how and where to go now?

 

three roads call to us

three realities, illustrated by calendar events,

converge today, and give me pause,

1st, we are still within the mourning month

for losing Jimmy Carter,

our most decent, common man, President,

2nd, we celebrate the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.,

a man who saw what wasn't

and pushed us to deal with "why not?"

3rd, we inaugurate our next President, Donald Trump,

who ran on a platform of anger, of grievance, of desperation, 

fearing his many floutings of the law

would send him to prison,

I have spent much of my life

working to help others find and express

the best of who they are,

I have worked to help community build, 

wherever it can,

so many of such efforts have been "Trumped"

by the pushing of us to fight who is not "us,"

in the spurious building of "community" by hating "them,"

I think of someone drowning who pushes the potential rescuer down

so as to get above the water for a moment,

I ache to hear Jimmy and Martin advise us

on how and where to go now.

by Henry H. Walker

January  20, ‘25

it's always time to marvel!

 

hope within our moments

a cousin looks at the world

and cautions us to see all the wonder we can,

to grab it with our soul and thus enlarge ourselves, 

despite how often we can feel diminished,

ravaged by despair hidden within the present of every moment,

politics and problems can be heavy weights to carry,

and that effort can make us miss a lot:

a flower, a snow flake, needs to be seen, appreciated, shared,

I am a photographer

and I know every sight has power within its possibilities,

it just takes opening self up enough to look at it right,

somehow within all the zero-sum around us

miracles still manifest in the perfection of a moment,

maybe in a sea shell, in the wing of a bird,

in the will of another who won't be denied,

in our self that risks and then breaks through to a rightness,

every new day is a promise,

and moments for hope start over again.

by Henry H. Walker

January 15, ‘25

Dance!

 Winter Dance Concert 1/25

there is a cleanness to dance, 

a simplicity of form and function

that, like music, speaks to the elemental,

I live in a world of words,

where I love the ambiguities and complexities,

as I work to hold idea and feeling

with the infinite variety of tools of words

I can use to sketch,

I reach for the wholeness that glimmers at me,

and dares me to see it within a net of sounds

that ache to hold what cannot be held,

the dancer has the tool of the body:

in movement, in stasis, 

in relationship to the other, to the others,

a dance is conceived, choreographed, 

taught to those dancing it,

then it can be shared with an audience,

though dance is communication, as Martha Graham argued,

many of us in the audience cannot capture

what we have seen with our words,

we can with our hearts,

as we appreciate virtuosity, simplicity, 

beauty, joy, whimsy, profundity,

dance eloquently speaks a language

that is its own world,

it is wondrous when we dare to enter that world

and let it transform us in ways

we cannot know with our conscious mind,

but which can profoundly reshape us.

by Henry H. Walker

January  16, ‘25

a lesser radius

 

the vicarious, the nearby, still there

I look at pictures of a hike,

of a waterfall, of a mountain top,

and each place looks like a friend,

at their best, all hale and hearty

and perfect for the world,

and I should be with them,

now I'm having to deal with a slowly-dawning realization

that my body can't hike as it once did,

that where I can ambulate myself

has a lesser and lesser radius from where I am,

family members casually walked 4+ miles 

up to a wonderful waterfall, Ramsey Cascades,

and easily walk it back, two hours up, two hours down,

my granddaughter hikes to the top of my favorite mountain

and back down a well-loved trail,

all in one full day

something I used to do and just can't any more,

I pushed it two months ago,

and I handled well the aerobics of a steep 2+ miles,

but I didn't quite have it in me

to make it to the A.T. and back again,

many incredible spots are still within my power,

I want to appreciate what is still available,

to look up and joy that the nearby and the vicarious are still open to me,

the sun is setting, yet the light can still be there for me for awhile.

by Henry H. Walker

December 29, ‘24

Walisiyi calls!

 

power in the naming

though we name our children before we even know them,

should we name a tree, a waterfall, a stream, a mountain the same way?

shouldn't their names come out of knowing them?

my favorite mountain was capriciously named for a man

who probably never even saw it,

let alone walked it,

let alone saw sunset and sunrise from its top,

a man who didn't know it,

I argue we should bring back the name

the Indigenous Cherokee called it,

for their naming was part and parcel of the gestalt

of their intimate relationship with the world,

a mountain not just lifeless rock draped with a green forest,

but rather a place with spirit,

a living power that is of a whole

with how they felt the world,

naming should be powerful, like with God in Genesis,

too often our culture seems to feel as a collector:

kill the insect, the bird, mount it in a collection,

record its name, for then we feel we know it,

and it is ours,

a mountain is not ours,

and its name should honor it,

a mountain belongs to itself, 

and we should relate to it as to a friend.

by Henry H. Walker

January  1, ‘25

attending to the flame

 a keeper of the flame

who is the "keeper of the flame" at CFS these days?

John Baird, longtime head of the school at CFS,

wrote me years ago and addressed the physical letter to me,

Henry Walker, "The Keeper of the Flame,"

what I heard in that is that Friends School

has a sacred charge to not just be a regular school but more,

not restricting ourselves to making sure students 

are given the right support for "reading, writing, arithmetic,"

but also following a charge to support

the "finer qualities of our nature" in the students, and in the staff,

Thoreau's term for the potential part of us

that notices and resists such as the government willy-nilly

taking over another country, as the US did to Mexico during Thoreau's time,

that notices, appreciates, and preserves the natural world,

like Thoreau did at Walden Pond,

that sees, that knows, that loves, the piercing truth of art, of nature,

of ancestors', and of our own insights, 

revelations of the profundity available to us,

if we can stay open to such revelation,

the softer sides of ourselves, the vulnerable, the unsure,

the part of us that can risk

becoming larger, that can put one block on top of another

until a new thing is created,

a soft mirror of the Creator in the Beginning,

as a teacher, I focused on the glory of each individual student,

as a colleague, I focused on what charges we should heed

as to what structures and callings could lead us to the heights and the depths

a good school needs if we are to support and implement

how to become a great school,

a school needs to both concentrate its efforts

on the individual light of each student,

and also on the collective light that should call us to blaze bright,

on the subtle but vital "finer qualities of our nature,"

it is wondrous when a teacher is there for a student, for a class,

it is important also, when a school finds as many as it can find

to be there for the wholeness of a school's vision,

and works to make it so,

the flame needs attention.

by Henry H. Walker

November 29, ‘24