color me with flowers

the golden hills

note: Amador County, California

call me pomegranate

when the low hills dropped

“When the low hills dropped, furrows fledged with young wheat-blades ran symmetrically into the distance under scores of larks.The footpath wandered through whitewashed farms and the yards of low manor-houses and later through spinneys filled with violets and primroses.Streams unwound under the willow branches, dwindling and expanding again into pools that were covered with watercress and duckweed and giant kingcups.”

-Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts

Monday is for the birds

note: photos taken at Downtown Napa Riverfront & Veterans Park

“every word was once a poem”

Distant footsteps cradle my nights
I can “hear them from miles away.”
Reasonance that expands, singular tales
of a long journey. Nights with hours of felicity,
darkness stream with graciousness
and comfort my eyes, memory
of a nomadic caravan I glimpsed
once and heard, “each step stitched
the walking earth… a millennia of repetition,
a sound of sorrow and hope and loss
and desire: the sound of walking”
as if the fairies visit me to sleep.

note: The poem’s title is a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The other quotations are from the book, Walking With Abel, Journeys with Nomads of the African Savannah, by Anna Badkhen

Celebration: It’s the Sixth Year Anniversary of Collage of Life.
http://www.collageoflife-henrqs.blogspot.com

CONGRATULATIONS JEANNE.

A Ylang-Ylang flower for you.

note: photo is from:

I don’t know if ylang-ylang grows in Vietnam.

“If in doubt walk”

I woke up one morning
it’s first day of June
3 weeks in Istanbul
fortunes and defeats
arrival and departures of thought
“a miniature lifetime”
sometimes you find things
before you imagine
sometime you imagine
before you find things.

“I had seen a lot.”

notes: the quoted phrases are from A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor.

note: I want to congratulate Heather on the Fifth Anniversary of her Lost in Arles:

http://lostinarles.blogspot.com

To celebrate her fifth anniversary:

greetings

“The star shines in the hour of our meeting.”-J.R.R.Tolkien

“journey and the mind”

Walking into the woods

half-knowing food for my senses

more than mushrooms and streams

chorus of lyre-birds and fairy tales.

Are there other altars of praise?

How do you approach ruins

and neglected villages?

Can the select ascend like spires

above orchards of apples trees?

It’s not ignorance,

knowledge and skills are incomplete

without humanity, a gaze

offering the others, dignity.

“You are only strongest

when you have a weakness

for other people.”

Walking, ambience of leaves and questions,

treading a noisy brook and “silent fields”

-faintest whispers,

a “cheerful evening lay ahead”.

note: the quotations are from “Natural Born Heroes” by Christopher McDougal which I finished reading and from “A Time of Gifts” by Patrick Leigh Fermor which I have not finished yet. The “Natural Born Heroes” surprisingly has an exciting story about Patrick Leigh Fermor.

what the eagle sees

Wood shadows walk over the waves

the waves racing to bless the sand

the sand where sounds and shapes weave

weaving nature’s ancient riddle

the riddle where I am

I am where words dance

dancing in the mind.