#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream

Ice figure with emerald head, Charles River

“The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy. Daily prayers are delivered on the lips of breaking waves, the whisperings of grasses, the shimmering of leaves.”
― Terry Tempest Williams

A hard sleep, gratefully. Charlie waits, impatiently, for our walk. At the river, ice crusts the edges as we walk into the cold. I want pictures of this ice, and bend and turn and examine the shapes, and then, my legs buckle and I’m in the river, in my sneakers, up to my knees. So, I walk back to the house, change my pants and shoes, and start out again. I find a figure that draws me close, in the ice of the Charles, an emerald headed woman. I want to know who she is and what it’s like to have a face and a head like a gem as gorgeous as this one. This is the picture that warms and excites me outdoors today. In the meadow, there is always milkweed fraying and blowing. Indoors, I warm myself by the roaring fire I build and I work all afternoon; I open a poem that I will bring to my Concord workshop tomorrow, wondering if it’s ready. It’s close, almost ready for a first workshop share, but I find something to add that I’m pleased with. Terry Tempest Williams is speaking tonight in Harvard Square, sponsored by Harvard Books and a friend has gotten me a ticket to her reading from her latest book, “Erosion.” Well, she is brilliant. Deeply, deeply moving. We sit, all of us, in awed silence, to her poetic words, her perfectly expressed stories. We listen as she plays for minutes the audio of groaning rocks. She reads about the intimate and transformative experience at attending, literally being present, for the cremation of her brother. The whole talk is one of the most powerfully effecting experiences I’ve had from an author. I know I am deeply changed by her stories and her telling and the authority from which she speaks. Hmmmm. I notice she is wearing an emerald colored necklace. The color of the face of the figure I found in the river.

Terry Tempest Williams, Brattle Theatre, Cambridge