#couterie forest

“I went out to the hazel wood,Because a fire was in my head”— “Song of Wandering Aengus,” W.B.Yeats So I went out to the forest and forgot to change my shoes and decided just to walk in my slides wearing these open-toed bamboo brace things for my Achilles, trying not to catch anything between my toes. I also forgot to change out of my pajamas, my beloved polyester stripey Dollar store Gangsta…

I have an incorporeal compass insidewhich, when the trail splitsor crosses, knows which way to goas if the life inside chooses fromamong the countless greenshow to visit the feathered cousins&I visited green heron andsaw the egret atop the piling anhinga just a flash of wingshis sharp call across the lagoon &Soon City Golf Park will send the menin a green duck boat filled with poison to kill the…

For a forest friendGoing quiet in the forest is exhilarant living.Leave your sugar frosted lattespeaker phone in airplane mode.Choose wild cherries and passion flowers.There are thrills in trills in the trees,the slow dance of coasting birds,frog song conga lines at dusk.Go quietly and with someonewho stoops to toad stools; stops, looksand listens with hawk-sharp senseswhen birds swoop and sing…

I’ve done something to my achilles, possibly pushing way too hard into barefoot shoes, although at 69 it could be any number of things. I have, for example, somehow developed duck-footedness and often sit with my feet balanced on their ball, an anxiety thing that probably doesn’t do my achilles any good either.I was pushing towards 2 miles every day walking in the forest arboretum or the wilder…

When the days are empty of work except for what I choose–reading and writing, some chores, the garden–I take long walks in the forest arboretum not to raise my heart rate but to lower it, to follow–after the admonition from yoga–the breath of everything. Lately my thoughts roam unleashed there,  thinking of natural beauty in other forms, and of desire still easily kindled even at my age with the…

Walking is meditation if it is morning chorus and kaleidoscopic green. Not stillness. Not silence. Not transcendence. Follow instead the breath of everything.  I don’t want to escape this world but instead to live deeply within it. I don’t want to approach the lotus unless I can wade in to admire it.  Walk widdershins around the best trees. Resist the dominant habit of humanity. The interleaved…

Today was the first time I set foot on Scout Island in City Park since the 1960s. I had some unpleasant childhood experiences there: the Cub Scout den camp out when I burned myself on the Coleman lantern and my father and Uncle decided to treat it by pouring cold Dixie beer onto it, and later at Jamboree someone I still consider a friend today but who was subject to moments of maniacal assholery…

I realized I hadn’t been to see the old growth oaks along Bayou Metairie in the lawn-like front of the park.  miss those venerable trees, a few of whom are special to me, so I went walking today in the forest arboretum looking for a venerable tree. There are some grand ones and not just the oaks in the Pendergrass Grove, but I realized this is not a park. It’s a forest, one large and inter-rooted…