we must gentle our touch upon the world

the woods can shout

a Native American prayer I like

asks the Great Spirit to help me learn the lessons

hidden in every leaf and rock,

I have long worked to open myself

to learning to read the woods,

rock and water tell stories that feel obvious,

as do flowers, animals, sunrise, and sunset,

there is also subtlety within a story:

a great rock moved in the high water of a storm,

The rock moved ten feet in a storm about ten years ago.

Here is the space the huge rock came from.

a lichen, liverwort, whose lives dwarf my own,

 now the woods shout a story at me:

a great fire roared across the forest

and nearly consumed the home we’ve built

abrupt against the woods and stream,

I understand how months of precious little rain

desiccated leaf litter and down branches,

how an insect killed countless hemlock

and served them to the fire,

I understand how wind roared so loud

that the fire was a blowtorch

and everything downwind of the flame

wanted to give up its ghost,

now, half a year later,

other winds have roared their story

and tree after tree have given up their ghosts,

bewildering the trails above the cabin

into near impenetrable tangle,

calling for chainsawing to clear the paths,

my life is a bit more than 2/3 of a century long so far,

and I have never seen the pages of the woods

so clearly shouting a story that something is wrong,

that we need to wake up,

and gentle our touch upon the world,

for we have stepped out of the comfortable story

and roiled the inputs into what can then be chaos for us.

by Henry H. Walker

June 24, ’17