed athtp://artistspath.info and athtp://www.laurenceholden.info.
Laura Story Johnson is an atorney working in human rights research and advocacy. Born and raised in Iowa,
she has lived in New York City, bush Alaska, Mongolia, Boston, west of the Zambezi River in Zambia, and
in Austria. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has most recently appeared in apt and
the South Loop Review. She currently resides in Chicago with her husband and two children. www.laurasto-
ryjohnson.com
Genevieve Leet is a 23 year old poet and artist from Michigan. Te arts, she believes, speak to sustainability
issues in moving and engaging ways. Trough poetry, painting, and photography, she hopes to build the pub-
lics relationship with the land and thereby foster responsible stewardship. In 2010, Leet received a fellowship
to study Tailands coral reef decline and write place-based poetry on the experience. Te work focuses on
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an artisanal fshing community and the degradation of the reef they traditionally rely upon. Stewardship
is from this collection and grapples with the complicated moral questions regarding the use of our natural
resources. In 2011, Leet graduated from Kalamazoo College. She won Terrains 2011 annual poetry competi-
tion themed Ruin and Renewal, the 2007 Brave New Voices: Global Warming Poetry Competition, and
was twice named a national Udall Scholar. She has performed across the nation, including at the introducing
Governor Sibelius Earth Day speech. Her work is forthcoming at Terrain.org and has appeared in Of the
Coast. Genevieve looks forward to her honeymoon hiking the Pacifc Crest Trail in Washington State. She
will be carrying her camera, notebook, and ice axe close at hand. You can fnd more examples of her work at
genevieveleet.com.
Joel Longs most recent book Lessons in Disappearance was published by Blaine Creek Press in 2012. Know-
ing Time by Light was published by the same press in 2010. His book Winged Insects won the White Pine Press
Poetry Prize and was published in 1999. Longs chapbooks, Chopins Preludes and Safron Beneath Every Frost
were published from Elik Press. His poems have appeared in Quarterly West, Gulf Coast, Rhino, Biter Olean-
der, Crab Orchard Review, Bellingham Review, Souwester, Prairie Schooner, Willow Springs, Poems and Plays, and
Seatle Review and anthologized in American Poetry: the Next Generation, Essential Love, Fresh Water, and I Go
to the Ruined Place. He received the Mayors Artist Award for Literary Arts at the Utah Arts Festival and the
Writers Advocate Award from Writers at Work.
Jesse LoVasco studied poetry and art at Vermont College of Norwich University afer years of writing on her
own. Her poetry is inspired by time spent with plants, woods, inhabitants of the earth and the experiences in
between. Te human/nature relationship holds a great deal of importance in her life work as well as poetry.
She claims not to be a scholarly poet, though she has read and studied many published poets. Te discipline
of going to the page day afer day, afer being in the woods observing an animal or tree, feeds her intention to
create words that have meaning, inspire deeper awareness and intimacy with the natural world. She teaches
poetry workshops for adults and children and is currently working on a non-fction art, writing and ecology
workbook called AWE. She has resided in Vermont for the past 14 years, where her daughter and two grand-
sons live and also has two sons in Michigan.
J. K. McDowell is an artist, poet and mystic, an Ohioan expat living in Cajun country. Night, Mystery & Light
is McDowells frst collection of poetry and part of Hiraeth Presss Catalog. McDowells poems have appeared
in the Journal of Shamanic Practitioners and Writen River. McDowell recently contributed the foreword to
Homebound Publications rerelease of L. M. Brownings Ruminations At Twilight. New work can be regularly
found at McDowells poetry blog Night Mystery and Light. McDowell lives 20 miles north of the Gulf
Coast with his soul mate, who also happens to be his wife and their two beautiful companion parrots.
Gwendolyn Morgan not only learned the names of birds and wildfowers but also inherited paint brushes
and boxes from her grandmothers. With a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College, and a M.Div.
from San Francisco Teological Seminary, she has been a recipient of writing residencies at Artsmith, Caldera
and Soapstone. She has poetry published in: Calyx, Dakotah, Kalliope, Kinesis, Manzanita Quarterly, Tributar-
ies: a Journal of Nature Writing, VoiceCatcher, Writen River as well as anthologies and other literary journals.
Gwen and Judy, her partner, share their home with Abbey Skye, a rescued Pembroke Welsh Corgi.
Master Cho Oh-hyun, who writes under the pen name Musan, was born in 1932 in Miryang in South
Gyeongsang Province of Korea. He has lived in the mountains since he became a novice monk at the age of
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seven. Over the years he has writen over a hundred poems, including many in sijo form. In 2007 he received
the Cheong Chi-yong Literary Award for his book Distant Holy Man. Te lineage holder of the Mt. Gaji
school of Korean Nine Mountains Zen, he is in r treat as the head of Baekdamsa Temple at Mt. Seoraksan. His
work has appeared in Te Asia Literary Review, Asymptote, AZALEA, and Buddhist Poetry Review.
Old Mountain is a poet, part-time hermit, and solitary Buddhist. He conducted the interview of Miya Ando.
Tyra Olstad recently moved to upstate New York to teach Geography and Environmental Science at SUNY
Oneonta. Before that, she spent several years wandering around wide open western landscapes, working as
a ranger and paleontology technician at units of the National Park Service in Arizona, South Dakota, Wyo-
ming, Colorado, and Alaska. She also earned a PhD in Geography from Kansas State University, where her
research focused on place atachment, land management, and the aesthetic of plains landscapes. She has pub-
lished articles and essays on ecoregions, exploration, wilderness, and sense of place in a variety of professional
and literary journals.
Nicole Parizeau is former senior editor at Whole Earth Magazine and principal editor at University of Cali-
fornia, Berkeleys Lawrence Hall of Science. She writes and edits in the San Francisco Bay Area, to which she
moved from Montreal as an interpretive naturalist. New poetry and prose appear or are upcoming in Folio,
Poecology, Emrys Journal, Opium Magazine, Writers Rising Up, and the anthology Weather, from Imagination
& Place Press. Nicole is writer in residence at Sonoma Mountain Ranch Preservation Foundation and a 2013
Associate Artist at Atlantic Center for the Arts.
Pamela Petro is an artist and writer who lives in Northampton, Massachusets. She has writen three books
of travel-based non-fction, and teaches creative writing at Smith College and on Lesley Universitys MFA
Program. Her essays and articles have appeared in many publications including Te New York Times, Granta,
Te Atlantic, and Te Paris Review Daily. Her work with petrographs silver gelatin photos printed on stone
grew out of her book The Slow Breath of Stone: A Romanesque Love Story, set in Southwest France. She is
currently creating an artists book based on her tenure as artist-in-residence at the Grand Canyon. Her new
book of creative non-fction will be about hiraeth in and outside of Wales.
Jamie K. Reaser has a deep fondness for the wild, intimate, and unnameable. She received a BS in Field
Biology, with a minor in Studio Art, from the College of William and Mary and her doctorate in Biology
from Stanford University. She has worked around the world as a biologist, international policy negotiator,
environmental educator, and wilderness rites-of-passage guide. She is also a practitioner and teacher of eco-
psychology, nature-based spirituality, and various approaches to expanding human consciousness, as well as
a poet, writer, artist, and homesteader-in-progress. She is the editor of the Courting the Wild Series, as well as
the author of Huntley Meadows, Note to Self, and Sacred Reciprocity. She makes her home in the Blue Ridge
Mountains of Virginia. Visit her Talking Waters poetry blog at www.talkingwaters-poetry.blogspot.com, or
through Talking Waters on Facebook.
Angeliki Savvantoglou is originally from Greece, but now lives in Bristol, UK, where she studies Conserva-
tion Biology. Her photography refects her love of the natural world and her hopes that humanity will develop
beter relations with the diverse kingdoms of the earth. She also enjoys drawing, swimming with dolphins,
traveling, and singing.
Scot T. Starbuck was captain of the fshing vessel Starfsher in Depoe Bay, Oregon, and a writer in residence
at Te Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. Now, he communes with dolphin yoga masters of Encinitas, Cali-
fornia, and frequently hikes in the Pacifc Northwest. His most recent book, River Walker, is at Mountains
and Rivers Press in Eugene, Oregon. He works as a Creative Writing Coordinator at San Diego Mesa College,
and has claywork online at Te Trumpeter Journal of Ecosophy at Athabasca University, and Untitled Country
Review.
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Russell Streur is a born-again dissident residing in Johns Creek, Georgia. Published internationally, he oper-
ates the worlds original on-line poetry bar, Te Camel Saloon, located at htp://thecamelsaloon.blogspot.
com, where the beer is cold, the whiskey Irish, and the door is always open.
Brendan Sullivan is a lifelong beach bum who has turned from acting to poetry, as he fnds it a more remark-
able and reliable muse. He also enjoy surfng, sailing and diving. His work is a series of snapshots..small sto-
ries about life and what we all share in common. He wants readers to take away what they need and want from
his words, as poetry should be an individual experience. His poetry has appeared in Te Rusty Nail, A Clean
and Well Lit Place, Haggard and Halloo, Mad Swirl, 521 Magazine, Guter Eloquence and Te Missing Slate. He
has just had short fction accepted into the Horror fantasy anthology, Nocturnal Embers.
Christine Waresak is a writer and editor living in Seatle. She was born in Pennsylvania and moved to Florida
as a teenager, but it wasnt until a free plane ticket brought her to the Pacifc Northwest that she recognized
her true home. Even though she is ofen cold, she never tires of watching fog thread through pine trees or
wind toss waves against the shores of the Puget Sound. She has an M.A. in English from the University of
Florida and recently published a short story in RED OCHRE LiT.
Martin Willits Jr retired as a Senior Librarian and is living in Syracuse, New York. He is currently a volun-
teer literacy tutor. He is a visual artist of Victorian and Chinese paper cutouts. He was nominated for 5 Push-
cart and 3 Best Of Te Net awards. He has print chapbooks Falling In and Out of Love (Pudding House Pub-
lications, 2005), Lowering Nets of Light (Pudding House Publications, 2007), Te Garden of French Horns
(Pudding House Publications, 2008), Baskets of Tomorrow (Fluter Press, 2009), Te Girl Who Sang Forth
Horses (Pudding House Publications, 2010), Van Goghs Sunfowers for Cezanne (Finishing Line Press,
2010), Why Women Are A Ribbon Around A Bomb (Last Automat, 2011), Protest, Petition, Write, Speak:
Matilda Joslyn Gage Poems (Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation, 2011), Secrets No One Wants To Talk About
(Dos Madres Press, 2011), How to Find Peace (Katywompus Press, 2012), Playing Te Pauses In Te Ab-
sence Of Stars (Main Street Rag, 2012), and No Special Favors (Green Fuse Press, 2012). He has three
full length books Te Secret Language of the Universe (March Street Press, 2006), and Te Hummingbird
(March Street Press, 2009), and Te Heart Knows, Simply, What It Needs: Poems based on Emily Dickinson, her
life and poetry (Aldrich Press, 2012). His forthcoming poetry books include Waiting For Te Day To Open
Its Wings (UNBOUND Content, 2013), Art Is the Impression of an Artist (Edgar and Lenores Publishing
House, 2013), City Of Tents (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2013), A Is For Aorta (Seven Circles Press, e-book,
2013), and Swimming In the Ladle of Stars (Katywompus Press, 2013).
Diana Woodcocks frst full-length collection, Swaying on the Elephants Shouldersnominated for a Kate
Tufs Discovery Awardwon the 2010 Vernice Quebodeaux International Poetry Prize for Women and was
published by Litle Red Tree Publishing in 2011. Her chapbooks are In the Shade of the Sidra Tree (Finishing
Line Press), Mandala (Foothills Publishing), and Travels of a Gwai Lothe title poem of which was nomi-
nated for a Pushcart Prize (Toadlily Press). She has been teaching at Virginia Commonwealth University in
Qatar since 2004. Prior to that,she lived and worked in Tibet, Macau and Tailand.
Daniel Williams is a poet who resides in the Yosemite region of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Northern
California. He holds an M.A. in English Literature from San Jose State University and has taught at Foothill
College, Columbia College, and Metro State in Denver. Daniel has read for PoetsWest readings at the Frye Art
Museum, and has been a frequent reader on PoetsWest Tursdays on KSER-FM radio, Barnes and Nobles,
and Epilogue Books in Seatle, and at the former Codys Books, Berkeley. Recent poems have appeared in
Grrrr..Poems About Bears, A Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare, Sierra Songs and Descants, Into the Teeth
of the Wind, Amoskeag Journal, NEBO, Sea Stories, Te HotAir Quarterly, Minnetonka Review, Great American
Poetry Show, Raven Chronicles, Rockhurst Review, Flowers & Vortexes Manzanita, Common Ground Review, and
Yosemite Poets: A Gathering of this Place.
www.hiraethpress.com
Poetry is the language of the Earthnot just poems but the slow fap of a herons wings
across the sky, the lightning of its beak hunting in the shallow water; autumn leaves and the
smooth course of water over stones and gravel. Tese, as much as poems, communicate
the being and meaning of things. Our publications are all poetry, whether they are poems
or nonfction, and refect the ideal that falling in love with the Earth is nothing short of
revolutionary and that through our relationship to wild nature we can birth a more
enlightened vision of life for the future. We are passionate about poetry as a means of
returning the human voice to the polyphonic chorus of the wild.
Writen River Copyright 2012 Hiraeth Press
All poems, photographs, and essays copyrighted by their respective authors.
Hir.r+i lrrss
Detail, Painting Genevieve Leet