The first thing I do on my snowshoes is go to the wetlands, right to the spot where the brook spills into the river. I’m looking for nests, because you can find them so easily on the bushes at the riverbank. No two are the same. The nest, a work of art. A bird, the maker, scavenging. The branches were covered with leaves and buds when it was built here. The bird was just a flitting back and forth. Unseen at work. The maker is long gone.

I’m out early before my Wednesday morning writers. Last week, after she died, I proposed we dedicate our session to Mary Oliver: bring a poem, I asked them, that represents her influence on your writing life. I have prepared a prompt based on “Little bits of energy,” in the excerpt I quoted above. So, when I get to the brook this morning, in my snow shoes, I pause for a moment, as I always do, to listen to the rush and gurgle of the water, and I notice the way the bubbles move under the ice. Like energy. Like little bits of energy, creative energy. My creative energy. That’s how it feels this morning – the flow, the excitement of inspiration. Of listening and letting the voices of poems the makers make reach me and move me and scramble me up inside so I can go into my groups and bring my scrambling and we can all scramble each other and have such a lovely time doing it, on a Wednesday morning, under the arch, standing, semi-circled, looking out over the frozen lawn sloping down to the ice rippled lake and say thank you. Thank you, Mary Oliver, for making your poems and scrambling all our bits up.