MARCH FIELD JOURNAL: THRESHOLDS

MARCH FIELD JOURNAL
Bridport & East Middlebury



THRESHOLDS

We’ve already crossed a few.

From forest, 
field and barn, 
the patch of flax,
the cow, the sheep, 
the church and village store
we moved on to a place of more and more,
where water drove hard through a gorge of stones
to turn the wheels that broke the iron hills with smoke.

Everything seemed possible then,
with space beneath our roof for even more.

Now we sit in the village square.
We stare at the handbuilt barn.
We stand beside the ruins of the mills 
and take photos with our phones.
We wonder how and why
and what they’d make of us.

And are we standing in or out?
And what now can we do?
What holds us in, what keeps us back?
What must we keep, and what let go? 

FEBRUARY FIELD JOURNAL

FEBRUARY FIELD JOURNAL
The Watershed Center

The name you can say isn’t the real name;
the way you can go isn’t the real way.
	~The Tao Te Ching, version by Ursula K. Le Guin


What can we observe
about this creature,
in this forest?
Stop and look.
Make no assumptions.

Sometimes she walked
straight along an open path,
sometimes she zig-zagged
under low branches.
She stopped here 
by a deer trail, and here
beside a coyote’s trotting way.

She stopped
in front of this yellow birch,
and this hemlock,
and this white pine.
See how she sank her heels
into the ground.

For awhile she sat
in this clearing,
looking toward the south.
Notice the nutshell 
and the breadcrumbs.
Notice the prints beside her.
She wasn’t alone.

We can see clearly
that she wasn’t here alone.

October Field Journal: Salisbury Kame Terraces

OCTOBER FIELD JOURNAL
Kame Terraces, Salisbury


Once rivers limined the stone mountains
with gravel and sand.
Below, the ice-blocked valley;
across, the wild flow of melt.

Three kinds of oak.
Witch hazel and teaberry
undergrow the logged-over
never-plowed land.

So much time, 
yet not enough time.

I want to be like a river
on the edge of the ice—
letting go as I can,
holding whatever I must hold.




I know "limined" wasn't a word. It is now.

SEPTEMBER FIELD JOURNAL: KINGSLAND BAY

SEPTEMBER FIELD JOURNAL
KINGSLAND BAY


What is your name and what
do you know and what
together can we do?

Folded, weighted, shifting,
broken and remade,
the layers hidden underneath.

And where on this map
of shifting stone
do we belong?

Come walk and name
this place, this very place,
this weather and these trees:

limestone bluff,
the edge edged with white cedar
—and the rain.

And when the blowdown comes
may we trust 
our own entangled roots?