The Snow Buckwheat Country:
All at Once
The Grass Country:
One…
…by…
…one.
It’s not indigenous if it isn’t expressing the energies of the land.
The energies are there for all to read, all together or one at a time.
So, you think you’re going to build a trail system across the porcupine’s trail to an orchard’s compost pile, eh, and water some trees along it to protect the people on the trail from spray drift from the orchard. Yeah, sure. You just go try that.
Trickle Irrigation Hose, Gnawed
Good thing the water was turned off to this system a few years back, due to lack of funds to maintain what was started. When a development goes bankrupt, all environmental promises are annulled.
The farmer continues to use the compost pile. The farm has been in the family for generations. I’m sure they know the score. All that was achieved, really, was a bunch of dead trees and a continually irritated porcupine.
Just to be clear: this is not a wild porcupine, but a relationship between a farm and a hill, with prickly bits and hose-cutting teeth.
Oh, hello.
It’s a thing. With legs like hers (she is, let’s say, about 7 centimetres from tip to tip ), you can jump from twig to twig, in three dimensional space. It’s not like a bee in the flowers, though. This is hunting. 
There were four in this bush, hunting together. So, here’s the thing: there are regulations for protecting indigenous landscapes, for the planting of bunchgrasses, mostly. These improvements are welcome, especially in disturbed lands in housing developments, but when the mule deer are locked into them and eat all the wild flowers down to their roots, and it gets on the middle of August, the place is close to a desert. Planting lavender and Russian sage helps, so does the dill in my garden, not to mention a bit of queen anne’s lace and some red orach, while we sort out how to make deer corridors, hack down the sagebrush, and replant the wild flowers, especially thistles and all the species that used to grow along the borders of valley bottom wetlands that are no more. Our wetlands are our houses now. The survival of wasps, like these beautiful gymnasts, is up to us. “Wildness” does not come into question. That’s just White thinking, and we don’t need that any more. Or maybe just some wild lettuce. We could manage that.
Or just some smokebush. Look at this tiny wasp below. She likes smokebush. 
And, hey, smokebush, that’s a pharmaceutical plant. We could do our lungs some good at the same time.
This is not an image of mountains, not of what rises or mounts, but what held against the ice that cut all else away.
The Coast Mountains
The ice is now air. Humans, bears, martins, squirrels, eagles and bobcats, to name a few, pass through it: the people of the ice. Nice.
The rattles of summer!
Westron Wind, when wilt thou blow, the small rain down can rain.
They are still being born.
They are countless and perfect.
Born from suns themselves.
At home in the complex interstellar environment.
And now they are leaving home.
Soon they will drift on the interstellar winds.
Among supernovae.
Through solar flares.
Among nebulae…
… and star clusters of all kinds.
It is the season for floating to the far corners of the universe.
… and beginning again.
The universe doesn’t extend.
It deepens and curves.
Smoke has replaced the sky. It is the way of things.
Here are the dry hills. Overgrazing, a reduction to three species, one native and two of which are as flammable as gasoline. Nice.
Water: forestry nursery in the distance, sport fields below, and a royal gala apple orchard. Nicer yet.
Below are the old wetlands that used to store water. Note the recent disperal to high evaporation house plots. Exquisitely well planned.
European culture sits uneasily but orderly upon this smoky land.
Look at the yellow dock gone to seed.
Look at a mule deer plant it in the sun.
There is balance in beauty and beauty in balance.
Everything leaves its trace.
One image three times…
Wasp Drinking.
Earth Drinking.
Sun Drinking.
… that’s the way it is on this planet. That’s the way it is.
While making arrangements for my father’s funeral a week ago, I walked down at dawn to the mouth of Simm’s Creek, on Eastern Vancouver Island. No, this is not rain.
Four years from now, with some incredible luck, this plucky little salmon will be coming home.
Others like it will be returning to the fire forests (note the smoke) over the mountains to the east. Fire, water and fish: it is enough.
