New Snow in the orchard across the valley / And look, there is a mist above the orchard.

::::::::

New snow on the hill across the valley

And look, there is a mist above the orchard.

If we were to leave our coffees

To start the cold car and drive across the valley,

If we parked far up the snowbound orchard road

And walked from there into the high meadow,

By then, wouldn't the mist have vanished?

So why bother?

How would one know

That the vanishing mist left behind

A paradise of rime frost,

Bedecking remnants of goldenrod

And copses of honeysuckle

With delicate crystals

Catching the first rays of the rising sun.

Unless one bothered,

And we did - bother.

(Article changed on Dec 29, 2024 at 1:40 PM EST)

Authors Website: https://garylindorff.wordpress.com

Authors Bio:

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.