Walking through the bunchgrass.
Walking through the sagebrush. 
Walking over the bed of an ancient sea. 
Looking at a supernova. 
Looking at planetary clusters. 
Looking at the solar system. 
Looking at the starry carpet of the night sky.
Meeting a red dwarf on the path. Stopping for a moment. 
Meeting the sun beside Coyote’s trail. 
Spider lives in the sun. 
Walking an old story. People call it poetry now. It’s not. Neither is this an insect. 
People call this nature now. 
It’s not. You can’t walk with Wasp if you call it nature. 
You can’t walk with the earth if you call her Nature.
Desert Parsley Between a Rock and a Sage Brush Stump
And yet there are all these words.
They’re not Nature. This is Nature:
Here at the bottom of Coyote’s trail is the Milky Way.
That’s not poetry. This is poetry.
Human Version of a River
That’s not Nature. This is Nature:
Pigeon Guarding its Barbecue Along the Rail Line
Nature is beautiful.
So is poetry.
What a Lot of Words in One Place!
This, though, is an older story. This is the star road. Here’s a star being born.
Here’s the sun. We are within him, yet he has shape.
And words.
And children.
There’s the moon. Really. There she is. (Click to enlarge, if that helps. It could be that the technology you are using is not very good at seeing the moon.)
The earth is dying, because the words are about people now. Oh, she’s not dying all at once. She still feathers.
She still stars.
She still yellow bells.
In all the green cheatgrass stealing her water, stealing her words away, she is still among the stars.
Still standing still. Ancient.
Here’s some images of her I made early one morning in March, when I mistakenly flipped the wrong switch on my camera, and found it was the right one. Here she is among the stars.
Here’s one of her words there.
There were human words for this once.
Ancestors in the Rock at Vaseaux Lake
There still are.
Categories: Arts, Endangered species, Ethics, First Peoples, Gaia, Grasslands, Nature Photography, Spirit, Sun, Water
Okanagan Okanogan 
Your pictures of nature show me words of poetry- beautiful! Thank you for sharing microcosmos of your world! Wish you a grenat monday! Tamara
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Thanks, Tamara. I wish you and your green man could join coyote and I as we head up into the hills. What a troupe we would make!
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It would be an adventure, I agree! Anyway, reading your posts brings a piece of your hill, together with coyote, right down here, somewhere in the middle of Europe.And you know what? Things are not much different either side of the sea-green man needs our help…
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I should do a post about Green Man! That’ll be fun.
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Can’t wait , let him visit Slovenia, too
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Harold, sometimes I wonder if you are slyly playing with us. Earth won’t die. She may change…well, she WILL change, as she has been doing for longer than we can imagine. If we provoke her enough, however, she may just shuffle us off as she has so many other species over this limitless space of time.
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Ah, yes, but that is to look at the earth from outside of the earth-human relationship, to look at it as a kind of independent thing floating among the stars. Goethe warned us against going down that road of separation. It’s not that we mustn’t follow that path, but that we must rise above that path or we will be that path, when we can be so much more. Well, Goethe really meant, it’s the body. Look at bodies. Be the bodies. His enlightenment did not preclude bodies. Newton’s did. Newton’s men then went on to discredit Goethe for not being Newtonian. That is rather illogical, really. My point is there is knowledge that is not separated like that. When I say that I went walking among the stars with Coyote, I don’t mean I went to Alpha Centauri by rocket ship. I mean something different. I have also had to realize that no one has a clue what I mean and that the task of explaining it is, perhaps, not my task. The technological power of contemporary culture, and the individualities it creates, is so strong that resistance is seen as individual difference or artfulness within it. It might just be more useful to speak clearly and be completely understood. The earth I’m talking about is dying. People spend millions of dollars a day to make sure of it. Every moment any human, myself included, spends looking away from the living earth kills it. And yet it is possible to walk among the stars and to speak as the earth and with the earth. Instead, contemporary walking practice is about extending the intellect into the territory of the body and exploring the nuances of urban space. That is a pure indication of dead earth. Only the ghosts of earth remain in those concepts. And the ghosts, may I add, of humans. I am deeply troubled by this.
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Thank you> Learned a whole lot of new words today, all of them describing the local little people that dot our surroundings. Great topic to ponder. derfnam
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ArooooooooooOOooooo!
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