Kneeling,

Picking snow peas

At the cool end of the day.

They are hard to see sometimes

Among the same-green leaves of their vine.

I start low so I won't miss any,

But do, anyway, miss some,

Lifting my eyes slowly

Working my way up the plant

Pinching their stems between

My right thumbnail and forefinger,

I am tossing jade crescents into a bowl

When suddenly I see

Between leaves a radiant cloud

Which I continue to watch

From my blind.

Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.


He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.