Birds have been following me all day.
Grasses stir the air, murmuring my name.
Butterflies make rainbow paths along the ground for me.
Lupines direct my sight to azure sky above.

(It is their nature
To sing to me.
To show me.
To love me.
What is my nature?)

Birds have been following me all day,
Securing the space between us with sacred flight.
Your hawk’s piercing gaze shakes loose my knowing mind.
Your eagle encircles the crescent moon in the mid-day sky—
What magic is she weaving in these ethers?

Now your small orange-tip-wing dainty butterfly
Leads me delicately on with a vague and ephemeral promise
Of a glimpse of that divine fire:
There!  Then suddenly,
Gone.

        Does that moment of precious beauty, of stunning reverie
        That moment of eye-filled,
        Mind-filled,
        Soul-filled
        Satisfaction seem as fleeting to you as well?
                                                                    
                                                                                         -Judy Todd

Benedicto

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome,
dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.
May your rivers flow without end,
meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells,
past temples and castles and poets' towers
into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl,
through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock.
blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone,
and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm
where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs,
where storms come and go
as lightning clangs upon the high crags,
where something strange and more beautiful
and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you –
beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

Edward Abbey
Inspired writings, points of view and ruminations....