A Poet’s Walk Among Weeds and Wildflowers
Playing we spy with my biological and spiritual eyes
Creating tanka, sonnets, and rondeau I do so enjoy Tonight, poem pleads go with the flow, please employ
Seeking an energetic breakfast, relived hunter-gatherer days Scavenged yard finding several tree-ripened apricots, hooray!
These orange treasures ignite my sacral fountain of youth energy My new friend the tree and I have achieved metaphysical synergy
Now with my prana invigorated I shall continue to transform Only to my authentic and regenerated self shall I conform
In nature, we often embrace my inner child So, I set off to commune with the wild
Walked along rural roads under hazy, summer sunlit sky Played solitary we spy with my little eye
Wildflowers of all colors, shapes, and sizing kept halting us in our tracks and mesmerizing
Noticed outcrop of blue-purple blossoms, how can this be chicory? Mere strides later lettuce grew like weeds, Gaia created a Holmes mystery
Tiny nectarine color florets we kneel down to admire Relatives of Jerry’s scarlet begonias when I inquire
Thorny and hairy wineberries growing wildly we inspect Ripened fruit littering road’s shoulder covered in hungry insects
A single white flower has us enthralled Hedge bindweed, it’s called
Smiled and recalled purple flowers climbing high upon barren pine Japanese bindweed beautiful scaffolding of nature’s design
Upon turning for home thirsting for juicy apricots I’ll graze, a purple thistle haltingly caught my gaze
Stepped into the brush obtaining a better perception Revealed previously hidden from view the floret has bumble bee’s attention This gentle pollinating hunter-gatherer causes me no apprehension Like Nemo, clowns around anemone fishing for nectar Symbiotic relationships twixt flora and fauna upon God’s altar
Humans should get along so well
Please enjoy this Joseph Lieungh loop pedal from the sixth stanza
while you enjoy the photos I snapped with my inexpensive Android phone along my short journey that I have described with this poem, captioning the species identified, other than my precious apricots, using Google Lens.
Finally, my thirst quenched upon arriving home
The making of Simon and Garfunkle’s Bridge Over Troubled Water inspired the first stanza. I knew I wanted to create a poem from yesterday’s walk. Usually, I rather effortlessly download a tanka series, a sonnet, or a rondeau. Today, I found myself scratching random notes into my creative cauldron (the “Be Mindful” journal jules - Miz Mindful gifted me and into which my better poems flow as I handwrite and thus engage all aspects of our metaphysical and biological capacity) with no formatic poem emerging.
The other day I watched that video after Rebecca Romanelli recommended it to me. The video shows how Simon had written it as a two-verse song. Garfunkle and the producer said it needed a third verse, saying “The song wants to be bigger.” Simon went out of his normal creative process and scratched out a third verse right there in the studio — perhaps the song wrote itself, as it wanted to be.
I realized I was being stubborn by trying to fit today's poem into my normal process and once I let go of the steering wheel, the poem wrote itself.
The house in which I live is nestled between farms in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania. I moved here in April 2022. Last year, the apricot tree yielded little or no fruit and whatever fruit there was, was green. My dear friend from college, who has owned the house for over 20 years, said the tree is too old to produce good fruit. In May, I started sitting in a hammock swing hung from the tree, reading Hermann Hesse, with my bare feet touching the grass, grounding me to the Earth’s energy. I noticed green fruit in the tree and falling to the ground. I tasted some as I like sour, but yeesh these were too acrid.
Recently, I noticed the apricots in the tree and having fallen to the ground were at very stages of ripened and started enjoying them.
A Medium friend of mine said people have underestimated trees and their abilities and contributions to humanity and that we are only recently understanding the connections trees make underground and the various communications they have with neighbors in their ecosystem. She that the apricot tree likes me and my energy and that the tree started producing fruit again because we have entered into a mutually rewarding friendship and the tree approves and enjoys watching over me as I read in the hammock swing.
The fruit she now produces is her gift to me. I thank her and I hug her trunk. White Feather wrote about hugging and learning from trees.
We all could learn a lot from White Feather. I wish he were here. At least his legacy remains.
My playing with pronouns by bouncing between singular and plural is intentional and neither related to gender identity nor non-binary gender nor fluidity twixt the poles. It simply reflects that as a human I consist of animal and soul. It reflects my embrace of the microcosm of duality within the macrocosm of nonduality.
Humans are a uniquely designed symbiotic species of highly evolved animals and souls. See White Feather’s https://readmedium.com/simultaneous-selves-8eca7d61801d. This is also the story of creation in Genesis when one looks back at the original texts before certain words were mistranslated to man and woman. See Graham Pemberton’s https://readmedium.com/what-do-the-first-three-chapters-of-genesis-really-mean-chapter-2-the-creation-of-eve-7aa72143925b and https://readmedium.com/what-do-the-first-three-chapters-of-genesis-really-mean-chapter-2-further-thoughts-b6797482fd5c.
Simplifying the analysis, Adam and Eve do not represent the creation of man and woman but rather the creation of a species consisting of animal and soul. I had started to think along these lines a couple of years ago when I had the realization that the terms divine masculine and divine feminine actually refer to ego and soul (https://readmedium.com/my-reaction-to-two-recent-pieces-on-the-concepts-of-divine-feminine-and-divine-masculine-1f9b899faa17) which I later refined to animus and soul in my https://readmedium.com/the-human-spirit-duality-e456c0729e99 in which I explained my view that we are neither humans seeking spiritual experiences nor spirits seeking human experiences — we are simultaneously and inseparably both.
Regarding the concepts of conformity (or non) and authenticity, please see:
This is my first Weeds & Wildflowers submission. Here are some previous nature or nature photography-based poems the readers of W&W and my newer subscribers might enjoy:
In Rama I create, with soul energy surging through my body, inspiring me and breathing wind into my sails,