I wasn’t lost. Rather I was lost in the woods – the dying browned ferns and the orange sumac, chickadees working their way among a thick crabapple tree. I thought of something from Rebecca Solnit’s book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which I am reading right now. “It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from …”
This fading stand of maple trees on a trail at Beech Hill caught my breath. As if I were seeing an erasure in the landscape, the color of which I hadn’t ever noticed before. I both wanted to paint and write the pale green, almost white, disappearing leaves.
I am tucking this idea away and will write it when Dawn Potter comes November 1 – 3 to teach New England Bards: Discovering Voice, Discovering Place at 26 Split Rock Cove. Dawn will focus on Jane Kenyon and Hayden Carruth as voices of the rural north country. From there we will all be writing from our own voices. But for the moment I thought of Jane Kenyon and this stanza from her poem, Happiness:
There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.
