tales told: heard?

           

  seeking nature's stories

we are creatures of the story,

using character and situation within unfolding time

to connect seemingly random events into meaning,

we can escape the chaotic feel of life

as popcorned images upon a passive retina,

story throws itself at me in the books I read,

the shows I watch, 

where I am captured

within a wholeness that intrigues me,

providing questions and then answers,

the forest and the mountain also can seem

spontaneous, and purely of the moment,

they can seem to lack the cohesion of a story,

and I want the tales,

I want to understand that world

with characters and situations before the edition of humans,

bears for me live an arc

I hope to hold enough so that I can understand

at least some of their world,

I can watch one for moments, minutes,

and I then know them a bit 

as our two worlds lightly intersect,

I reach to hold both their before and after,

along with the easily-grasped present,

I can create plausible scenarios of past and future,

but the truth-seeker within me hopes for it all,

a month ago the bears visited our neighborhood every day

hoping for opportunistic meals,

even trying the doors of vehicles and houses,

now the acorns are plentiful all over the woods

where they can gorge on all that protein

readily available, more full of tannin than sweet,

most of their year I cannot watch them,

yet I still guess at their story,

even rarer are the visits by the great blue heron,

to know a few minutes of their flight

and of their stalking of minnows and crayfish

can be enough for me to hold,

every plant, every tree is its own character

and also in an ensemble I reach to see and understand,

I love to experience the day, the seasons,

as each actor lives its part and the sets slowly change,

I like the stories geology reveals,

as mountains are made and slowly, slowly reduce

back toward sea level,

storms and streams speed up the reel,

yet our lives are so short

that the story of a mountain 

or even of a great tulip poplar tree

is much harder to imagine and understand

than the stories I read and watch of human kind,

I love to work to understand who we are,

it's the definition of "we"

that my empathic heart loves to expand,

to expand to all of life,

and to all that is the underlying structure

upon which our moments play out.

by Henry H. Walker

October 22, ‘25