the natural world can call us

 

caring enlarges us

the pandemic shone light 

on on our human need for binding ties,

we need connection with the other,

to validate us, to reassure us we're not alone,

to help us fit ourselves into larger wholes

to escape the loneliness that can be our ego,

our prison, until our heart reaches out, 

and we care,

the screen was a pale substitute for flesh-and-blood realness,

many of us re-found relationship with plants,

for, with them, we don't share contagion,

and they are cousins to us,

even more the animal world called us,

particularly with the pets

who enlarge our families,

and are even closer to us as family than the plants,

I talked last evening with a high school senior,

who, in Covid Time, found opportunity to help a neighbor with her sheep,

and he found himself transformed by relationship to them,

he learned their world, transfixed by difference and similarity,

by the wonder that each life breathes in and exhales out

with every moment of their being,

he became so committed to ram and ewe and lamb,

with each moment of their lives,

and thus with his friend's world

that she gave him her Shetland sheep in her will,

and he is able to maintain that sense 

of rightness in the world after her passing,

his face transforms in his eloquence about his new reality,

a connection such as we all need to other life,

to a larger self that calls to us,

that calls us to care,

and thus we are much the better 

when we answer that calling with our full self.

by Henry H. Walker

March  9, ‘25

to honor the Earth

 order within nature

order, pattern:

somebody here laid out the bricks

into and onto the ground next to the house,

that somebody had a plan that pleased their eye

with the forms the bricks made,

now moss seems to have painted itself

onto the lines between the bricks,

creatively overlapping and embellishing the order,

expressing it with the fullness of luxuriant deep green growth,

another order: we humans love our right angles,

I wonder if part of that order we feel in them

is from the plants' vertical thrust up toward the sun,

we then feel rightness in that assertion and echo it as best we can,

a Taoist meditation I use

admonishes us to honor the Earth with our dwellings,

to fit into the world as best we can,

and show our love for what is not implicitly us

with what is more explicitly us,

the garden that is geometric, controlled, unnatural,

appeals far less to me

than the garden whose order is 

from the flower itself, the leaf, the trunk,

the frame that sets off and celebrates the natural drive to order 

that suffuses the universe, complexity rising above entropy,

I resist the attraction of the whims of our power,

the one that shows us a view of ourselves 

but one that shrinks us, and distorts us,

I prefer the garden

to show us what is beyond us

and lets us enlarge the idea of who we are

and what we should honor,

I still honor what an architect, a worker,

and the moss, gratuitously, somehow

express in the pattern before me.

by Henry H. Walker

March  9, ‘25

individuality within community

 

to work as a team

1st, a teacher receives classroom, students, and subject area,

and then crafts approach and activity

to meet the students where they are,

charged with helping empower them 

to venture as far as they can go,

taking who they are

toward mastery of the skills they need

to make sense of the world around them,

to learn how the world can be changed,

and how each can work to effect change 

that will benefit themselves and the world,

2nd, each teacher can be empowered to realize

that a school is a village,

that others also share the vision, and the effort,

the top of the mountain is much the same,

but the way up to the top has many paths,

the top might be a validation of the value of who one is,

and that validation can come from self

as reader, as artist, as writer, as dancer,

within a project, within a discussion,

within service to another,

within service to the environment,

within countless ways,

3rd, a school is challenged to embrace

how another's work with students and their disparate callings

actually makes one's personal efforts

stronger, more effective, more long-term,

Carolina Friends School has generated and evolved committees

so that staff can center efforts on the collective,

staff and student alike can progress so much further

because others also see the mountain

and work had to find their ways up it,

at a recent meeting of clerks of CFS committees,

a point was raised that the value of committees,

and attending the meetings,

was not readily apparent to many staff,

so folks revert to what they can control,

what happens in their own classrooms,

and easily can miss the larger picture,

our challenge as a whole staff is to understand and act 

upon how much we are a village,

and that others' efforts actually enhance our own efforts,

we are not alone in finding the way forward, and up!

the team is how the collective

somehow both enhances the individual

and also allows community to be, and thrive,

and validate us all.

by Henry H. Walker

March  5, ‘25

talismans

 holding memories

what can reach across the long years

and hold a memory of what a day really held

that mattered enough to transcend the clearing restart of the next day?

what a moment felt like when the mundane glimmered bright,

as if the sun just cleared a mountain above

and showed us a moment that really mattered,

my wife is working on a project

of artifacts, of talismans, which, somehow,

in the essence of their physicality,

serve as nucleus around which emotions circle,

images appear within that circling mist

that would not endure without having the central crystal

through which to shimmer back into reality,

for oh so brief, but oh so real, transcendence,

near two months have worked upon this mountain place

since I was last here,

a place that has long served as a nucleus for my life,

a constant, a place that stays much the same,

and allows my heart to circle round it,

I remember the time I toddled in the creek

mesmerized by water and sand,

by their dance down the mountain,

and my clumsy attempts to dance with them with boats and dams,

creations in the sand, ephemeral as sand castles at the beach,

I've returned here through all the constancies and upheavals 

of family celebrating hellos, and wrenched by good-byes far too often,

we'd always like for more to have held constant,

I mourn the people who can no longer sit around our tables,

I treasure pictures we took and saved of circles of hearts bound together

which call up the gain while also murmuring of what is now the loss,

today I mourn a great oak tree,

damaged by the Great Fire about 8 years ago,

a tree that we had to have cut and removed

for the safety of the next circles to come here,

we'll have its base there for decades

to hold memory within its table-like surface,

where each ring can murmur loudly to whoever visits

of each year it thrived across the last century,

we have a split-rail fence in the yard,

cobbled together from a few old chestnut rails from a hundred years ago,

from yellow locust rails I split myself 60 years ago,

and cedar rails a new neighbor shared with us,

the present structure ordered, and perfect,

yet it, too, will not last,

I have long been drawn to cross-sections of tree,

within which the growing and fallow parts of the year

make their mark and hold time in their totality,

as if time could be held,

I got a few sections of the red oak's lowest trunk saved for me,

they stink, though, where they're stored in the basement,

an aspect of the type of oak they are,

some talismans are challenging

in the visceral reality that circles around them.

by Henry H. Walker

February  25, ‘25