#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream

First blooms on the sapling, Purple Leaf Plum

. . . Each growing season;
And with soil scabbing our knees
And our own fingers worming
Into dirt, feel a like blessedness—
A birth—in our own blind returning
To our beloved earth.

~ Excerpt from Earthworm Poem, by Dennis Camire

Ah, Frank’s cold comes my way. Mildly enough. I am up early to finish prepping for the Charles River Writers workshop today and to send my monthly newsletter. Both accomplished. And excited to find in an e-mail of the early morning hours the publication of my art feature in Mud Season Review. Delight, and astonishment, to see my winter’s ice image at the top of the issue: “Fertility Goddess, Winter Brook,” one of my own favorites from the last winter. All of them are favorites, really, and I’m so proud they have found this home in this journal that believes so wholeheartedly in the season of mud. I show Frank the images, and he’s delighted too. Later asks me, Well, does the Charles River make the best ice? Could you have found these images anywhere else?

No, definitely couldn’t find them somewhere else. I have to really really know and be familiar with a place and love a place so well to be given this kind of sight, I think. These images are sparked by seeing, by looking, yes, by awareness of the daily weather of the river and wetlands. But, I feel they emerge in a kind of intimate conversation. The images are there, they are formed in the ice, whether I see them or not. That is like conversation between friends or loved ones: what’s revealed is revealed because of the conversation and the receptivity to insight and revelation.

I have a wonderful Charles Rive Writers workshop; the theme and prompt about your favorite time of day works well to generate lovely poetry and prose. In the late afternoon I pick up the special one and we go outside in the yard where I rake a bit, a big pile of pine needles and leaves pushed up again and again by the plow on the driveway. In this organic heap I uncover an earthworm. I must show this to the Special One, who is perfectly comfortable handling it. . . until it starts to squirm. Now it’s on the driveway and we watch it move the squiggling turning whirling bending way a worm worms around. Then I put it back in the pile of needles and leaves it wants to work on. I turn around, and there is dance being performed by the Special One: Dance of the Earthworm.

Charles River