Fruit for the Grandchildren

 This year I have picked apples. Apples from old trees, apples from tangled trees; yellow apples and red and the green as well; and they have fed me well. It is no work to eat when the apples are dropping. Fill your basket, slice them well, cook them together; and they provide a nourishing porridge, a nourishing staple for sustaining the daily work. Apples from the ancestors, apples from the hundred-years'-earth-people, apples from the pomice-heap, the yore-days' grafter's skill. Green apples hard and tart, crab-apples soft and sweet, yellow apples like the bread of the earth, red apples good to eat: in this land where the old sowed, the new may eat.

Although people are rich these days, they are poor indeed, for what is good is neglected. Watch as the apples, good apples, the bread of the earth—see as they fall, fall down, down to hard ground, fall and bruise and grow soft and rot, as they go to the wasps and then dwindle away upon black earth, upon grey stone, here where many decades hence they were tended, centuries ago sown excellently by the people who came before. Are there those among us who will take up the fruit of the earth, sweet to drink from excellent trees, from wondrous deities dwelling in this broad valley, in this mountain-land where the thrush sings, where the meadow-rue blooms? Are there those who will take them up, gather them up, those who will give thanks and work hard, who will cut and cook and slice and dry, who will make the gift live on, who will cause the Excellent Path to live? I see the people, the multitudes coming and going, hurrying north and hurrying south along the bustly road, here and gone in an instant, and why are they all going other than here, as if they were mad, as if they saw what was excellent and did not want it, saw a gift divinely given and decided to steal instead, like a person given some old dead leaves and some young new sweet shoots, who chooses the old dead leaves? Old dead leaves stamped with dead men’s faces—see, a bluebird would not fall for that!

I heard you speak, heard you say in response, saying, They are for the deer, maybe the cows, They do not taste good, they are not good to eat, not sweet and good to drink from laden boughs, from generous earth—saying, I can get better for my little money, for the shopkeeper will trade me chaff for apples, apples for chaff, and my chaff is good enough for me, chaff for a couple bloated old apples from a faraway land, from some farm, and what’s the difference? Cold, reliable exchange, cold and predictable, the same every time, for the choicest apples, good and uniform, the same every time, never an odd taste, never a harsh bitter flavor.

Things don’t taste so good when you’re the one holding bitterness. There is so much bitterness in people’s hearts, that if they taste the tiniest tinge of bitter then it’s too much, it’s the last wafer, overwhelm on overwhelm, and they spit it out! But with a calm heart, a heart fasted in the meadow, a heart that leaps for what is good and holy, a clear and pure heart, free of inner bitterness, then what is a little bitterness from a kind old apple tree, generous and good, not expensive, a gift, a kind old grandmother’s apple tree, a kind old grandfather’s love, sung into living with good voices, by a hundred people and a thousand deities and ten thousand thanks and a hundred thousand excellent apples and a million excellent apple seeds, a few of which may sprout, may live, may grow up, spring up, unfurl, sprawl and blossom forth—a hundred thousand apples that fill the belly, that nourish one well with excellent food, that cause one to leap up, to live and be alive, that cause one to be joyous and hale? Or, if still the one apple tree makes your tongue curl, then walk on, walk along with a big basket, with a great vessel and a heart that has drank goodness, that has drank deeply from the nectar of immortals, from the sun upon the earth—yea, walk along and seek amidst the trees another one drinking that very nectar, a wonderful tree generously bearing, another one bringing gifts up from the Mother, up from the Excellent One!

There is a tree by the library, called the Laughing Tree because when two or three people have been picking fruit together under their boughs, they begin laughing. The apples are tiny, like little blueberries, and soft as the black earth in the mountains, with a couple of small seeds in each, and the taste is like the light and the fire of the rising sun and the chirping of the clear flowing Mettowee, the good water, the blossom-water full of fish, beaver-water, muskrat-water clear and deep, whose hair is the willows and the reed-canary. Would you know that these fruits, these excellent gifts of this lovely tree, were apples, if you passed by—would you drink the fruit from the boughs, accept a gift well given, give again? One day these tiny apples sustained me the whole day—they are wholesome and full, red-purple and good to digest, good to drink from the tree, good to stuff oneself of good kindly branches, good joyous boughs. It wasn’t long ago that this wonderful deity was planted in good earth, above grey stone. And if you let the gift from your body mix with the leaves and grasses, let it become the earth, let good seed from good earth leap up, spring up, spring forth, slowly and then quickly unfurl and blossom forth, then may many hedgerows and many meads be graced with many wonderful deities, children of this first one, this generous one, blessed, graceful to look upon, towering kindly, sprawling with benevolence, with great kindness, joyful! Or to take a handful of seeds and put them in a prepared place—that too.

To be a gift is the ordinary way of things—this much you can see! To be a gift like clear water flowing, to be a gift like the willows by the water, like the Laughing Tree, branches bent down with sweet red fruit, sweet purple fruit. What would you rather, which makes your heart grow full, makes your heart live, O divine one, divine Human Being, Heart Being upon good earth, upon grey stone?—to be alone, looking for ever more pennies, ever further, your eyes strange and distant and hungry like a gaping chasm, scratching at the earth for pennies, stealing from the earth, stealing from your sister and stealing from your brother? Or to look up, look well, look giving up, renouncing what is not good, look giving thanks, taking up what is good, look up at the heavens so vast, so great, and the land sprawling, the high mountains towering, and before you a wondrous deity stands, wondrous bearer of the gifts of the earth, an apple tree, an apple prayed and sang by the ancestors into this beloved form upon this beloved earth, into this black meadow shining brightly, fruitfully bearing? And, sowing good seeds in good earth, caring for the earth, tending the earth to be deep and black and whole again, to again be filled with the white fungus root, to be filled with the generous roots of the apple tree, of the plum and currant and the towering oak and the all-good fruiting trees, of the parsnip and all the good meadow-roots, good meadow-fruits, generous beings, praying that they be, that they should again spring up, again be here, and drop for the children, hang low for the grandchildren, sweet, full of sweet water, good Mettowee-water, these our excellent sisters, brothers beloved upon good earth, upon grey stone? And, giving thanks, weeping a thousand tears of thanks again, to eat what is good, to eat of what is freely given, given to be given once again, by the children of the Earth, from the Earth, again, and to and from the Earth, Mother of All, Beloved Earth, Excellent One, Most Splendid Abundant One, Merciful One, Black Earth, Fungus Earth, Dame’s Rocket Earth, Garlic Mustard Earth, Goldenrod Blossoming Earth, Wild Ginger Earth, Yellow Lily Unfurling Earth, Hemlock Earth, Pine Earth, Maple Earth, Spruce Earth and Fir Earth, Locust Earth and Ash Earth, Bright Black Mountain Earth and Beloved Abundant Valley Earth—Most Wondrous Earth, beloved of all!—so long as the sun shines and the seasons turn, so long as water flows and the mountains stand tall and the valleys fill with hemlocks sparkling in the good autumn air, in the glimmering sun in the springtime, in these mountain lands, gathering and sowing, sowing and gathering, again and again, here, here in these mountain lands, may we give thanks. 

Yellow

There are many things that words cannot describe. 

The shapers of a thousand beings, of the world unseen—

They lurk in the deepest shadows of the mind. 

In the milk-like waters flowing low to lie,

I found a yellow eye, peering from the weeds. 

There are many words that words cannot define. 

I stared into the flames. Are they really not alive?

A flame, a flame, burning, twirling, living, free!

It burns through the thickest shadows and twists the mind. 

Those are the fluttering stones that circumscribe

A glittering flower, yellow-golden with glee:

There are many things commands cannot confine. 

And those, on the windy walls of the mountain-side:

As if there were nothing not thick unknown, we peer. 

It blooms in the deepest shadows and shapes the mind.

Those are the multiplicitious dwellers of the slime:

The little heart which lets light shining gleam. 

There are certain words which words cannot confine;

They burst through the deepest shadows of the mind.  

(2022)

Infinity in the Meadow

It always amazes me how small the house is, yet how thoroughly entrapping. Go out, go forth only a short distance from it, only three or four stone’s-throws and you will find yourself free; yet stay inside, and in most parts, it is a struggle to keep from becoming scattered.

An open meadow is a fine place to sit, a fine place to rest. The sky is there, Father Sky and Mother Earth too. A fine place to sit, a fine place to rest. Out here, the world is wide open, empty of what is dross and vulgar—constantly dissolved into the blacknesses—and full of fullness, spacious, entirely alive. You can walk for hours, nay, days out there, from this holy mountain to that holy mountain. You can sit down in a field and meñamel while the vastness of living lives, the vastness of Heaven and Earth brightly le. Here is the place where living lives, the place where the light dwells and even the darkness in a covered cooking-pot becomes full of light. Here is the bottom, here the endless expanse. And here we are. And there is nothing except this. The multitudes imprisoned between four walls—how could they, in tiny cramped houses, tiny cramped mansions, ever escape Mother and Father, hide in plain sight at their feet? These days when someone wants to disconnect, they bury their face in a smartphone.

And that is how the multitudes escape their mother and father, one of the ways: through toothy-snatching pleasures, pleasures that catch, that snatch and snag, pleasures that sing like a siren’s song, that spin like a spider’s cocoon; and pain, pain and crampedness and unnaturalness and complication that spur one, frantic, to scurry, to do things; and indeed there are things to do, things to accomplish, means and methodologies numerous as the morning jewels on a spider’s web. Between four walls, in any here-and-there house whose windows are large or small, there are pleasures and comforts, tortures and torments alike. There is a pantry full of dross and vanity; televisions, computers and smartphones full of stale air; an oil heater that releases bad smells and dry sultry winds; a cook-stove with burnt and caked-on dreams and anguish; a dishwasher full of not-yet-broken glass and shattered pottery and bent silverware; a desk or countertop piled high with white fear etched all over with black blood; never is there nothing to be done and no business to do. There is dirt, there are mice, there are dirt and dust and mice scurrying about in the head and heart of the one who stays too long here. 

With too much dirt and mice scurrying in the head, people become irritable and deluded, lashing out at one another hopelessly, internally agitated, grinding, worrying, dizzy-headed, sickly, sad. Heaven and Earth are forgotten; you are falling deeply into an inward-going hole, crowded and pressing, spiralling down to the hard merciless floor in a confused heap, energy congealing like a blood clot, acute soul failure imminent; or haemorrhaging like a dying star. 

And the road. It is nothing more than a portable house, an easy-snatching-toothy pleasure, whether you walk or bike or sit in the car, the latter of which is a house within a house, both luxurious and insidious. It is said, “A road becomes a road by people travelling on it.” Where you step, does the ground turn to ashes? Better to walk slowly, to be calm and concentrated in body and mind, to calmly place one’s foot, walking in a mountain stream, in an old deer-path, a field’s edge.

I’m sorry to be so grim to you. There are good things about a house, too. You can keep jars and pots and baskets full of dried apple slices and acorns and wild grapes and garden corn. You can keep potatoes and parsnips too, and cook them in a clay pot. And when it’s too cold to be outside, you have a place where death is not imminent; when rain comes, you needn’t rot with the wild raspberries. There are good things that come with the bad. Even from in amongst the slime and raw faeces of the internet, a few good seeds, excellent seeds in fact, can be snatched, can be rinsed off. Sometimes the only way to get a good seed is to stick one’s fingers in the sludge, the cow-pie, this fresh fuming dung. And, to the one in need, a truly good seed, is worth it all.

Now, I tell you, the people have forgotten what it means to meñamel, to shaqumeñamel, and to le. They have forgotten the pleasure of emptiness and nothingness, the pleasure of infinity in the meadow, out in the qulumailaa. They have forgotten the pleasure without teeth that snatch, that pleasure of nothing and no pleasure. Verily, the one who delights in wisdom, delights in this pleasure. The wise shun agitation and seek calm, for it is in calm that the truth is seen, in calm that virtue is attained, in calm that the heart is pleased. And Mother and Father have gone nowhere at all; clean out the mind, throw off the roof, smash the walls, pull up and scatter the foundation, and you will see the endless heavens, the wind-bright space; see the vast expanse, the holy steadfast mountains, the qume shen and the ilileshya. Like the little snake on the warm rock, like the well-placed stone in the mountains, a well-sprouted seed, a well-grown cornstalk in the blackness, melxemi. 

Water-Poem

(Still somewhat work in progress)

When water finds no rest it goes chasing, goes running, goes racing, then it gathers up into great rivulets, great rivers, great floods; it goes tearing down house after house, town after town, and finding no rest, nourishes not the meadows and hills, flows not gently ‘twixt tree and meadow, ‘twixt meadow and tree. But when water stays in one place, then does it sink deep, then does it gather up underneath the earth to nourish the villages, the fields, the meadows and the hills; then does it well up, spring up, spring forth as clean springs, then does it furnish a dwelling-place for watercress and esculent nettles. Likewise, the one not loving themself shall find no rest. Restless they chase, go running, go racing; they gather up their strength into great rivulets, great rivers, great floods; they go into the world, constantly trying to enact their plans, petty or grand; and finding no rest, nowhere to rest, they nourish not the villages, nourish not the fields, the meadows and the hills.

Water that chases, might chase further into the mountains for a time, but always downhill, always lakeward, always seaward, always oceanward it chases; down, down toward the gaping abyss, toward the gaping darkness it chases the depths. Tarry and sink, tarry and sink where you are, O good water! Nourish the hills and soften the earth where you sit; be an oak, be a ramp, be a maple, be an ash! Be a sedge, a little bluestem, a mountain’s-hair-grass, a Cladonia, an Umbilicaria, a blueberry, a wintergreen, a cucumber-root, a springtail’s rustling, and a millipede’s neverending clomping! Be a cupful, a pailful of water good for drinking, good for boiling, good for washing; be a spring furnishing nettles, furnishing mushrooms of many sorts—chanterelles and boletes and milky-caps and brick-caps; be the berry from a ginseng-root, the dewdrop from a cohosh-leaf, a muddy seep for toothwort and avens; a yellow birch of the mountain, a red oak of the hill; be the witch-hazel, the dogwood, the clematis, the bergamot good of taste, the yarrow good for blood, the goldenrod, good meadow’s gold! Be the sweet-blossomed milkweed, the sweet-rooted lily, the starch-rooted parsnip, the stout-rooted potato of the field; be the shiny ripening flint-corn, the white-blue of the rye-corn, the fattening of the wheat-corn in the meadows soaking, up in the grain-fields growing! Be clear water, cold water, pure water; be fish-swimming water, clear good water, broad beaver-water, reed-canary-water, sedge-water, iris-water, watercress-water; be frog-water, be sweet-flag-water, muskrat-water, turtle-water, trout-water, crayfish-water, water-snake-water, sculpin-water, mayfly-water, cattisfly-water, damselfly-water, dragonfly-water! Be the broad and unhurried, the deep and lazy river-water, the deep-bellied river bottom where quick-tailed trout make their homes; be the deep cool marsh-water, the manna-grass-water, the willow-water at the beaver’s dam, the cherry-water, the elderberry-water at the river’s edge; be the hops-vine, the ground-elder, the plum-wood’s blossoming! Tarry, O beloved water; tarry and sink where you are, and do not go any further chasing, chasing to mud, chasing to sullied rivulet, chasing to sullied flood, not down, down into the gaping darkness, down into the gaping abyss! Sully yourself not with mud from the chasing, filth from the slithering, silt from the racing—no! Tarry where you sit, tarry and sink, good water, O water beloved by all; go not chasing, go not slithering, go not racing down, down into the gaping darkness—stay here, O water, O pure water, clear water, here in the mountain lands, here in the land where the thrush sings, where the meadow-rue blooms!

And be like clear water, the water good for drinking, good for cooking, good for washing; the water that nourishes the oaks, the hickories, the mountain’s-hair-grass, the sedge, the cinquefoil, the Cladonia, the Umbilicaria, the blueberries, the barberries of the hill; be like the water that nourishes black birch, the white birch, the hillside honeysuckles and berries, the spruces and hemlocks and pines, the maples and ashes and hop-hornbeams and butternuts; the water sucked up into maple-bark, into sycamore-bark, into willow-bark, into alder-bark, into hazel-bark, into witch-hazel-bark, into cherry-bark, into dogwood-bark, into ninebark-bark, into bramble-bark, into rose-bark and nannyberry-bark and cranberry-bark, into basswood-bark and basswood-leaf; be like the water that grows the ginseng-root and the cohosh-root, the water that grows the ramps and the toothwort and the nettle and the saxifrage and the speedwell and the partridgeberry and the meadow-rue and the windflower and the wood-anemone and the nightshade and the mustard and the milkweed good to eat; the dame’s-rocket and the goldenrod and the yarrow and the boneset and the joe-pye-plant and the bindweed and the orchard-grass and the bluegrass and the little-bluestem-grass and the meosh-grass and the bottlebrush-grass and the bergamot-good-to-taste and the poke, the lady’s-slipper and the showy orchis and the helleborine! Be like the good water that waters the June beetle, the moths great and small, the ever-clomping millipede, the sonorous bumblebee, the meadow-loving honeybee, and all the small bees; be like the clear water that waters the bark-beetle, the aphid, the caterpillar, the inchworm, the butterfly, the murmuring springtail, the gregarious ant, the hoverfly, the beautiful hawkmoth, the mayfly, the cattisfly, the marsh-worm, the meadow-worm, the mountain-worm! Be like the pure water that waters the deer, the moose, the rabbit, the squirrel, the fisher, the mink, the coyote, the dog, the bobcat, the housecat, the lion, the wolf, the bat, the mouse, the vole, the mole, the humans in their villages; be like the water that waters the crayfish, the toad, the water-frog, the tree-frog, the salamander, the turtle, the serpent so close-bound to the earth; yes! Like a gentle rain of clear water watering all beings equally and useful for every cause, like a clear mountain spring good for all beings be; like a clear spring fed by groundwater, by slow earth-sunken water be; like clear water in its nourishing of all grounds become, and spring up, spring forth, spill over, O dearest water, O god of life!—spring up, spill forth, by your own goodness and magnetism concentrate yourself like water concentrating, forming a spring, springing up, springing forth, spilling over, softening the earth and nourishing all beings! O water, beloved of all, being of two natures—the rushing flood and the nourishing spring—be the latter; spring up from the rocky earth, the pebbly mountain-spring, the muddy seep, the venerable headwaters; be the gentle one, brought forth by love, cool and calm like the earth, brought forth from the depths of the earth, mother of all things!

Just like water is kind—may you, O water, O god incarnate, be kind: kind like the spilling-over spring, like the vast sheets of rain, merging with thing after thing, soaking into this earth and that, this field and that mead, this wood and that glade; all mouths are not rejected by you. Even enemies are united as water: their blood is of one source, one substance, for although they seem opposed to one another, they are in substance the same.

When water is deep and not shallow, you can dip a cup or a pail in; there, the mountain trout find their home, and a multitude of animals come to drink. Where the water pools up in hollows and vernal pools, it soaks, soaks into the earth and nourishes the honeysuckle, the squirrel-corn, the spruces, the firs; there, the frogs come to lay their eggs; it softens the earth, and the myriad herbs come to flourish. Why be shallow when you can be deep? Why be sheet erosion when you can be the nourishing seep? Even the shrubs of the driest ridges, make the juiciest fruit; the hawthorn, the blueberry, the cactus of the sandy places; the serviceberry in the oaken-woods, the barberry, growing on but little stone, and the gooseberry too, shaping sweet fruit of lichens and sparse grasses alone. Be now the water which fruits on those ridges, sweet; be now the water which bears for good beings to eat, those beings to be watered and fed by the poorest of the herbs, those scant-mountain-rain-sippers, the stone-eaters and the frost-nibblers. Would you think the barberry a frugal being, who makes succulent fruit in the places where drops are few? Extravagant in the taking and extravagant in the giving he is, a master of rain and sun and stone; no meager ninebark at the river’s edge, no carp’s snacking of the wooly willow’s dropping. See!—even the poorest among the plants loves themself and gives yet a seed-laden fruit. How much more so the apples and grapes out in the black meadow, the cherry and plum by the river’s edge? And yet even the barberry is like a spring, a holy water-fount; from drops to bear a smattering of red fruit, fruit well to be eaten, well to be had—how much more so an apple-tree by the waterside, the greatest of the fruiting trees, sweet cider-fount, sweet pie-giver, not wasting the water of the earth? Just as the barberry, drinking deep, makes bright fruit for the eating, withhold no kindness for the sake of the chasing, the running, and the racing; is it not enough just to be—here? To, a human being, soak in the waters which come your way and be fruitful, to withhold from yourself no love, no scrap of kindness; and may it be shared outward, shone outward, with extravagance, like earth that has been well soaked, welling up, springing forth, seeping as a seep, springing as a spring. Like a barberry in the thin places swell; like a gooseberry from a rocky ledge sprawl laden; like an apple-tree in the black meadow, each bearing their own fruit according to their kind—like them may you soak, alive.

The Devil’s Teaching

Be afraid of what is difficult to obtain; be wary of what is desired. Give thanks for your hardships, for Loshaxh is the harsh teacher and fearsome messenger of all the winds, the waters, and the lands. Running from the flames of the blazing house into the open air, one enters into the vastness of Maranlhin-jawe, gentle teacher and giver of all gifts.

To see the Fearsome One as an adversary, is to not yet be of true wisdom. Without this perfection of wisdom—the ultimate friendliness of all good and bad—one will go on without learning either way.

Everyone wishes for Maranlhin to teach them the easy way. But when they don’t listen, the Devil pesters them with harsh teaching. And then when they say, “The Devil is evil”, they are at that moment beyond hope. So the foolish and the clever alike have said, and so their wisdom was never perfected.

It is as if all the hosts of the world
were throwing bullets and cannonballs—
yet, to the one knowing truly,
they transform
into a shower of flowers,
fragrant, of many kinds.
A crown of thorns has
blossomed and borne fruit.