What survives erasing time?

if you were to vanish,

along with all other humans,

and time had thousands of years

of oxygen and rain and seasons

to work upon all your things,

what would be left 5-10,000 years from now

to give a clue as to who you actually were?

ceramics, glass, stonework, can endure, maybe plastic,

but wood and cloth and paper and much of the metal

no longer will be there

to potentially bridge back to who you were,

roughly 10,000 years ago

humans first populated North America in mass,

when I find a trace of their world on the land

we borrow from the future,

it is of rock: arrowheads, projectile points,

a few potsherds from the last 2000 years or so,

thus, we call their time a "stone age,"

though wood and bone and fabric

would have their stories to tell,

if time had not stilled their voices,

archeologists can recover more of their world

than we common folks can, inferring a lot,

still with empathic projection,

I seek to feel their world,

bring them closer to what I understand

by imagining them with the tool I've found:

making it, using it, losing it,

I found a soapstone pendant with a perfect round hole in it,

and a cache of extraordinary treasures:

projectile points, a chunky stone, scrapers,

lovely pieces of flint and quarts, potsherds,

all within a foot of each other,

next to our rebuilt outbuilding,

revealed because earth was disturbed

and rain from the roof uncovered them,

most times when I find a stone tool,

it makes sense that it was lost,

this cache seems to me to be of choice, of purpose,

thus potentially revealing more of their world

than just a tool by itself:

why did those early peoples choose to leave these treasures here?

the best reason I can so far imagine

is to honor a loved one who died

and was probably buried here,

maybe with the soapstone pendant around their neck,

their time predates the Indigenous people

who still survive in these lands,

the chunky stone and potsherds

take the time of this cache

back 1,000 to 2500 years,

I honor these early people

with my words, with my thoughts, with my love,

I can only begin to know them

but I want them to still live in my heart,

and be treasured in the artifacts on my wall,

we were gifted with time with a Diné elder, a Navajo,

in a tour of Monument Valley,

a place so dry and barren 

it wasn't deemed worth stealing by Anglo culture,

and now the stark beauty of uplifted stone and ubiquitous sand

shouts its glory to all who can hear,

our guide tells us of his grandfather

and how his memory of ancestral songs

takes them back about 600 years

to when his ancestors found this "promised land,"

a land he feel is not his, not ours,

but belongs to each people who find it,

we each borrow it from the future.

by Henry H. Walker

August 8, ‘26

to enlarge our souls

 

of NASA at its best

at our most profound

we humans crave to fill the holes of our ignorance,

to ask the largest questions

and to work hard to find the answers,

even when those answers

will not put food on the table,

will not benefit our material life in any way,

but such quests will work to meet a hunger

to know who we are,

to know from where we came,

to hazard answers

that will benefit us only in our souls,

NASA envisioned, designed, built, and deployed

the James Webb Space Telescope,

braving countless possible single point failures,

any one of which could doom the mission,

now far out in space, further away than the Moon,

this miracle of human ingenuity and execution

can look out at the universe

and sharply see and record the long span of time and space,

from over 13 billion years ago when our universe came into being,

through evolving epoch after epoch,

as galaxies are born, collide, die,

as stars are born, explode with creation, die, are reborn,

Genesis did its best to explicate Creation

and humanity's role in the whole shebang,

it filled the holes of our ignorance for a time,

now the wonder that God creates with the universe

reveals itself more and more

as we have lens, opportunity, will,

to look out and back with clarity never before possible,

with just our eyes on the darkest, clearest nights,

we can see breathtaking glory,

but those revelations pale compared to what the space telescope reveals:

countless galaxies, so common they seem everywhere,

wonder upon wonder upon wonder,

a fabulous beauty and diversity to enlarge our souls,

we are creatures who can both

have our feet in the mud

and find ourselves in the stars.

by Henry H. Walker

August 9, ‘26

our granddaughter finds her way

 

creating community

a point is alone,

a line has purpose,

a geometric figure enlarges into meaning,

a web can create community,

I imagine being my granddaughter

and how she is making sense of becoming adult

in a world where the barbarians

have moved past banging at the gate

and have been allowed into power,

she is finding a way forward

to play by the rules that still work,

to build a community of friends,

to develop her own skills of understanding and expression,

she and her university have chosen each other,

and she is ready to move

within the web available to her,

I trust her heart, her sense of self,

her commitment to being true to who she is,

and finding her way forward,

despite how lost it is possible to be,

she will make a difference in the world

and will work to build community,

that blessed community that calls to us

even when we feel lost,

even when we feel despair,

Izzi will find a way,

Izzi will find the ways,

to create within the webs that call to her,

she will be of love and hope

and she will create community

with what is accessible to who she is

and to what she builds with her choices,

even within this broken world we still labor to fix.

by Henry H. Walker

August 6, ‘26

feeling lost in the night

 

Lost In Space

in the night my subconscious manufactures situations

within which I am  lost,

unable to find my car, my way home,

I don't know where I am

in terms of where everything else is,

I am lost and alone

and deeply afraid that I can't find my way back

to where I need to be,

to where I want to be.

by Henry H. Walker

August 6, ‘26

growing into our best?

 enlarging our world

before we are born

we are swallowed in a warm sea,

as one with the universe, 

until birth differentiates us,

and we have to be alone,

born into individuality but not into independence,

we are blessed and cursed with profound dependency,

most times we bond with the mother

for food, for care, for love,

we expand our bonding to whatever parent, adult, sibling

comes into our world, and cares,

we reach out with our eyes,

with our smiles,

and our world grows larger,

action begets action, and creates connection,

we become a valued part of larger wholes

within which we discover relationship

and find ourselves of worth for we are not just alone,

we fit into the whole

of family, neighborhood, the reality of God,

I think our understanding of self

can be deeply expressed by our relationship to others,

to the universe, to how we are contained 

and expressed in a webbing with people and place,

those relationships make us real and defined within space,

I was lucky to grow up with loving parents,

a stable welcoming neighborhood,

and a world that played by rules 

I could understand and learn,

the past important,

the present accepting,

the future hopeful

and accessible to our success,

such optimism is sorely challenged today

as malignant spirits grow beyond control,

the body politic wrenched by the malevolent idea 

of conspiracies against us, dissolving relationship,

 a dissolution that we must resist,

for just following our easy will 

leaves us prey to infantile, wrecking desires.

by Henry H. Walker

August 5, ‘26

from George Fox to oracle

 

of an early student, Jessica Harris

a former student, and good friend,

comes over and visits for an hour and a half,

she tells us of her love for Brooklyn, for New York,

and for the life she has created there,

she lives with gusto,

with an easy calmness to it all:

she has evolved both professional and personal ways of being,

she readily connects with and appreciates other people,

out of whole cloth she has built a commercially viable persona of oracle,

with a wig, and a costume, she gives herself to audiences,

there people type questions,

and she pulls forth answers

that make sense to her and them,

all based on her intuitive grasp 

of how the questions came forth,

plus her reading of the body and spirit of the questioner,

Jessica loves the psychological,

the way the human spirit craves to make sense of it all,

she then ventures a response,

less enigmatic than the Delphic oracle might have given,

and she, and the questioner can both be happy with the telling,

the work entertains, and pay the bills,

in her own personal questions to understand

how to be,

what to do,

she wants to parallel Buddha

in how to meditate,

in how to both embrace this life

and to go beyond it to what is even more real

than our sensations,

all the glue that grabs at us

to stick to our moments,

rather than to transcend them,

thus she seeks the reality that is more real

than the ephemeral of the sweet taste,

of moments we can easily know,

Jessica is happy with herself,

with the choices she has made,

with the joy of following her own heart

into knowing what to do, how to be,

as she gets ready to drive away,

she comments: 

"How Friends School of me to have followed my own leading!

and to have created my own reality,"

it works, because it is real

to who she knows herself to be,

how wonderful that the world, plus her creative work,

allows such a path to be revealed, and followed.

by Henry H. Walker

July 7, ‘26