Soul Mountain Retreat #6

I have abandoned Thoreau this morning for the pond. The woodpecker trills from across the water and songbirds join in a symphony, celebrating the blush of green in the underbrush. Overhead three geese fly abreast, announcing their presence, and further away the drone of a plane and the revving of motors remind me of the inescapable human presence. What is it I want to know, capture in words, as I sit here in the adirondak chair, notebook in my lap? "Surely some revelation is at hand." Is it the human names for the birds and their rhythmic cheeping and twittering that could be charted in musical notation or poetic meter? Is it a term from physics that could name the ripple patterns on the pond's wind-stirred water, or describe the contrasting pattern set off by a duck's entrance into the pond? Perhaps it's the constant variation within a predictable range, or the sun's steady warmth--steady at least for now--that holds me here, each day, each moment, a variation in beauty, a shimmering, whose larger pattern I anticipate, whose minute particulars I can't predict. Or perhaps I am a voyeur of nature, longing for binoculars, to pry into privacies I have not been invited to witness. Yes, and there's that expectation from reading the Bible or centuries' old poetry that a blade of grass will hold a prophecy, that a stubborn dandelion sprouting in the crotch of an old tree will provide the text of a sermon, that the lazy surrender of thought will clear the mind of spot or blemish--that I will feel myself a member of the family of nature.