Nass river

Tent tethered among jack pine and bluebells.
Lacewings rise from rock
incubators. Wild geese flying north.
And I can’t remember who I am supposed
to be.

I want to learn how to purr. Abandon
myself, have mistresses in maidenhair
fern, own no tomorrow nor yesterday:
a blank shimmering space forward and
back. I want to think with my belly.
I want to name all the stars animals
flowers birds rocks in order to forget
them, start over again. I want to
wear the seasons, harlequin, become
ancient and etched by weather. I
want to snow pulse, ruminating
undulating, pebble at the bottom of the
abyss, candle burning darkness rather
than flame. I want to peer at things,
shameless, observe the unfastening,
that stripping of shape by dusk.

I want to sit in the meadow a rotten
stump pungent with slime mold, home
for pupae and grubs, concentric rings
collapsing into the passacaglia of
time. I want to crawl inside someone
and hibernate one entire night with
no clocks to wake me, thighs fragrant
loam. I want to melt. I want to swim
naked with an otter. I want to turn
inside out, exchange nuclei with the
Sun. Toward the mythic kingdom of
summer I want to make blind motion,
using my ribs as a raft, following
the spiders as they set sail on their
tasseled shining silk. Sometimes
even a single feather’s enough
to fly.

And I can’t remember who I am supposed to be.

~ by Robert MacLean

. . .

The solo wilderness traveller slowly sinks into silence, into a delicious silent awareness, an internal quiet that can’t be put into words. It transcends words and the sense of time; these elements of the human world are replaced by acceptance. Acceptance of all that is. In that primordial soup beyond words you gradually lose a sense of self.

The return to the human world, the world of words and time, tends to be jarring.

. . .

The page above is from the first draft of the new art journal I’m working on:

Meditations On Nature: The Beauty Of Wild Places