harmonize with the greater creation

the song life sings

my soul loves a hike into beauty,

a hike with beauty as companion for each step,

I love to go where rock and water play together,

where plants are stubborn, spread themselves,

get pulled high by the sun,

Big Poplar, Smokies, near Gatlinburg, CFS students

Boy Scout Trail, Jedediah Smith State Park, CA

where an elk, a bear, a heron, an otter can appear,

Elk, California

Grizzly Bear, Lamar Valley, Yellowstone

Heron, Northern California

Otters, Fish Lake, Lamar Valley, Yellowstone

Big Horn Sheep Lamb, Lamar Valley, Yellowstone

Wolf, Lamar Valley, Yellowstone

where the circle of my life can overlap, for a time,

some of those other circles

that a flower, a tree, a waterfall, a wild cousin, a view

weaves around itself in the purity of its being,

View Toward Fontana Lake, below Clingmans Dome, Smokies

true to a rightness we humans ache to hold,

yet a rightness we too easily escape from

when we lose our greater self

in the short sight of the lesser

we can think is who we are:

we look into a mirror,

and we miss who is really looking back at us,

we lose ourselves in ego

and forget the community that holds us—

from our animal cousins who remind us of wildness,

to our mothers who work with leaf and sun

to hold the power life needs,

to our distant creators: 

when water and rock together dance,

there is a song life sings

above the elemental beat of the earth herself,

we should work to hear it

and let the notes we can live

harmonize with the greater creation.

Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone

words and photos
by Henry H. Walker

words written January 8, ‘17