It started just now with a hummingbird

Hovering over the porch two yards away

then gone,

It stopped me studying.

I saw the redwood post

Leaning in clod ground

Tangled in a bush of yellow flowers

Higher than my head, through which we push

there are still a few more openings for Mono Lake!

Water Night

(excerpt)

If you open your eyes,

night opens doors of musk,

the secret kingdom of the water opens

flowing from the center of the night.

And if you close your eyes,

a river fills you from within,

flows forward, darkens you:

night brings its wetness to beaches in your soul.

~ Octavio Paz ~

Wow, I haven’t sent one of these missives out in a while and I apologize for that. That’s what happens when you’re not super busy, you are not as efficient. When I was working with nonprofit organizations, we always looked for a busy person to be a board member. They get things done.

We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love. - Tennessee Williams

Some of you long time Footloose Forays fans may remember when I used to offer weekend events at Lake Leonard. My son, Hunter and I are combining our talents and strengths and are at it again.

93 Percent stardust,

with souls made of flames,

we are all just stars

that have people names.

-Nikita Gill

And in this hazy day

Of April summer heat

Across the hill the seabirds

Chase Spring north along the coast:

Nesting in Alaska

In six weeks.

Gary Snyder c. 1956

this expression does not have anything to do with your dog lying out in the hot sun panting. Instead it is derived from the constellation - Canis Major - the big dog. The sun in August “appears" to be in this collection of stars. Therefore, these are the DOG DAYS.

Take earth for your own large room

and the floor of the earth

carpeted with sunlight

and hung round with silver wind

for your dancing place

-May Swenson

wholly to be a fool

while Spring is in the world my blood approves

and kisses are a better fate

than wisdom

-ee cummings

More and more I have come to admire resilience.

Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam

returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous

tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,

it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.

But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,

mitochondria, figs -- all this resinous, unretractable earth. -Jane Hirshfield

“Life is short, break the rules. Forgive quickly, kiss slowly. Love truly. Laugh uncontrollably and never regret anything that makes you smile.”

-maybe Mark Twain maybe not.

"The flower is full of everything -- the sunshine, the cloud, the soil, time, space, the gardener, everything, including your own consciousness…

The flower is full of the cosmos. The flower is only empty of one thing, that is: a separate existence, a separate being, self-nature.

Because a flower cannot be by herself alone, a flower has to inter-be with the whole cosmos... So the same thing is true with a person…" -Thich Nhat Hanh

"Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends." —Joseph Campbell