 I guess we'll move it back and then we'll move it up when you guys go like that and then we'll move it up. Although Naomi's going to step before you climb. So she doesn't need this does she? Yeah. She does? Yeah. So what we do is move the mic back. Yeah. Keep that here. Just a little. Okay. Yeah, that's good. I'm sorry. And then after she goes, we'll just move it back. Yeah, we'll school as well. It might not be that good. I think that's our cue here. I guess we're starting. Ryan's always starting stuff. Always starting stuff. Come on, Ryan. I'm not letting you start anymore. It's good. Thank you all for coming. There are some open seats up here. If anyone is still needing a seat and a couple over here on the edge. So if you don't like your seat or if you want a seat, maybe if people join us at the end, you can wave your hand in there if you have an open seat next to you. Anyway, hi. Thank you all for coming. I'm Naomi Heindel, executive director here at North Branch Nature Center. And I'm so glad to be here with all of you this beautiful evening for an evening of reflections and celebration of nature through the spoken, written, and musical arts. Presented in partnership with the Kellogg Hubbard Libraries' home city and recorded tonight by Orca Media. So a couple quick things before we get started with the program. Thank you. First, a land acknowledgement. The first flowers are up out on our trails. The fish will be biting soon. The snows have finally maybe left for the year. And I was recently reminded that for thousands of years, this would have been a time of year when abnaki families would be packing up their winter camps up here in the uplands after a winter of hunting big game and heading in their canoes downstream to gathering spots along Lake Champlain to see how others had made out over the course of the winter to celebrate the warmer weather and longer days coming. And here we are gathered tonight on abnaki land to do the exact same thing. Second, we have a sound system now. Hooray! Wave your arms around if we need to turn it up or turn it down or whatever. Third, there will be a brief intermission tonight in part so that you can enjoy this beautiful exhibit on the walls by artist Nick Netto. These are the illustrations done to accompany former North Branch Nature Center Director of Education Amy Butler's new book, Educating Children Outdoors. So should you wish to purchase any of these pieces or prints or cards or Scudder's Poetry book or DCD's or Amy's book that we have in the back or anything else from our gift shop, I would be, or Marjorie's book. Marjorie's book is out there too, thank you. I would be happy to help you with that as would Lane Fury and Emily Seifer and Em Sloan. So we will all be milling around. As you know, this evening is a fundraiser for North Branch Nature Center's 2024 annual fund, which means that by being here tonight, you are contributing to our core work and our mission of connecting people with the natural world. So thank you so much. The presenters are offering this event as a fundraiser because they want to share their love and support of North Branch with you. We're pretty low-key in how we do that so there will be no cowbells or paddles raised or anything like that but we do welcome donations and memberships. It is our spring membership season so whether you've been involved at North Branch for nearly 30 years or this is your first time here tonight, please consider joining as a member or donating and any of us here on staff can help you with that. Before I turn the stage over one more thing. We are in the process right now of planning for NBNC's future and would love to include your voices in our strategic plan survey. So if you haven't yet, please share your thoughts through this survey. QR codes here. Wi-Fi password is North Branch. All one word, all our case. And help us shape the next five years at North Branch. Okay, thanks for letting me share all of that with you. Now I get to introduce five fabulous members of the Central Vermont community, longtime friends of NBNC and folks who deeply love our natural world and our human connections with it. So please welcome Scutter Parker, Brian Pfeiffer, Marjorie Ryerson, Ruth Einstein, and Dee Davis. You're so good you filled up those two seats. There are a couple more if anybody wanders in. As a minister, it was always impossible to get people into the front seats. So it's very rewarding to see how well you've done tonight. Come with me. Join me in the pasture where placid brown cows cut paths across the slope and trample ripe mud near the spring that sprouts in the knoll's crease. Listen to the small explosions of their tasting, long inhalations of their drinking. Sit beside me on the familiar boulder where moss grows brittle in the bright eye of the sun and miniature gray lichen columns bear red-lipped bowls across the rusty quartz. I haven't gone for years. How could I have known I was waiting for you even then? And I think that's how I feel about tonight. And I think that's probably the way Brian and Marjorie and Ruth and who's that other guy? And Dee feel. We get a chance to explore our own lives, look into the world around us and then share it with you and have the connection that comes from that intimacy of opening up the stories of our own lives and inviting you to share yours and focus on exploring yours way beyond this setting. So that's what we're doing tonight and that is a gift for all of us and thank you for being here. I want to thank Naomi and North Branch and I want to thank Kellogg Hubbard Library but Naomi's done such a good job at all of that. The art is incredible. Thank you to Orca Media for being here. And I want to thank my wife and constant partner in all of this, Susan Sussman, who is lurking somewhere. There she is, okay. And she's a constant partner except when I abandon her and she takes over on the electronics and things with buttons which she does incredibly well. She's like our manager. She's not in our roadie. So I have, I managed to come out with a book in 2020 just at the peak of COVID and so many events were there to be canceled and that was called Safe As Lightning and I forgot to bring any of them tonight but you can order them at Bear Ponds if you'd like. Safe As Lightning is the title poem for that volume. Long before guilt was invented, this stream managed rocks without it. Never a threat or weedle just shifted them with strength when it was gathered. Changes from every storm were there for my exploration. That's how its small riffles and dark pools became such freedom for me. Neither worms I pierced nor speckled fish I hooked cried out in accusation. In turn, they claimed me. Taught me to fin in plebs beneath a dark green overhang of rock. Oh, how the heart is taught to bargain. Search the hard ground of obedience and its deceptions. I would rather sink my feet in black, lonely banks where a holy beaver pond spills disconcerting welcome through the trees. There is no promise I will be safe if I relinquish. It is a place where for a few years burk trout fatten and silt accumulates until some torrent tears the sticks apart and I come exploring next June's fertile mud. Nothing I can promise spares the children. My grandson shudders at colliding arguments of thunder but will not be denied from lightning. And the other way we express our love and connection is by building things. This organization, the library, the bridge, all kinds of the things that give us a chance to be together in a part of each other. But there's one thing that didn't get built. This is called a coal plant in Iowa. A coal plant in Iowa that never got built provides me with stacks of paper for the printer and I have scribbled notes made lists for years on the back sides of evidence from earnest witnesses declaring the benefits of burning coal. The first drafts of this poem were all printed on the other side of a 2007 long-term reliability assessment. How quickly the enormity of what did not happen eludes me. It was January. The wind roared snow across the fields of Marshalltown. Most recited that the billion dollar plant would make things better, I was there to disagree. They still packaged beef in Marshalltown and now that same wind makes its own electricity. It was a ritual of formal testimony to establish need. There were rules to guide what could be said. I dressed appropriately, spoke my careful argument. There are rules for poetry as well but it's easier to break them. That other talk goes on and on. The words and rules so slow to change. At least one coal plant doesn't. A foot-high stack of paper waiting blank-side up is all that's left of it. This is a trip that Susan and I took along with others and looking around. A couple of others who were here. A branch to southwest Texas and this is a poem about Star County Park in Texas. His skin is like, we're waiting, we're looking for seats. There are three over there. Yeah. Let's do this. Yeah. Or if you want someone to sit in your lap, you know, it's whatever. I think we're going to do it. Okay. Star County Park, Texas. His skin is like desert varnish, dark from dust and time and sun. He has laid claim to the rotting gazebo. It's a ray of faded novels, unused self-help books. It's 90 degrees and it's just getting started. So we join him in the shade. Someone still mows the field. The campsites offer cracked cement tables, tilted brick benches. He is gracious. We are awkward in what has become his personal public space. He used to work for Pepsi making labels until he couldn't take it any longer. Now he says he's on his journey. So are we. He shows his snake stick with two pencil points to hold the catch. Snake hunting has been hard the last few days. We are on the prowl for Vermillion fly catchers. Binoculars at the ready. He says they're all over the place singing in the morning. It's time for lunch. We get full bags and coolers from the van. He readies his moldy bread and milk. We offer cheese and turkey in a spinach wrap, water in a plastic bottle. Then grapes and a couple oranges. He says thank you very kindly. You belonging strangely welcoming. We find the bird. It's tiny insistent brilliance. A creature just surviving brings such pride for us. Delight fulfillment. We watch it whisk from tree to tree. Go back up and thank him. This is called the fox. It was when we lived up on Hill Street in Cliff Street. It wasn't as Hill Street, it was Cliff Street in Montpellier. She sat calmly on the neighbor's porch after two feet of snow. That was enough to bring the whole street outdoors. We'd glimpsed her in the secret of her own pursuits. A smudge of rust at the woods edge. Now she sat there so much more intimate than myth. Almost too small to be real. No evidence of cunning. As though she would gladly come inside out of February's storm. Stand back we said. Don't let the pets out. Make sure the children stay away. Police were summoned. Fish and wildlife was besieged with calls. Soft hairs bristled on our necks. Before she left she paused in front of me. Full coat soft russet. Legs delicate. Black stocking. She stood inside at distance my body had been taught to keep. Squinting at me. Neither offering nor asking. Then trotted down the path the neighbor had dug to come up and see for himself. Disappeared in the snows deep before the officials came. And then finally the poem that's going to be the title of my new volume coming out sometime probably in next year. The Poem of the World. The poem of the world reveals itself like a dose hoof tapping ice till she can drink. Startles like the rust of purple on this falls for Cynthia leaves though it may have used that small voice every year unheard. Blinks like red and blue potatoes dug this morning drying in the sun testing their startled untrained eyes. It's the unexpected tickle the fit of shared laughter in our urgency of touching that becomes another way of making love. It's an ocean beach of pebbles that suddenly starts singing each stone its own tink together a glorious indifferent song. And it's the voice of each bird I have only heard as morning chorus landing with its own song and bright perfect body in my brain. It is even now I begin to see them the subtraction of birds taking summer with them too busy to announce their leaving. The poem of the world wants me to wake in my own body. It is astonished I might let these supple bones grow brittle. It is the sudden thing I trust. My good friend and co poet fellow poet poet of Marjorie Ryerson whose book views for manhunger is here. She remembered to bring it. She didn't even have anybody to remind her which is really good. And they're going to be for sale out there. So Marjorie welcome and thanks for joining the natural selections team. You've been selected naturally. We're honored to be here with all of you and with two very dear and long time friends. Brian and I have a long history of getting to know each other at The Times Argus way back several centuries ago. It was great. 40 years ago. 40 years ago. So I'm going to read several poems from this book that was published last year and I'm putting together a second book that the designer is working on now. This first poem is called Darkness. We have a choice between types of darkness. The darkness that obscures or the darkness of inner peace. The darkness of loneliness or the dark comfort of one's lover on a winter night. The darkness that haunts long hallways or the darkness that asks us to prepare a longer table. There is the darkness of barren land. But the darkness of moist earth in spring is our sweetest reward. This poem is titled How to write a poem that is brief. Pick a topic like describing a leaf. Don't attempt to write a poem about grief. Avoid any poems describing a thief while you're at it. Skip having a motif and be sure to stay away from comic relief or poems about the great barrier of reef. Instead, write a poem about corned beef or else craft a poem about a handkerchief and don't dare show your finished piece to your favorite editor in chief. This poem came from a real experience. I didn't make up any of these details. It is not in this book. It's coming out in the next book. It's called The End of the Drought. The God's grief breaks wave after wave of thunder. Horsely slams roofs. Streets hide under masks of frothing brown satin. Water sprays from fire hoses hidden in the sky. Aiming for parched fields below. Turning the air as opaque as fog. The birch trees leaves gyrate in circles like a billion pasties glued to something without design or gender. Crisp grass, grass sits passively repelling the assault on its fragile stems. A train hauls through town, water blinding the windows. The greased tracks can't hold the embankments in place. Gravel and mud shimmy into adjacent fields. The air is full of the sound of a thousand bare feet walking through sticky mud. The sound of 20 million librarians saying shhhhhh. Bathtubs are emptied over the edges of roofs. Cracked bleach gardens deflect churning waters that Korean toured Asphalt in search of busy intersections. Quaking dogs hide under benches. This rage, this passion, this gift from anemic clouds is too late for the hay crop. Too meager for depleted reservoirs. Drivers, unable to see through weeping windshields, pull onto the shoulders of roads, climb semi-dazed from their cars. They let the rain soak their shirts, shoes, hair as they turn their faces upward squinting like small children walking out into the noonday sun from a darkened movie theater. Too soon, the pagan celebration slows and stills. The sky lightens, the firemen and librarians go home. Leaky faucets drip from the ends of every pine needle. Drops hang like eyelet lace along the edges of railings, gutters, electric lines. Open blue sky explodes onto center stage. The streets are liquid ribbons racing away as if late for work. Blending with light, this poem is called. It doesn't matter the words we use. Every poem narrates the same story. Each poem attempts to make sense of the jagged past, tries to walk the thin ice of the present. Each poem slips moist fingers into the future, snoops into rooms whose doors are locked. Elsewhere, biologists in antiseptic labs bend over microscopes hoping to discover why words cannot move us closer to our own parched cores. Does it matter that scientists have discovered the dream genes for risk and uncertainty? Does it change anything if the Big Bang never happened? All we need to know is that when our eyes meet those of the sun and don't shrink away, and I'm not talking about the eclipse. I should wear a tips glasses to read this poem. Don't shrink away, we fuse with the spirit of a poem. When what we see coalesces with light, we know ourselves at last. The solitude of November. In the meditation known as November, branches shove thin fingers into ashen air. The first snowflakes drift dizzily down in slow motion as if the clouds are just learning their numbers, counting out one plus one makes five. Naked November holds out her bare palms welcoming the imminent darkness to come. In this month, lanky rivers settle heavily onto their beds, unobserved, undisturbed, relieved to hibernate in ice until spring. Humans are hesitant visitors to this ancient month, a time in which candidates no longer fly and trees last starved leaves abandon hope. Everywhere, once vibrant plants have folded at the wastes like tired old ladies tying their shoes. It is best to be alone with November, a month whose reward is ample space for breathing, a month that follows toxic heat, brash colors, reckless harvests, and humans struggling to complete their summer chores, racing against clocks that tick too quickly. November spreads her gray silk across damp ground, a carpet for drowsy meadows, for the few who choose to see. Giraffes don't buy drano. Giraffes don't buy drano to pour down their sinks, then sue their towns over poison in their tap water. Eagles don't wander the aisles of Walmart hunting for bargains, their high heels squeaking on polished floors as they smoke packs of unfiltered kennels. Chipmunks never send gifts to distant cousins via 72-foot, 18-wheel FedEx trucks that grind up interstates and down dirt roads. Their engines devouring fossil fuels have six miles per gallon. They're tailpipes gifting the air with benzene, formaldehyde, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide. Chickens don't spend money having their feathers trimmed or their nails painted. Butterflies don't order toilet paper by the carton. And when did you last see an elephant drive his shiny BMW from Dallas to Portland or a suit and a chimp with diamonds in her ears fly Delta from New York to Paris to sip Calvados and visit the Louvre? Poem came from traveling down the length of the Mississippi River taking photographs of it, and it inspired numerous poems. It's called The River's Wisdom. The water twists, torals howling forward. This river sucks enough water from springs and storms to keep plummeting its level power beyond every next curve. Whirlpools and eddies, random but constant, shiver the surfaces that spin gold at dawn, that shimmer blue at high noon, that dress entangled black silk as the new moon ascends the ridge. This river's wisdom is in charge. Even during the crest of April, as snow melt fattens its blustering core. Even in late January, when geometric-scored ice seals in the current with winter lace, this river knows what all rivers know. Its language is constant music as it breaks its glass against rocks, thuds its drum against fallen trees, shimmies its slick body under dripping bridges. This river doesn't sing for humans who've grown forward stopping and starting on emails, paychecks, reality TV. This river, its wisdom is in its lack of need. This river's wisdom isn't attaining harmony even while thundering. This river's wisdom isn't simply being in a place without time. This river's wisdom is in welcoming roots, light, eternity, no questions asked. This river's wisdom is in valuing the life within. I'm not much of a microphone person. Can you all hear me okay? No? Thanks for being here everyone, and thanks for being you. I don't have poetry for you tonight. I have two short essays to read. One is about a flower and love, oddly enough, and that'll be after the intermission. And the other is about a little butterfly in a big place, which I'll read for you now. Some of you may know that I spent 21 years in Vermont visiting bogs around the state looking for a tiny butterfly. And last May I finally found it. I've written about that experience, and my students in the Field Naturalist Program at UVN asked me to write an essay for the magazine that they produce every year, and they asked me to write about scale, about small things and big things. So even though I spent 21 years looking for this butterfly, I spent about a week writing this essay. And it's a bit of a mess still. I'm still working on it. It's called Elphin Wings in Big Places. And let's be honest about the genus Colophorus. With a few green exceptions, these aren't exactly charismatic butterflies. Commonly known as Elphins in Green Hair Streets, Colophorus butterflies perch with their wings folded closed over their bodies, in which point they become about the size of a penny in only somewhat more ornate. The Colophorus have never inspired poetry or gained much traction on social media. They've not been like a cause to lab at demonstrations or marches. You know, like nobody's out there saying, save the Colophorus. Except maybe me. Because tiny and gossamer, these butterflies can express big and enduring ideas in nature, including human nature. The first is intimacy. Once you locate a Colophorus butterfly, perched on a twig or a flower, it will usually allow you to approach and sit in its good graces. And that's really unusual among butterflies. After a while, yeah, your Colophorus will depart the scene. But if you're like me, it'll usually leave before you do. Because it's really hard, perhaps even heartless, to turn your back and walk away from one of these little butterflies. After all, rarely are we so close and unobtrusive to wildlife. Especially airborne animals, sitting with a Colophorus butterfly, watching it sip nectar or lay an egg, seeing it interact in the most fundamental ways with the world, feels like some sort of guilty pleasure of which I might not be worthy. And these Colophorus butterflies, they're called brown elephants, they're actually copulating. These kinds of close encounters don't make insects any less different from us, but certainly make some less remote and more relevant to our own drama. Our own dramas in the world. So the next is diversity. Depending on whose unsettled taxonomy you prefer, at least three dozen of these butterflies, three dozen Colophorus species live on Earth, and maybe many more. We're not sure, like maybe eight or so. Mostly in northern zones, boreal and temperate zones, including about two dozen in the Americas. And here's the thing about these butterflies. Some species are what we call generalists, which means they lay their eggs on a number of different plants, and that's where the caterpillars can feed and grow. Other Colophorus are specialists. Their caterpillars live on a highly restricted diet of one and only one plant. Regardless of what they eat, or actually because of what they eat, Colophorus exemplified one of the greatest relationships in the history of life on Earth. The shared evolution of insects and plants. At its most basic, insects get food, and plants get pollinators. And insects are a big reason flowers are so diverse and wonderful. Now, it turns out that moths and butterflies prefer angiosperms. And those are the leafy plants, the flowering plants that lots of us know and love. Orchids and oaks and grasses and goldenrods. Angiosperm leaves are soft and nutritious for the caterpillars. And the diversity and abundance of the flowers and their nectar is great for the adult butterflies. But here's the thing about these butterflies. Some of them, some of the Colophorus go for gymnospherms. Those are the avagras, like pines and spruces and cedars in their ilk. And that's really an unusual thing about butterflies. This affinity for conifers. It's a really odd bond. It's really rare. And I think it's actually maybe my favorite thing about Colophorus butterflies. Their attraction to conifers. Trees with needles. That one there, it's called Hessel's Hairstreak. It lays its eggs on Atlantic white cedar. It's not a plant we have in Vermont. And no other plant in the world. You might find the cedar in no Hairstreaks, but you will never find a Hessel's Hairstreak far from Atlantic white cedar. And I actually have the good fortune to encounter those two species, the butterfly and the cedar, across the full extent of their range, their shared range. And it's this coastal and inland strip that runs basically from the Gulf of Mexico up to southern Maine. So it's a sort of swath of territory. And a lot of people might see that territory if you envision it. Because this extended megalopolis knows the eastern seaboard, right? Well, where people see that, I see the only swath on this earth where a little green butterfly can meet up with its essential tree. This next one here on the bottom, this thing's called Blogg Elfin. This is the one that I found after searching for 21 years. And the scene is like this, and this is closer to home. You know, closer to home it turns out that one of the most elusive butterflies on the continent, Blogg Elfin, survives on black spruce. And only on black spruce. In woodland bogs across northern New England and adjacent Canada. And even at the relatively few bogs where it's known to live, relatively few take it from me. Blogg Elfin is basically still unknown. It flies around for only about two weeks from late May into early June. And that's it. That is done for the year. The rest of the year, a bog Elfin exists on spruce spows as either an egg, a caterpillar, or a chrysalis, all of which are virtually impossible to find. So generation after generation, bog Elfins never willingly leave the bog. It's their community. And a bog is indeed a community. A bog is more than a remote open space with a squishy mat of sphagnum where outrageous flowers bloom like purple flames. A bog is more than the sum of its scattered trees and shrubs, its rare birds nesting and its black flies out for blood. A bog is an idea and an experience with a history and a culture and a future. A bog exists and thrives or dies because of all sorts of things. Bedrock and soil, its latitude and longitude, the weather and climate affecting it, and lots of other things, not the least of which are humans and all their manifestations. Anything from a chainsaw to a 66-year-old guy walking around on a gimpy knee and carrying an insect net. And as it turns out, a bog is a community. It turns out Vermont's got like 97 of these wild places, these wild communities, and we call them natural communities. And each one is distinct and defined and categorized and repeating across the landscape when conditions are just right for them. We put names on these communities so that we can know about where we are in the world when we visit them A natural community is a synergy that gives us reason, meaning, even story. And you know, as it turns out, a little cloth or butterfly is really no different. To my mind, a bog elfin is a bog. As a caterpillar, it eats only black screw needles. As an adult on the wing, it sips only the nectar of rodora, leathery, and other bog flowers. A bog elfin is made entirely of bog. And everything that conspires to be a bog. And you know, maybe that's really all the story I need. Reclusive and rare on the wing for about a few days, a bog elfin is more than a little brown butterfly. It's a living monument to its community. From the glacier that helped make the place a bog to the orchids that will glow purple and white on its squishy mat, not long after the elfin and I have departed the scene. A butterfly the size of a penny unwittingly tells me where I am in the world. And when we sit together on the bog, you can bet that I won't turn my back and leave, not until the elfin flies away first. It's so fun doing these multi-media events. I wanted to make a comment about one thing I love about music, art, poetry, and everything in between is that it's almost like you get to travel without going anywhere. And like our first piece was Brazilian, a piece called Black Northeast, written in the 40s. I don't really know anything either. That's why I like hanging out with people like this. The only thing I really know is music, but if you ask me a question, if we're not playing music, I really don't know how to answer it. I don't have much to say. We're going from Brazil to Pakistan. We're going to go to Pakistan now. This is the Scotch fiddle tune. And I just want to let everyone know we're going to do a Scotch fiddle tune. We're bringing Scotland and Pakistan together. And then I wanted to let you all know I'm going to do just like a quick ditty before our break. I'm going to sing a song. And I'll introduce it. We've got to be in the moment too. So we're going to be in this moment. And then I'll do a little ditty before we take a break. And I'll let you know what that's all about when we get there. Are you ready? Absolutely ready. That's what I want you to do. Kingston Trio got out of the floaty Tom Dooley. They wrote a song called Scouts and Soda. Now just to share a little personal information, this is my dad's favorite. So I want to solve a wishing well. He left April 3rd. He's doing great. On the New Jersey tomorrow, we're going to celebrate his life. Remember? A lot of belly carton, a lot of jewelry, a lot of Johnny Cash and of course, he's called Mary and also the Kingston Trio. If you know the song, join in anytime. Scouts and Soda Mud in your eye Baby, do I feel high on me? Oh oh oh oh Dry martini So enjoy some refreshments in the lobby and join as a member of North Branch if you haven't yet and you can visit any of the North Branch staff and buy all their books and CDs please. We'll see you back in a few minutes. Thanks. 815 we're starting again. I know, well we'll wish you that. Yes. There you go. We're going to play a song in three. We haven't had a waltz yet. We can say we're going to France. We're going to go to France. We're going to go down the hall. Yes, we will. This is a, can you pronounce this? That's what we're going to do. Don't mess up. Beside me, multiple times a day he gazes at me with deep love. Then gently places his forehead against my mouth. In the mornings he moans with longing, gently pressing against me as I awaken. He loves to eat and is consistently grateful for food I placed before him. He readily communicates how much he missed me when I come home from a few hours away. He consistently rewards me with gentle affection and love. He quietly talks to me throughout each day, his eyes squinting with smiles. His native language is not mine, but I understand everything he says. He has four legs and a long furry tail, my ideal lover. If night's breath plays its flute to the stream, inspiring dreams in sleeping fish. Or if the stream stretches its sparkling fingers around miles of its own vial in while night leans heavily down, pulling the bed covers over. I wonder if the dying cedars lining the stream bank bend toward their gyrating reflected images, or instead if the water dances upward toward starved tree roots offering its song as nourishment as well as hope. I wonder if the percussion of time asks the vibrations of instant gratification to dance while the stream plays its piano and sheds tears. Or if the vibrations challenge the percussion and determine who is stronger, wiser, kinder, more enduring. I wonder if the fireflies see anything but themselves conquering the dark, and if they assume the powdered sugar of stars above is merely their own reflection, illuminating another night as it seeps in above distant mountain reaches. House windows have been clothed in mourners black for more than five hours while my four-poster bed has been singing a love song to me, telling me how lonely it is for the weight of my warm body pressed against its mattress. My bed has been crooning to me. Don't turn on the lights. Don't check the time. Don't think about the return email you did not write to that long ago, friend. Don't consider going back downstairs to shove yet one more log in the wood stove. Don't worry that you never got all the dishes in the sink wash. Come, please come, it moans. Slide your soft body horizontally into my arms. Let me hold you and love you. Shut your eyes and trust that while I hold you, you will forever know peace. The bed then gets down on its knees and proposes marriage. It whispers my name with a familiar timbre then spreads itself gently beneath me. The highest wall, the highest wall ever built across our path, is made from the rugged material called grief. When you get there, reach out. Intimately explore its barbed surface with your tender fingers. Accept its imprint on your body. Acknowledge that this wall will forever alter your path forward. Know that this wall will shape new directions for your life, but also know that when you arrive at the wall, you will find community there. You will never be alone at the wall. We are all there with you. This next poem is called Instructions for the Eight Billion, and it is a participatory poem, so you are welcome to follow it. Be still and breathe in. Feel the silky air. Pull it into your abdomen. Feel yourself full from your knees to your shoulders. Shut your eyes or keep them halfway open. Allow your mind to empty. Allow your mind to still. Be no more than the air you breathe. Acknowledge your thoughts as though they are strangers passing by on the street. On each inbreath, feel the last century pour into you. It is your inheritance from flapper girls to the Korean War, from model tees to moon landings, from the parched corn fields of the 30s to AA meetings, from New Orleans jazz to Mr. Rogers to AIDS. All its moments, all its inhabitants are alive in you. They reside in your lungs, each restless commuter, each stalled snow plow driver, each tired private biology professor seeking a new cure, each elementary school nurse doing throat cultures watching the clock. Let them all float away. Cradle your left hand in your right. Touching your index fingers at the middle knuckles. Touch the tips of your thumbs together and hold them still. Continue to breathe deeply. Slowly, silently count one as you breathe in. One, breathe out. Two, breathe in. Two, breathe out. Three, three, four. Each breath is your legacy for this country and this century. Your hope for rainforests, your gift of lessons learned about wars, your anguish for the warming planet. This present moment is all that we have. Breathe it in. Fill your abdomen, your ribs with the roundness of the blue shrouded globe with 14 billion-year-old stars still traveling away from the Big Bang, still a long way from wherever they are going, stars still searching for meaning and finding it only in the journey. Now concentrate on your left hand. Let the center of your being be in your left hand. All your power, all your compassion, all your energy is in your left hand. Let that energy radiate to the ends of your toes and to each follicle where 100,000 hairs grow from your scalp. These breaths belong to you alone, powerful and whole, without compromise. This legacy is yours alone in the package of your genes, in the wholeness of this moment, in your breath, in your abdomen, in your light. This closing poem I'll dedicate to Ruth, empty. It's called Music Doctors. The world unravels, burns and shreds in ways none of us have imagined and in ways none of us knows how to repair. Yet healing tears flood our cheeks as Box BWV 974 Adagio saturates the room. Masane's meditation Adagio also raises the rivers of our soul's gardens as does Arvo Park's Spiegel in Spiegel. Music doctors are as old as the human race. These healers drench us with the only medicine that truly heals, medicine that numbs our agony so that we can go on. Well, I've been working on this essay for a year. This was scary for me. I didn't think I could pull it off, and I didn't pull it off. So I scrapped it about a week ago, everything that I'd written, and rewrote it. And here it is. I bet you I've been promising my readers. I'm writing now. I'm substacked. It's sort of my, the ground I've stepped out there. It's called Chasing Nature. You can read the there. Both of these essays are not there yet. So these are their debuts. This one I'll get there sooner or later. And it's called Blood in Love. And this is the setting for it. These are the words behind our home. As a writer and field biologist, I have an unofficial policy on love. I avoid using the word in print. Oh sure, I profess love for my family, friends, and most of all my partner Ruth and our dog Odin. But in essays about nature, I find love to be hollow and cheap. Which is somewhat a problem for a writer. Unlike other languages, English offers us few verbs for expressing a deep and abiding affection or reverence, short of the love that we reserve for the people closest to us. I might easily say or write that I love date bars or Jimi Hendrix or rainbows, but not in the same way that I love Ruth. Any of us might love our local coffee joint, or a painting in our home, but we probably get by OK where either of them gone forever. Which brings me to my relationship with blood, Ruth. It's complicated. What began as a passing fancy grew into an innocent crush, which then blossomed into a genuine fondness. After that came a fairly strong affection, which then became outright adoration. And it didn't stop there. Longing and devotion crept into the relationship, and then euphoria. So now, it's like, I don't know any other way to put it. I think I'm in love with blood, Ruth. Maybe like nothing else in nature. And I'm being serious about this. And so like a confused teenager or a besotted adult, I'm trying to make some sense of this. And when I need to make sense of things, I usually go for a walk, think, read, and write. Mostly I write. So here we are with my work in progress. And I've got bullet points. The first is intrinsic beauty. I like the looks of this plant. The simplicity of its single broadleaf and lone stalk bearing a flower with those pearly elegant petals. Usually eight petals, sometimes more, eight on the left, ten on the right, and usually alternating in length and subtly in shape like that one on the left. But not always. Blood root is unpredictable. Relationships can be like that. That we humans are drawn to flowers is incontrovertible. No news there. Why we're drawn to flowers is another matter. All sorts of research suggests that early humans associated flowers with survival. No, we didn't eat them really. But long before pharmacies and supermarkets came on the scene, flowers might have alerted our ancestors to the start of a growing season, the season of fertility, and opportunities for plant medicines and fruits. So I don't know, maybe I buy that. More than anything, I think we like flowers because they're beautiful. And that's enough for me. We give each other flowers when we're sick or when we hurt or have suffered loss. Flowers make us feel better, especially when we're with them in the wild woods. When I see it there in the woods, blood root makes me feel good. Even euphoric. Like seeing someone I love. So the next is timing. Blood root is happening now in places like this. It's among a suite of plants, some of which we call ephemeral, that go about their business of reproduction in the naked woods of early spring. Blood root announces that the forest is about to resurrect itself, to breathe again, to release its salamanders and spores, and everything else it held in trust for us through winter. Like what's not to love about that? And then there's moods. Blood roots got plenty of moods. And audacity is one thing. This flower dares to show itself when a late snowfall might put an end to its vernal ambitions. But not too much audacity, really. Blood root's not reckless after all. And for good reason, blood root can be wary, cute, kind of dorky, artsy, mysterious, and simply magnificent. And okay, yeah, I'm anthropomorphizing here, which is not only bad science, but in the Anthropocene, it's probably an insult to blood root. But then again, we're human. Insults happen, even in loving relationships. But finally, I think I love blood root for its impermanence. And I have the same. I guess it's more like a mantra. Just get me to the blood root. I say it to myself when I'm scared, whenever the future seems uncertain. After my own brush with death six years ago, during the pandemic, when I've worried about Ruth's well-being, even as I try to make some sense of the world, its wars and hatred and crimes of injustice, a flower in the woods behind my home offers me respite. Even equanimity. Just get to the blood root. And guess what? We've made it. The first blood root popped up for us behind our house on Monday, this past Monday. And I visited with it every day this week. But here's the catch about blood root. In some ways, this relationship is kind of a spring of flame. Any one blood root plant will bloom for only a week or so. Then it's done. If rain or snow or time knock those petals to earth, there's no flower in waiting to take their place. By May around here, the blood root show is mostly over. So even as my rendezvous or trist with blood root has just begun, I also know that every day is slipping away. Blood root reminds me that nothing lasts forever and that I can be present here now. So is that love? Can I use that word? I don't know. No, a plant won't fix the world, put an end to my doubt and dread or even completely. And no, I don't believe we'll find our salvation solely in knowledge or intelligence or even what passes as our politics. Equanimity comes mostly from within and from what's genuine in the world. People, art, poetry, nature. And in case you had noticed, it's spring. So if this plant isn't your thing, the spotted salamanders are getting it on. American wood cocks are probably painting with the peepers right outside this door right now. And the Azure butterflies have just taken flight. Like all good stuff. But for me, here, now, or at any time of year, whether I see it or not, blood root is a force of nature. Kind of like gravity or faith or reverence. Kind of like love. I love it. I don't know if we could go down. So I realized when I put this second group of poems together that they're all sort of about God, whoever they are. I was a minister for a while and my parishioners always suspected I was a Unitarian. They were pretty much right. So this is the first church that I served in in McIndoo Falls, Vermont, which is a little village in the town of Barnett. Not Barnett. It's called Come Near. When Buddhists bought a farm in Barnett, the women in Bev's hair salon had stern words to say about failed Christian mission dollars sent away. They had been invited up for tea. Everyone went. And can you imagine leaving bare ledge in the living room? But when Bev's son brought home the woman he'd married while stationed in Thailand, Bev made space bloom at their family table. Special plates, rare preserves, the younger children clamoring to ask and tell father grinning at his son as if the prodigal had come. The new wife sat there giggling. Youngest child wriggling on her knee as though they all, including God, had been set free. And this is about someone who visited our home because it had been his home before. Recognition. He stands by the rock wall and roses, stares out across the valley at Northfield Hills. Sometimes it seems he just comes to cry. Our driveway, house, lawn where he waits, are on land clawed and leveled from rough pasture that sloped uphill from what was his home. Our garden, snug inside its fence, was his backyard. There are visits from others who once lived here, tugged like ghosts. Some stay and wait for recognition. So I go out and stand with him. I know the house is gone, but I don't have any other place. A hummingbird, frums past, lands for sugar water on the red plastic feeder. What was that, he calls out, astonished. You must have seen them when you lived here. Oh no, they hadn't come up with them yet. We watch it drink and dart away. I do know what he means. Each year it feels my eyes create the chestnut-sided warbler, singing all over this garden when I first put its tiny body and its voice together. And every June the grief of apple blossoms stuns me with departure. I say, wait. I go inside, find the chipped white aggies, streaked with blue. The garden soil keeps offering. Return them to their owner. And my father was a preacher. He became a preacher late in life, and he dove right into it, heavy. It was a little hard for the rest of the family. And yet, this is the story I remember and grieve about. Summer of 1966. As for the land you left, it was like an affectionate divorce done quarreling with seasons on the farm. We came back, planted trees each spring faster and more orderly than they could plant themselves. The summer before you died, suddenly you only wanted to walk the boundaries of the farm. Even jobs we'd planned together, cutting poplar or planting fur, easily postponed. We looked for old ax marks, faded splotches of paint, skeletons of fence posts, barbed wire pressed to earth by 30 years of leaves. Tracking through a cedar woods you pushed past brittle branches up a slender stream that disappeared beneath a web of roots. Suddenly, a small pool at the base of giant cedars lined with black forest silt, water almost invisible, except at the center where a spring surrounded by a cone of sand surged from a channel in the rock, a few grains dancing. Kneeling on the mat of cedar needles you reached to the other bank, bridged the pool with your body, bent your head to drink where the water stirred. I knelt on that bank as you had. Knees found creases yours had worn there over time. Years later I learned you'd brought each of your children here the place you loved an almost perfect secrecy. And then just getting a little more direct I find, you know, we all can say that we find the deepest part of ourselves in nature, but the other way to find the deepest part of yourself is to find the thing you really don't want to look at. The thing you don't want to talk about, the thing that sits there like a boulder in the kitchen sound. And so this poem is called When We Talk With God as I said, whoever they are. Part of us knows when we talk to God we're talking with ourselves. This doesn't mean at all that the conversation is superfluous on the contrary. It may have been put off for years. Think how long we go with child or lover mentioning no more than pet care pick up schedule, groceries. And this is God we're talking with. Or as I began by saying me, I, even us perhaps. There's such insistence that God needs respect, confession, a bit of groveling. But don't these seem distracting and unnecessary if God lives with our wounds, dreads, cruelties, secret delights, irritating habits, every day, right here beside us? Maybe it's the self-importance of eternity that provokes this gap between us. As if cathedrals were the kind of thing we should spend time on trust and good food, opportunity, honesty for the kids, or everyone for that matter. As if what we did here should be discounted relative to some more sacred space and time because this life is so full of suffering. Not that it isn't, but I'd like the chance to not screw up the present sometimes it slows to a crawl and opens like a rose. So what if we even risk the friendship we think we already have? Honesty is choosing more, my love. See how dread slides, curtains closed, or let someone else click shut the door between us. And then this is Moose Bob. Dee, where are you? And this is this one of the box? This is about Moose Bob. Okay. And this is a trip that we took going up to Moose Bob with Chip Darmstadt who was hoping to see a spruce grass and didn't, again. Moose Bob. The blue-headed virial pokes its thread of song in and out among balsam buds erupting like green caterpillars and the first red maple leaves. Each hop, unpredictable and yet decisive, its body knows just how to stitch shafts of sun to recovering winter branches. We hope a spruce grass will land on that rotting log parade for us in the innocent glory that makes it easy prey for hunters. It never learns. It doesn't come to our benign impatience but a black-backed woodpecker hammers prize its way along a tilting spruce. We stopped in Island Pond for coffee and talked with the tired waitress. Walked down gravel, flecked with colored plastic graded to left to use this spruce and fur. Some think backwater. Some think salvation. In the bog, pitcher plants sprout blood-red blossoms. Sun dew closes on its insects. Lip fingers clasped as though in prayer. In a beaver pond, dead trees stand sentinel. A pair of woodpeckers take turns disappearing in the farthest stem. No creature here is prospering or seeking righteousness. Just doing what they can. The way they learned since the last glacier. White admirals are feeding in the puddles on the road. Some broken. One wing to the ground as pickups pass. Ragees hoarding, raucous. Moose chomp lily pads. Links are coming back for hairs. We come hungry from our ordinary lives.