#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream
Beech Leaf, Maple Wing
A late start. It's the morning my daughter's pigs, Osa and Leona, are moving to a new home. She is leaving for the summer in June and has made friends with a Farm Sanctuary in our town, Unity Farm Sanctuary, where they will live with a whole farm of other pigs, guinea hens, llamas, and loving, friendly people. Osa and Leona are sleeping now - and the way I know this is that the farm has a pig cam live feed! A new chapter of their special lives begin, and I'm grateful for the ways the pigs fed my spirit to have been part of their first chapter.
After we see the pigs in their new pen in the center of town, Charlie and I walk in the woods wet from yesterday's rain, into the fresh breeze and the meadow of new blooms, the white campion, wild geranium, and even the wind whipped dandelion is lovely to look at this morning. I want the jack-in-the-pulpit I spotted yesterday on my second walk to find me, but it doesn't see me passing today. Nearing the end of our walk I pass a beech leaf, then turn back. It's wet, translucent, and blades of green grass are visible beneath it. I stop to wonder and admire, and then I see the bonus - the translucent maple wing on the surface of the beech, and this makes me exceptionally delighted. Trees, in every aspect of every season, startle with such beauty.
In the early afternoon I attend a symposium on Yeats held at a poet's home in Lexington, a fund raiser for Four Way Books, and spend some remarkable time in a living room full of poets reading Yeats aloud and discussing intensity in revision, examining early drafts and finished drafts of his poems, showing us that Yeats revised toward intensity in a variety of ways, and even Yeats wrote awkward and ungraceful drafts as he struggled with what we was trying to say.
We didn't read this poem, but having walked in my Sunday sanctuary - meadow and woods, I appreciate these lines, particularly the last:
“I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.”
