 Thank you all so much for coming tonight. I met most of you at the door. I'm Emily Cypert. I am deputy director here at North Branch, and just really glad to be here tonight with you for this fabulous evening of reflections and celebration of nature through the spoken, written, and musical arts. Tonight's program is presented in partnership with the Kellogg Hubbard Library's Beloved Homes City program, and it's recorded tonight by Orkin Media. So can we have a little round of applause for those yesterday, so we only did something. Come on, first, a centering moment. Please join me in acknowledging that we are gathering this evening upon land that is part of the traditional and unceded home of the Western Avanapi people. These lands of waters have been a site of meeting and exchange amongst indigenous peoples for thousands of years. North Branch honors, recognizes, and respects the Avanapi as the traditional stewards of this landscape. We strive to respect and protect this land while continually honoring the legacy of Vermont's indigenous people, the Avanapi people of the Don. Next, we have here an assist devices, which I think I've about to take out of where they live. But if that is of interest to you, I will scurry back and find them. So if anybody wants to wiggle their hand a little bit, right now that would be helpful, so I know where I should do that. Seeing none, I will involve myself with that duty. There will be a brief intermission tonight in part so that you can enjoy the beautiful exhibit of art that I think most of you already noticed on the walls, by Hillary Ann Love Glass, a local artist. Should you wish to purchase any of her pieces, prints or cards, or Scudder's Poetry Book, or DCDs, or anything else from our gift shop, I would be happy to help you with that. And I have a couple of teammates who are going to be arriving shortly and Sloan, many of you know, and our new Executive Director, Naomi Hondo, will both be here tonight. So any of us can help you during the intermission with purchases. And as you know, this evening is a fundraiser for North French's 2023 annual fund, which means that by being here tonight, you are contributing to our core work and mission of connecting people with the natural world. So thank you so much for that. You shall also know that we are in our spring membership season, and so whether you've been involved at North French for 28 years, or this is your first time here, or wherever you are in between, please consider joining tonight. Lastly, I especially want to highlight a fundraiser we're building right now called Climb Away, which is actually sparked by the kiddos in our forest preschool, who, like most four and five year olds, really love to climb. And their teachers decided we needed to add some exciting new climbing structures to the nature of the place game. So while you're enjoying the art and helping yourself to a cup of tea or a cookie, please help fill up that little Climb Away donations jar. I know of a normal little group who will be very thrilled for your support. OK, thank you for letting me share all of that with you. Now I will turn the stage over to four fabulous members of the Center Vermont community, longtime friends of North French, folks who deeply love the natural world, and our human connections with it. Scutter Parker, Brian Pfeiffer, Dee Davis, and Ruth Einstein. Thank you all so much. Yeah, that was wonderful. Oh, man, why don't we just listen to the two of you play? My goodness. I'm Scutter Parker. I want to be Scutter tonight. I'm Brian Pfeiffer and Dee Davis, Ruth Einstein, Scutter Parker. It's, it's, um. Is it the hair? It's the hair. It is the hair. It's like I want, it's how late he is retired. So someone has to make ball jokes, right? So. Why isn't he here tonight? In bed, doc. OK. So, you know, it's been about five years since we, we did this. The four of us did this. We, we gathered here. And so I really want to sort of welcome everyone and welcome everyone back. You know, oh, the other thing I should tell you is that I do have a reading. I'm going to give a reading. But like today I decided to sort of set the table for this whole thing. There are writers here, you know. So like I write in a notebook. I drew my first and second draft in a notebook. And then I go to the computer. And I just have this mess here, you know, that I edited along the way. And I've just been thinking about it all day. So I'm going to ramble a little before I read. That's probably another reason I want to be Scutter right now. But so there's me, Scutter, Ruth, my partner in nature and in life in D. I should also mention Susan Sussman, who is like the fifth beetle or something. She's sort of like, you're like, you're our support and roadie and manager and that sort of thing. And you know, I really, I don't know. I mean, we're going to do a lot of things tonight. But I think it should all really begin with gratitude. And that's more than anything. That's what I'd really like to start, mostly for like that you're here and that I'm here. It's the first time I've sort of been out in public in a long time. And but even more than that, you know, like I just realized that I can stand at a store window in Montpelier now and not have to worry that like a bomb or a missile is going to land on me, you know. And I can then go order lunch and take my lunch and walk pretty much anywhere in Montpelier and eat my lunch and read poetry in any store window. And I might even also watch a peregrine falcon chasing one of the pigeons that roosts on the steeple of the Unitarian Church. And to me, that would be just a really wonderful day for which I am most grateful to be living in this community. And so really, I also want to thank Kellogg Hubbard Library for Poem City this year. And I think, is Michelle here? Michelle Singer, who's organized Poem City in a way that I think has never been better than ever. So thank you so much for this. And you know, we're here to support North Branch Nature Center, which, you know, it's this little preserve here on this slow bend in the North Branch that really has a great metaphor. But it's like, what's the metaphor? Like, punches outside of its weight class. Like, this little nature preserve has a big reach and does really great things, bringing so many of us closer to nature. So thanks for being here to support that as well. So, you know, since we last did this, a few things have happened. I think we did this in like 2017. Some crazy things happened in 2016 and 2017 to us, to our community, our nation, our state, the world. Not the least of which was a plague. What else happened since then? Is there anything else I need to keep up on? Like, I don't know, Brad and Angelina? Did I miss anything with that? I don't know. So we had this plague, and we also had a coronavirus pandemic. And by plague, you know, I actually been thinking about this a lot. And by plague, I think I, since we've done this last, I just sense this sort of acceleration of concern or evidence that the human experiment has somehow become a little unmoored, that we've gone off the rails a little bit, and that too often we just seem to be overall heading in the wrong direction. Like in our politics and in the coarseness of our public discourse, in too many places we seem to be losing our sense of community. It's like I just almost see we're losing our sense of community to commerce almost and glowing screens. And we're, of course, assaulting and losing our connection to nature. I don't mean all of us. I mean, just this general sense of that. And in some ways, I feel our faith is shaken. Our appreciation for the sacred seems to be shaken and weakened. But here we are, together again. And we've named this thing natural selections. And of course, it's an allusion to Charles Darwin and evolution by means of natural selection. He sort of laid the framework for us to discover where we came from and who we are and where we might be going. And it's often common to invoke Darwin or some other 19th century white guy when you're dealing with nature. But I actually want to invoke Rachel Carson. And that's also kind of a bromide when it comes to ecological events. Rachel has been sort of identified with the birth of the environmental movement, the modern environmental movement. And you know what? She deserves it. And I think probably more than any human being that I've read and I've visited places where she's been and sat where she's sat and seen what she's seen, she has done so much for us. And I think about her a lot. I have a lot more to say about her, but I know that I'm going to ramble and run late. But I have this quote from her. And a lot of people don't know this. Well, a lot of people, you probably do know this, that long before she wrote Silent Spring, long before she gave us safety, some level of safety from toxic chemicals, long before she brought us, she sort of brought nature into the concerns of so many people in America. She wrote about the sea. She gave us the sea. Rachel Carson wrote a trilogy of books about ocean ecology in oceans and life in the sea and by the sea. And for one of them, she won the National Book Award. This was like in the 1950s. And when she was accepting this award, people were talking about the poetry in her books. And she said this in accepting the word. She said, if there was poetry in my book about the sea, it's not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry. And so tonight, I think what we're gonna do is celebrate what's, I don't know, it's like poetry, it's like Palm City, like what it means to be alive. And we're gonna do it with ideas and the force of the written word. And we're gonna do it with music, which is like poetry without the words, sometimes. And I think that those are really manifestations of what's real and what matters pretty much more than anything else in the world. I think those are manifestations of love, pain, art, literature, music, nature in our connection to one another. So that's what we're here for tonight. And how did I do? That's my ramblin' spiel. Oh, the other thing, this is our play of the land here is that we're gonna do this in like three sets, like Scutter, I'm gonna read and Scutter's gonna read, then Scutter's gonna read and I'm gonna read, and I sandwiched on either side of our readings will be music from Dee and Ruth. I don't see we hold applause, I don't really know. I don't know, it's up to you. No, okay, she said no, all right. Yeah, hopefully applause, right, great. So I have just a short reading now since I rambled before that and I was asked to write this a few weeks ago by a writer who runs a sub-stack site, there's on sub-stack, it's a site online called Seven Senses. And every month on the full moon, she writes about seven senses, like our five senses plus senses beyond that, experiences beyond our five senses. So she asked me to write about smell, the smell of nature, the smell of spring. And I said, you know, it's occurred to me that I don't often, as a biologist, I don't often relate to nature enough by smell. Like sound and sight are my major, are my go-to senses when I'm outside. So I said, yeah, I'm gonna write about smell because it's not something I touch a lot. So here's what I wrote. It's called to breathe with a forest. And by the way, I wrote this while I was in the Southeast. You're gonna hear about this adventure I just got back home from in the Southeast. And I wrote it for people who don't necessarily live in Vermont as well. To breathe with a forest. The promise of spring is the breathing of dirt. In the naked woods of home, before the eruption of wildflowers and warblers, before the carnal meets the vernal, soil sends forth aromas of a new season. Here in Vermont, where we enjoy more than four seasons, it's mud season. Our dirt roads, rutted and soft, can seize your truck to its axles. But in the woods, it's a season of mud giving, of leaf litter nourishing, of trees pledging, of forest releasing, all that it held in trust through winter. There's no revelatory smell to this release. Not like the sweet signature of honeysuckle or the aromatic summons of balsam poplar. They'll come later. Now instead, we inhale a vague fusion of mud and dew, of wind and warmth. And maybe it's simply that there now exists any smell at all in these woods. New to our nostrils after a winter of crisp, vacant air. So I sit on a fallen ash, close my eyes, breathe with the forest, try to parse its scents. And yet I recognize that the smell of this place is greater than the sum of its fragrances, greater than me. It's the aroma of harmony of a forest community, and an expression of a new season. It's the sense that I not only belong in these breathing woods, but that I belong to these breathing woods. Thank you, Brian. So nice to be here. There is no place I'd rather be. I wanna acknowledge the pickleball players who are here today. Susan and I play a lot of pickleball, and I've been driving my compatriots nuts, telling them about this event. And some of them have actually come. So thank you very much. There, I don't know what that has to do with me, but it's okay. And I don't wanna get into the tennis versus pickleball thing. So the first poem I wanna read is called Sit Here. And that was, most of the poems I'm reading are new, or relatively new, or very old and rewritten, but this is a part of Safest Lightning, the book that's out there, for a $10 contribution to North Branch. Sit here. A fine cable runs from peony pedal to light fixture above the kitchen table. A spider smaller than a dew drop drew it from herself. In her ascending dance, she's delicate and different with assurance. I bring in blousy, boisterous blooms knowing I bring the family too. Small ants scoot toward breadcrumbs on the cutting board. They and six earwigs swiftly set up shop. I quarrel only fitfully with them to stop. Creatures emerge for days, buds surge open, shoulder into one another, residents visit bloom to bloom. A yellow spider quits the yellow peony, glows in the new magenta pedal home. Two days, one blossom or another tires, drops deep coral petals as though a child released them in oncoming sleep. Drifts pile on table, slip to chair, still more colors tarnished spill across the floor. Sunlight fills the kitchen but keeps moving. Nothing stops, everything slows. Beauty slips out of nouns and adjectives, the vase, the sturdy shelf. It takes all my courage just to sit here with my less impatient self. I have a couple of wood frog palms or spring creature palms. This is one I wrote a while ago. And it's about Dan Linder and Will Linder from Banjo Dan. Playing together with Danny Cohn out from the Throbulators, right? Isn't Danny playing out at the Whammy Bar. Together again for the first time. Familiar musicians play bluegrass and country, murder ballads, rollicking anthems to an indulgent God, heartache, passionate promises against all odds. We are cramped and delighted at the Whammy Bar. They smile at almost missed transitions versus that suddenly disappear but flawlessly step back into the mic or back to alternate Banjo guitar and mandolin. Their heads together for close harmonies. Song all around us on the road from Maple Corner Home. Every time the road dips, peepers and wood frogs joined in perfect riot. After winter and before the summer quiet. So deeply practiced that it seems to take no effort. And then Osmore, we go kayaking all over the place. Osmore Pond is one of our favorites. I think there's no development on it. Just the, the state, yeah, just bullfrogs. Forests toppled downhill to the mill that must have been here. The water worked the saw. Wildness was worked to houses. Now just a beaver dam upstream. Slab wood covered in two feet of water grows a fuzz of brown and pale green colonies that blur the lines a bit. But anyone who has sawn logs to even shapes will recognize it. Flat on one side, tree round bark clad on the other. Soaked in slower time, slabs linger, shelter small fish, huge polywags with tiny feet. Sunken sawdust rotted into silt, swirls up from our paddles. We glide through the present into a vast, welcoming patience that with no will to humiliate, shatters our unreadiness. Thunk of paddle rested on gunnels. Small ripples, soundless to our ears. We sit beside our ordinary lives, stopped, feel the silence of our absence. Our memories already gathered to a larger memory. We drift, two loons dive for bass in branches of a toppled yellow birch as if they've always been there. And I think I'm gonna give a couple, I'll read my other spring songs. Woodfrods, a clock chucking creates its own syncopation down beyond the screen of pine, gray birch, and a rusted white delivery truck that sinks deeper each year in collapsing gravel above what was briefly a horse riding ring that never fully quit being a marsh and now regrows its tamarack and alder. The horse barn sits uphill, a few party boats on flimsy trailers stored each winter, otherwise unused. It sags a bit more every winter. Further upslope just above our home each spring, a stream collects snow melt from what was a bouldered pasture. Maybe it has always paused a few weeks here. Sedges, saplings, lost leaves soaking in two feet of water. This year, the clock chuck catches in our throats. The way a song announces it is back and never left. We climb down to the pool, glimpse water quivering, bodies splayed, tossing sunlight, perfect in their abandon, waiting for that brief ecstatic violence. We pause our cautious footfalls knowing we might hush them back to silence. Bodies green, shocking pink, too close. The sudden flip and dive shunned unwelcome wedding guests. Stillness is the only chance left to us. We freeze until they rise, recover voice and dance. Patience lets them act as if we're gone. Something almost like acceptance. And then I admit I've always worshipped wild blackberries. So the title of this poem is that blackberries are a resident god. You know, paganism seems to come more naturally these days. This is in two parts. They lure with the offer of perfection into their green fire. No hand reaching goes unburned. Hours later, all the itch and stinging we could ask and more. This alone is proof of holiness. They have their years, their seasons. They do not give one place their name, but approach even to the outskirts of the city when the time is right. It seems easy, almost proper not to notice them giving refuge as they do to small nests and burrows. They are dignified, sometimes thought to be indifferent as though they knew the dangers of too much praise. But such perishable flesh we think whenever their fruit meets our lips, what peril for a god who dwells amidst our industry? I hesitate to offer anything except my thanks, hand stained purple, pierced and pierced until my little box is full and then my mouth. I stand, it seems, discovered in my body on this steep hillside all around me sweet flesh jubilant. And then the companion I'm on a step ladder in the company of wasps finger staining with succulent fruit. Mid-August and the work I need to do grows faster than weeds, though some of it has to do with weeds, but waxing, but wax wings wait just beyond the fence and I, like them, am a determined scavenger. Nothing I nurtured this throng of needles, red pebbles, plumping to impossible purple. I'm on the third step of the ladder, lured through corridors of thorns, call it giving blood, this delight in peril, my greedy hand stretched for the farthest berry indifferent to the stab and gash, thrilled by the unstable footing. What irresistible finding, this great unearned, this freely given, right next to my tended garden. We decide it to put us in the middle and then just dance through the performance. It's not really an ecstatic dance, but more of a microphone and music stand dance. I don't wanna know, what's this? That's a brush. I'd like to introduce this song just by saying, Ruth brought this to me and I was like, Ruth, I don't have any time to learn anything. I don't mind rehearsing here and there, but I usually just make it up as I go, like the last song. But this one you can't make up, but I gotta tell you, I am very grateful she brought this because, can you introduce the song for me? Yeah, so this is Chopra and Nocturne number 20 and it's just one of those pieces that just captures you and takes you away. And I knew if I brought it to D that he wouldn't do it the way that we've all heard it, but he would do it. Yeah, and sort of, yeah. And it's fun, because I'm more of a street music theorist. I kind of made that up as I went to. I didn't go to school or take any classes, but I learned how to read music when I was five or six. So if you have kids or grandkids, so when they learn foreign languages, if you learn it really young, the sponge concept is true. You can absorb everything. So I was really grateful I learned how to read because when I got stuck in a box with music in my 20s and 30s, I taught myself classical music because I just needed to get out of the stuckness. And learning classical guitar helped me actually become a better jazz and rock and blues and bluegrass and all the other genres of musician because that's really where a lot of it comes from there. So long story short, it was great. We spent some time together. When we actually did the work, it took about 15, 20 minutes to translate this to a guitar for the back rhythm and Ruth takes care of all these wonderful notes in front of me. And so I basically just got to make up my own part. For sure. And because... And I said yes or no every time. Yeah, exactly. And because it was done so long ago, there's no issues with a copyright. We're all set. No one's getting arrested tonight. Okay. I think I'm ready and I get to start it, right? This has gotten a lot lower. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, I'm really good at this stuff. How are you our roadie? I'm interested right now. Usually she just has to do all the electronics and we can... I got that. Thank you both so much. That is just incredible. So I think I'm gonna start with a poem. You know, I think we've all done... I know I have done those things in your life where you wake up one night at night and you just think, oh my God, I did that. And this isn't funny. This is just those things that just shock you. Say, how could I have done that? This is one of those. Sorry to share it with you. They didn't come back. When I plant strawberries, I grow three times what we need, give courts and courts away, pretending I've learned something about generosity. Really, I want Ronnie Amidon to show up and pick the fruit with me. He was my first friend when we moved from New York to North Danville. He quickly realized it was his job to teach me how to be a farm boy. Soaked me with warm sports from his favorite Holstein, Teet's full to leaking as milking time approached. I learned to grab a Teet and spray him back. He taught me how to grip and lift hay bales, home manure, so it dropped through hinged planks in the gutter to piles below the stable. Scatter sawed us bedding from an aluminum shovel evenly on wet worn wood beneath the cows. He was delighted his ordinary days of work were full of knowledge I was eager to absorb. His mother welcomed me, fed us oatmeal mornings when I stayed there. We shared a spoon and bowl at the white and emerald table in her kitchen, popped with black craters where it had chipped away. We poured cream streaked milk on the oatmeal, added heaps of sugar to overwhelm the salty bitterness of it. The wood stove warmed our backs, the wood smoke laced the air. My father bought their farm. Not because we needed it or we're good farmers, we weren't, but because they were selling and he could. We drove down to the house. We now thought of his hours to inspect the property. We knew they'd planted and mulched strawberries, the prior spring in the front yard next to the rusting disc arrow. It was June, those berries waited for us. But Ronnie and his mother were there picking. They'd filled several baskets full of glossy fruit. As we drove into the yard, they looked up at us with the sudden wariness of strangers. Two weeks ago, this had been the home Ronnie had always known. Two weeks ago, we had been neighbors, friends. It seized me like a fever, a rush of righteousness. I'd never known before the ferocity of possession. I said, you have no right. I wouldn't look him in the eye. Ronnie said, but we planted them and did the work. His mother said, come on, let's go. They got into their car and drove away. Our conversations about everything from the trout to sex to chainsaws to our teacher, Mrs. Edgerton, went with him. Years later, I learned Ronnie took his own life because he couldn't marry the cousin he loved. I had never sought it, but I thought I've lost the chance to apologize about the strawberries. I can't even remember if we let them take the fruit they had already picked. So, this is called working for Ray in a little different tone. Ray is our neighbor, the vermoder who helps people like me who think we know how to do things, do the things that really need to get done. Working for Ray, it's not easy working for people who think they know what they want done, but have no idea what it takes to get it done. Their money makes them think they're smart enough to give instructions. Ray Hickory runs into all this all the time. So, when I hire him to help set posts for deer fence on my neighbor's stony land, I end up working for him. This is risky. Ray is no fan of incompetence. Michael and I had tried a post hole digger, then an auger on his tractor's PTO, but the holes veered off in all directions. Looks like you had a team of woodchucks on the job, Ray says. Michael would be best. You mark the spots, I'll excavate. Then you can hold the posts while I fill in and pack the soil around them. The day we did it, he kept nudging me. You really want that much distance between posts? Where's the log for the next hole? It's almost dug. Hold the damn thing straight, it's tipping north. You're slowing down, you must be getting old. It felt like working with my brothers when determination that we get it right meant much more than being nice and was a lot more fun. Once or twice I told him, more fill here. And the steel bucket glided over, dumped precisely the amount of dirt required, tamped it down and moved on. When we were done, I wrote the check. He looked around and said, not bad work today. You did okay. And this one is for my father. This is part of a series of poems I've been working on and reworking for my father. We moved up to Vermont and I say we started farming. He was a terrible farmer. Terrible farmer, very enthusiastic. I'm glad to have me as a 10 year old to do a lot of the work. This is called Bumble. Before we renew our conversation, let me thank you for the breath you and mom planted in me. Now, almost 80 years ago, John Mallory's having his 80th birthday so I just wanted to acknowledge him as someone takes John. I think we were talking about breath with interruptions no longer than a minute in a body that's probably replaced itself a dozen times, maybe a hundred I don't know and a huge worn sloppy sack of memories mixed, marbled, stretched, strangled, folded, fangled, fed, neglected, fraught with fragments dreamed. It's time to let some grudges go. I've lived long enough to feel the boredom for them in my children. They're complete irrelevance to my grandchildren. The staleness as they linger in my mouth. They just want the story. Get on with it, they say, though I have given each of them enough to grieve in their current generations. So let me celebrate the gray green skin of Hubbard Squash, dozens of them after a frost, a canopy of leaves collapsed to brown gauze, vines like cables strewn after a hurricane, 30 pounders. One could feed us for a week. The neighbors may be except a few. No takers for the rest. We cracked and fed the pungent innards, seeds, the sweet orange flesh to cows all winter. And cucumbers piled under blankets jellied by a killing frost, useful only for throwing at each other, splashing slop and laughter on our bodies and the crusted ground. Cottages around Joe's pond, a jeep full of zucchini, beets and wilting lettuce at each stop you argued with me, whose turn it was to get out and try to sell. Thanks even for the hopeless tools I remember with my body, the rusted pulp saw with no set to its teeth that lodged in the first inch of every branch I tried. Axes that mostly bruised the wood. A massive mustard colored chainsaw, McCulloch, that you finally bought and had me lug from tree to tree but thought you didn't need to sharpen. A horse drawn tiller on the hillside. You had me ride the horse and steer, yelling I should keep her step tight to the upper row, even then the tiller tugged itself and you downslope smothering seedlings in the lower. Without intending, you instilled a passion for the closer look, the right tool, a fondness for the sharpened edge, the satisfactions of a thoughtful plan, perhaps even a terraced garden. Determination that lofty enterprise can't survive oblivious indifference to the details. I love the way, for instance, an apparently clumsy group of bees can fill a summer day with a success of its million small precisions. Okay, well I actually wasn't planning to do this. You know, I'm reading essays and excerpts of essays. I'm a guy with a pair of binoculars and a butterfly net writing about nature. A lot of people don't know this about me but it turns out I do have kind of a body of poetry. Two poems that I've written. I wasn't really planning this, you know, Scutters of Poetry. I wasn't really planning this but I could recite one of the poems for you if you'd like. It's kind of weighty, it's about mortality but if you're willing, I could sort of say the thing. The poem is called When I Leave This Earth. When I leave this earth, let me die of apple crisp. Actually it's been on your revision a lot, that poem. Like I think it was like in 2018, I think it was date bars. I'm not quite sure but I don't remember. So I've just returned from this sort of adventure in the American Southeast. I was down there for five weeks, mostly chasing nature, walking, reading, writing, meditating. And I had it in me to locate one, well, two butterflies in particular while I was on this trip. And this is a great trip for me. I visited friends, I went to new places and I actually found myself in a monastery, in a trappist monastery, where I kind of was in retreat for four days. And it turns out that one of these butterflies that I was looking for is sort of radically found on the monastery ground. It's a beautiful monastery. And the, I guess he called himself the Abbot Emeritus of the monastery, the former abbot of the monastery, the head of the monastery. Father Francis Michael is a complete and utter nature geek. Like he, when he's not in his robes and he is out documenting nature, he's been a cloistered monk for close to 40 years. He's 74 now and he's just like, how many of you know iNaturalist? This is a monk, he's all over iNaturalist. He's submitting sightings online, everything he's seen, he's, and he knows everything that is on the monastery grounds. He rarely leaves the monastery grounds. And so we connected. And I wanted to see some of the things that he's been seeing. But then it occurred to me that I also wanted to look at my own sort of reverence for the sacred and look at his vows and his passion for being there and his, the way he sees the world. And we see the world in completely different ways. So we, so I did. I went to the monastery and in the monastery I found God. And this was God to me on the monastery. And these are orange tips. It's kind of nice when butterflies get, I mean like they look. And I just have a thing for these butterflies. The one on the lower, the one on the upper right is an orange tip by photo. It's a different species than the other three. It's an orange tip by photograph in the desert in Southern California. The other three are called falcade, that's called Sarah orange tip on the right. The other three are falcade orange tips. And you know, I'm gonna tell you a little bit about orange tips. And there was actually, and there's another butterfly involved here, another group of butterflies that I'll also talk about. This is something that I completely rewrote last night. Orange tips are free spirits, springtime unleashed, flighty and ephemeral, they appear out of nowhere, dart past you as if you do not matter, because you don't. Stop to sip nectar for about a few seconds and then fly away without any regard for the likes of you. Elegant and elusive orange tips are like your unrequited crush in high school. You are in love and yet you do not exist. I've managed to move on, Rosalind Hurwitz. Even so, despite their flightiness, even so, I know of no self-respecting lepidopterist who does not love orange tips. And we love them even though they are among the most difficult of butterflies to observe and to photograph. For every hundred shots you take of orange tips, 99 are blurry, one is a keeper. And yet, in their presence, you do not complain. I don't care how often your mere thinking about being with an orange tip sends it away from you into flight. How often you drop to your arthritic knee only to have the orange tip leave before you can even lift your camera to your eye. How often you think that at long last you're getting keeper orange tip photos only to discover that your camera's shutter speed is set for another galaxy. Or how often you squat to witness an orange tip only to get cactus thorns in your butt. I don't care how often any of that stuff happens. You do not complain. Ever. There is no complaining in the company of orange tips. Only equanimity and joy. Maybe even transcendence. Well, there's more. And yet, thank you. And yet, if orange tips are fickle and flighty, metal marks are phlegmatic and faithful. Sorry about that. They perch on leaves or flowers or twigs and they pose for you and pose and pose and flash for you their glitter and they do not fly away. In that sense, metal marks are like newfound love, like something so beautiful that you might at first avert your gaze because maybe you're not really worthy of such good fortune. Metal marks are like your most beautiful celebrity crush or a sunset or the northern lights there before you within your grasp for as long as you care to look. And maybe then, that's when you discover that metal marks are true to their name. Butterflies marked with metal. Glitter or strands of silver, gold, aqua blue or other sparkles. Little metal mark flashes silver glitter among its orange and black. Blue metal mark is a steely cerulean overstatement. Sometimes the metals are precious and inconspicuous. Take red bordered metal mark. At first glance, you might be blind to specks of aqua and violet, blue and rust. So stop, take your breath, take a closer look. Now, explore again the terrain of the metal mark like lovers navigating one another with touch. The glitter will be visible and then inescapable. It's as if a butterfly wasn't already beautiful enough that it must also be adorned in jewels. Okay, here's the bad news about metal marks and orange tips. They don't get to Vermont. You know, it's really, I think it's really our state's only flaw. We don't have metal marks and orange tips. They live farther south where I've been wandering to spring, but I bring you their good tidings. Orange tips and metal marks could have ended the Civil War. They're the South's proclamation to the North. Spring is coming. It's the only spring we've got. So let's rejoicing it together. What's coming in spring? You know, after all, this is what's on the way and this is just April, you know. After that, this is these moths, all of these moths I photographed in my yard in a one week period in the month of July. They all came to my yard here in Montpelier. Came to my light at my sheet. So we're gonna hear more music and then we're gonna take a little intermission and I should remind you that if you're come late and you haven't had a chance to pay or contribute, you can do that during intermission. There are also books available. D's got CDs there and Scudder's books available. A donation will go to the Nature Center and so we'll hear some music and then we'll take a break for about 10 minutes. And there's team cookies. Oh, there's team cookies, yes. Hey Brian, quick question. Yeah. How'd you get them to post for you? They sit near your UV light. I asked them nicely. Well, we have the perfect piece for after both Scudder's poetry and Brian's photographs and dissertation, don't we? What better, what a better song to play. I'm trying to teach you. We're gonna play a new version. What is it about? Clouds. We're gonna play a song about clouds. We're the butterflies. And I do want to say because we're talking about lots of sacred stuff. This is a piece called Omage. It is on the CDs. The first song that's out there. I know we don't listen to CDs as much anymore. And I was gonna put it on vinyl, but some people don't do that either. And I'm not at a point yet where you can just bring in one of those things. What do they call it again? Like a drive or something like that? And you can just plug it into this thing and then you get the music without all the supersonic sound. It's like compressing. But we'll get it live. And this is a piece called Omage. And I wrote this for my mother in her last week here. Cause life is precious and I'm really happy we're all here doing this. Cause we're alive. And I appreciate sharing this all with you. Yes. I'm gonna play this one for John. This is... Show and tell. Just gonna pass this around. Seashell there. This is called Touching Extinction. Is a landlocked vermonter more terrestrial than aquatic? The ocean is another planet. Immense aqua incognita. The seas cover 70% of the Earth's surface. They conceal incomprehensible biodiversity that few of us will ever get to explore or experience. And if you're an inquisitive landlocked terrestrial biologist, you gotta wonder what you're missing down deep. But here's the thing. And this is really unlike almost anything in nature. Tides. Twice a day, the tides cast ashore. The oceans winsome remains. Some of the most ornate and precious manifestations of life on the planet. Oops, that's not coming. Gifts of Poseidon. Forge from calcium and carbon. And yet the word we have for this treasure of biological diversity seems feeble. Even an injustice. Seashells. I discovered this when I myself set out to learn a little about seashells. Marine mollusks. The stage was the Rachel Kerson Reserve, a barrier island complex off the North Carolina coast. And basically during this winter writing retreat I took there, I would paddle my canoe just offshore, a short way out to the reserve. And I'd walk, I'd wander really often alone this three mile shoal as part of the preserve. In like, on any given day my aspirations really weren't that profound. Walking, thinking, writing in my notebook, birding and learning a few seashells. Like picking at them like a plover on the beach. I began with the abundant including various arcs which are classic bivalves. Kind of like those three in the upper right. The pale ones. That most of us would crudely pass off as some sort of clam. And after only a few days I could distinguish even while walking past them in the sand subtle differences in shape and curves of incongruous arc, blood arc and the ever present ponderosa arc. There was satisfaction in that. Like knowing the various maple species in my forest or the butterflies in my garden. And then one day I noticed the shell. It was a lot like the others, but it wasn't quite right. It matched nothing I had been seeing on the beach nor anything in my field guides. So I took some measurements and pictures and I asked experts for an identification. Okay, I did that part online. And after a bit of uncertainty and even some minor disputes, the shell turned out to be an arc without a common name called Noesha Limula which lived from the late Pliocene to early Pleistocene. And that basically means this bivalve when it lived on earth went about its business through the ages and then went extinct 1.8 million years ago. Gone, forever. And yet there on the beach, I held its remains in the palm of my hand. Most of the seashells we find are relatively new only recently separated from their living inhabitants. Some might be as old as the beach. My Noesha shell was a fossil, but fossils often come to us as like abstractions, you know, embedded in rock. My Noesha really didn't differ that much from the zillions of other seashells I was finding on the beach. And two million years ago, the North Carolina shoreline wasn't really that much different than it is now. Nobody though, not even an early hominid was on the beach to protest or witness or cause the extinction of Noesha Limula. It passed naturally. After all, extinction, especially mass extinction, has been a way of life on earth for hundreds of millions of years. The causes, shifting continental plates, rising and falling sea levels, volcanic eruptions, toxic gases, asteroid strikes and their ilk, all causes of mass extinctions. But now add to that litany of calamities, human beings. We have the power to warm a planet to deplete and destroy its biological diversity and yet seemingly no capacity whatsoever to do much of anything about it. Our science and our laws, our sustainable development and our carbon offsets, our multitudes of cop gatherings of nations, they don't seem to be coming to the rescue anytime soon. So, until they might, what do we have? Like what's gonna get us through? What's our faith? Well, we have ourselves, the stuff that makes us human, the stuff that we've been talking about tonight, love, art, music, poetry, we have each other. And I think we have our intrinsic capacity for wonder and nature. I think it still resides in everyone. Some of us, it's more buried than in others. So this month, that intrinsic capacity for nature, it'll be expressed in a kid dipping a net into a frog pond. In May, on our way to work, it'll be the dawn chorus of songbirds. In June, fireflies and orchids, July brings fritillaries and serviceberry fruits on and ever onward. And tonight, our wonder tonight. Well, for anyone who cares to listen, you can step right up and if you hold this to your ear, just right. You can hear the poetry of Rachel Carson's ocean in this queen helmet shell that I brought back from the preserve that bears her name. And that white shell we just passed around? That's Noesha Lemula. That's among our many wonders tonight with the poetry and the music. Tonight, we touch the remains of something living on earth before we were human beings living on earth. Over the course of 1.8 million, 1.8 million years, together, we've become time travelers. We go down to Cape Cod every spring and it sort of becomes a part of who we are. And this is a poem called Visitors. This is Galpond, Cape Cod. We've come back to taste the sea's restless salt, measure a year in feet of dunes and roses toppled to the sea. But this afternoon of sun, we retreat like gulls to Sweetwater, a place of small motions. Our paddles stir bright ripples on a pond named for its visitors. We drag our canoe through barely communicating streams like families joined by merest trickles of conversation. Higgins pond, then hidden herring pond where oak trees feed the water with lost leaves and lily pads press painted turtles toward the sun. Here is the stillness we seek to escape the ocean's generous erasure. We paddle as much to keep from moving as to move back to the rock that becomes a snapping turtle seconds later in the mind. Sunfish hover and underwater moonscapes as our shadow drifts across. A great shade colored bird watches every motion glides at the corner of our sight from its oak limb into deeper woods. How can a place this frail be so deft in the art of permanence? I believe the hedge footing into the dark water will always be full of birdsong. The webbed fronds stroke the dark backs of bass forever. Some part of us will always blossom here like apple tree spilling this year's paddles on the water. A white bowl gapes at us. I raise it slowly with my paddle. It pours outward from its rest, emptying the pond's weight, a handful of white bones from the turtle that it was. In the inviting air its stench releases. I give the water back its memory. Not far from here last winter at Coast Guard Beach, another storm ate further into the memory of dunes. Revealed, stones sharpened, ash traces from their fires. The brown lens of a pond like this, clutching stumps and bones dense with the smell of life compressed. We return to Higgins pond at the stream mouth to huge bass brows among the reeds. I stand, point wildly where they've just been. Pursue them with the canoe. Determine you should see them too. At last to quiet me and calm the rocking boat. You say, I see, I see. Gently mocking the urgency that heals so closely on our wonder. And this is another one from my father called virtue. I've been waiting, yes, it's 53 years for you to come back in a dream and finish the conversation we never quite got to. So maybe that means start the conversation about what you thought was good. That is what really made you happy, joyful even. Though I got clues like when you threw grasshoppers in the ponds you made for the trout we caught in the streams we fished releasing them in those pools I think you hoped would be for them trout heaven. I never got the trout side of the story though they leapt for those grasshoppers with speckled bodies and their greedy mouths which was a hopeful sign. I'm waiting with piles of broken glass you might recognize there in the corner. It's what's left of the really delicate stuff, sanctity, purity, chastity. You told us we're virtue. Though they seemed like more rules to teach us shame since you used such solemn voice lecturing about them. But you didn't use it when you made jokes that brought our mother's blush. And we loved it when you did that. So such brittle things seemed periled in a house like ours. A fact that was somewhat comforting because speaking for myself they certainly were. And then barn swallows for my grandson, Cashel. Here millennia before the barns that named them they promptly claimed those beams and rafters and the perpetual refuge of sun-stippled dusk, moats drifting weightless through light shafts between boards, fields torn from forests, exploded into daisies, summer grasses, black-eyed susans, asters, sprawling vetch and thriving webs of creatures, gifts for lightning capture on the wing. They flitted through openings, one a fist-sized outline of a barn cut out for them to nests pasted on hand-hewn wood, each summer haymows stacked tight with fragrant bales, inched toward their raucous mouths. Urgency wider than the tiny heads they hinged, echoing our urgency as summer was brought in. We could not tell who welcomed whom. They never bragged about their longer residence. My grandson has a friend whose grandfather lives in the valley, still haze some fields, fields and old barn we visit, shallow swallows chatter from the rafters. I embarrass him in yet another way, determined to describe the ordinary joy of being in each other's company. And this is called touch. A week after surgery, midnight, I wake to feel your fingers lightly explore the remaining bandage, stitches almost healed, surrounding flesh still swollen, all had been longing for that touch, tender as the way you clean and dress the wound. But this is touch for its own sake. Who would think to ask for it? Who in the surgeries, the shelters and the grief of our cruel streets dares say, just touch me? I think of all the things I don't deserve that bring me guilt, but this will never be among them. You could not remember doing it. You smiled, knowing I must have lain there, wishing it would never end. I think now, Dee, he'll be right there. He'll be right there. Oh my God. So I'm going to read a poem that was written for the service of a beloved friend. And I've kept working on it. It really is a statement of what I hope we can be striving for, which is something I call goodness. I've given up on virtue. I think that's a little squirrely virtue. Righteousness, yeah, we got lots of that. Way too much if you ask me. And then, you know, there's all these things that come in part from my religious tradition that really just don't reach me. But the notion of us as human, as a species, finding some kind of thing we can call goodness that's allowing us to survive and move ahead in this world, that's what I guess I'm hoping for. So Dee and I have not practiced. In fact, he enthusiastically said we wouldn't. And this is a poem called Offering. And as I read it, he's gonna play. I don't know what he's gonna play. He probably doesn't know what he's gonna play. No idea. And then after that, Dee will sing a song that he's composed and that will close our evening and our time together. So thank you all for being here. I also want to acknowledge that there are folks from Randolph where they're having poem city during this month. And I know Bradford has a poem town. I got poem city wrong. These are the satellite operations, I guess. And St. John'sbury does. I don't know other places do too. Yeah, but do they have pickle malt? I don't know. They will soon. It comes with the territory. So this is called Offering. May our love be like children's still fearless in their hope. Mighty as tides, surging in the Bay of Fundy. And when our bloom of optimism and easy confidence ebb, may we turn our love to daily work, practicing intimacy with each other and our only earth. Patient, attentive, sometimes overcome, willing to struggle with ourselves, be brave with our beloved, even with those who count themselves opponents. May love's determination fuel compassion, wake our imagination, unleash the startle of creation, aware it's this conspiracy of the universe that makes this possible for us. May we share riotous irreverence, hilarity at the absurd surrounding us. Laugh at the pompous, ponderous, pretentious, self-appointed mighty. Expose not just the cruelty and immorality of injustice, but its smoke and mirrors of inevitability. Remembering what it has destroyed, how much it continues to steal, dismissing its blame and excuses, saying no, building something better. May we acknowledge the dark weight of suffering and grief that pervades even our greatest joy and triumph, our hard-won confidence. Admit how much we need each other, the stitch of generosity, the heal of forgiveness, even slowly welcomed. May we forsake glib dismissals, learned blindnesses that stumble and bumble us into each other, shrinking, cheating everyone. May we let life astonish us in its vastness and detail, inventing, doing, creating, stunning us to humility, grateful to our wellspring earth. May we quit the games of bargained mercy, the wasteland of grumpy entitlement, the cruel complicity of fear. May we hold each other in hearts fierce with tenderness, giggle with delight, proud of tears, aching but unashamed of grief, bold in our joy. May the goodness we learn become a vast shared breathing. It's funny, because everything I heard the last two hours all comes to this moment, and the poem that Scutter read about touch is in this song, and a lot of elements all come into the song. So the album out there is an instrumental album. When I made that album, I had this vision of making like an instrumental album that could, I did a project on an experiential anatomy and physiology course I took in Burlington. I think that teacher actually made it up on the fly. So it's perfect for me. And I did my dissertation on how, I wanted to become a music therapist, but I didn't really want to invest all that money, and you really can't do it in Vermont, like insurance doesn't cover it, so. But I'm like in the music therapy, I think it's the best medicine in the world, along with poetry, are everything we're doing here. I think this is what like keeps me alive. It keeps a lot of us alive. And so I did this album with all these instrumentals and different keys, because different keys, what I learned doing research, they all have different effects on our body, our organs, key of ease. Really, red resonance in the heart, key of B flat, I remember resonates in the nervous system, and I remember playing for a gentleman when I was doing a lot of volunteer work with respite houses and playing for folks. And this gentleman had Parkinson's disease, and he hadn't spoken in like three years when I played improvising the key of B flat, he just started talking. And you couldn't really understand the words he was saying, but you could understand what he was saying through what I was feeling, and the intuition, and everything connecting. And I played for an hour and he didn't stop talking, because almost like he was telling me his life story, he was giving me fatherly advice, his wife was crying, it was a real beautiful moment, so beautiful that I probably left my body when I had to leave. I went down the one way street and had to pull over and just sit in the car for about an hour before I kept driving, because I was like, you know, it was a different dimension. So long story short, a lot came up tonight, and you know, this song is called Hopeful, and I guess I could talk for an hour about everything that's happened, but you know, we are in a, it's like the time feels like a critical mass, you know, we're all here, Vermont's a great state, like I feel safe here, and you know, but I'm forever hopeful, you know, I have this nine year old son, you know, and luckily we balance out screen time with lots of music and sports and just things, because like that's the default right now for everybody, it's our phones and our screens, and for me it's what's affecting for all the great things it's doing, it's also disconnecting us from each other and our souls and our spirits and all these wonderful worlds and science just wants to explain everything, and that's great, but you know, if I think why I approach music the way I approach it, because I want there to be a mystery, I don't wanna know everything, because then I, what's the fun in that? If I know everything, then what am I gonna do with it? So I'd rather not know, I don't think we ever will know, you know, and so therefore I share hopeful with you, and I hope you enjoy it. And he doesn't know what I'm gonna do with this. Yeah, just to bring it all together at the end of the day. That's hopeful, that's hopeful. I'm hopeful, I'm hopeful that she's gonna nail it. Give it up for Ruth Dyingstein, maybe. Ruth's one of my favorite people, we haven't played music in what? Like what, three years, or maybe once she came over, during COVID, well we're still here, but you know what I'm saying. And so when this all came up with Scutter and Brian, I was just like, yes, I get to play with Ruth. And I need some healing, can you think of anybody more healing?