still noticing glories

  

good for the soul

as aging reduces some of the doors into the wild

I can readily open,

I easily slip into obsessing 

about the loss of those doors,

once a vital part of my year--

particularly the annual Mt. LeConte trek:

intense exertion, sunset and sunrise from the mountain's long top,

camaraderie with family and friends,

good food and drink and sharing

within the spruce-fir, as if we'd transported to Canada,

and found ourselves held within the spirit of Mary Oliver,

or maybe within that of Loren Eiseley,

whose joy in the wild was blessed with scientific insights,

I would take middle schoolers every May to the Smokies,

lead them on a 10-12 mile hike 

up Mt. LeConte, the fourth highest peak in the East,

or up Mt. Cammerer, with the Appalachian Ridge dropping steeply below it,

or to Ramsay Cascades, a high waterfall with no trail above it

up the next two miles to the top of Mt Guyot,

the third highest peak east of the Rockies,

they would experience, write, share,

allow themselves to be transformed,

my aging body is daunted by the possibility

of reprising any of those three hikes,

each experience was of an "I-Thou"

relationship to the natural world,

within which each of us had the opportunity

to slow down and notice glory outside us, 

and then within us,

I will now miss such long efforts

that shouted at us and thus demanded

to be heard and appreciated,

instead I now seek other opportunities

for the natural world to speak clearly to me,

still its "Thou" to my "I,"

in quieter  ways, no less intense in revelation,

just subtler in their offerings,

perhaps the eruption overnight of fungus,

such as the incredible Amanita mushrooms I saw last week,

perhaps the subtle shades and textures 

of a sensuously morphing cumulus cloud,

a fairyland tableau of moss or lichen,

the eloquent bark of a beech tree,

the soft laugh of a small rapids,

the cascading view from an overlook,

my soul is not diminished now like my body,

it just needs shorter immersions to find what it needs,

my body cautions me to do less,

while my soul craves to do even more

in noticing the glories within where I am,

within where I still can be.

by Henry H. Walker

August 14, ‘26

messages from the past

 

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