. . .Now spread your fingers / And with soft receptive palms hold your tree / Firmly and gently / As if you are approaching someone / You know and love

::::::::

Pick a big one

That isn't right on a path or too close to a road.

Stand close to your tree

(don't be shy).

You might have to wedge your feet between two roots.

Now spread your fingers

And with soft receptive palms hold your tree

Firmly and gently

As if you are approaching someone

You know and love

That you haven't seen for a very long time,

As if you have just said, "Let me get a look at you."

Now you can hug your tree.

But you must be willing

To feel the craggy bark poking your cheek.

Wrap your arms around the trunk.

Find some purchase with your groping finger-tips.

Now pull yourself close

So you feel your heart beating against this great body.

With your head uncomfortably compressed

Against your friend,

With no distance between the two of you

For any deceptions or illusions to squeeze through,

Now it is just your body pushing the cloth of your shirt against bark.

It is the muscle and fat, blood and bone and nerves of you

Collapsing the space between you.

Now I will leave you two alone.

Enjoy your hug.

(Article changed on Feb 25, 2025 at 9:09 AM EST)
(Article changed on Feb 25, 2025 at 9:12 AM EST)

(Article changed on Feb 25, 2025 at 10:23 AM 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.