Oh, yeah, my back is still recovering from two days hard driving and sleeping on a funky mattress at the La Quinta Inn in Sacramento. (Recommendation: Don’t stay at a La Quinta Inn.) We made good time with the first day being longer but more scenic as we spent most of the time in the mountains until we hit Redding. The second day is that long stretch of San Joaquin Valley that has a smokey haze and the odor of stockyards constantly in the air. It’s good to be back and it was hard to leave. It took me a day or so to reorient to being here, found myself bungling in the kitchen a bit, thinking sometimes I was in the other house and why was the microwave smaller or the toaster settings different.

I really didn’t settle in to writing until the last couple of days I was away but I did write a poem that has potential, about the long waving grasses on the property. Every evening for about two hours, as the sun slowly set, I would be mesmerized by them as the wind swirled and whirled them in concert and they shone so vividly under the slanting light. Nature is fertile ground for poetry. The challenge I often find is to really, really be with nature on a level where I can hear what it is communicating. Or, better said, become attuned to how it is affecting me, what it is stirring up and what wants to be relayed via the sensory experience of the part of nature I am in relationship with at the time. I know that seems complicated (it does to me, anyway), but really it’s that thing called, “tuning in” that is a developed skill, a way of slowing down and allowing information to arrive via the cosmic AT&T and not be talking so fast yourself that nothing can penetrate the monkey-mind wall of sound.

It will be another month before I get back up north and this time I’m flying–getting there fast now that Horizon Air has direct flights from LAX to Redmond. Yippee!! Meanwhile, I have plenty of photos to keep me connected with those tall, tall pines, the creek in the meadow and those glowing twilight grasses.

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