Christmas Break

I've taken a long Christmas break. Read six books, four of which were poetry titles. Visited family and friends in Nebraska and Colorado, and am now readying to move to my home on the Olympic Peninsula.   If I focus on the whole action, I am exhausted before taking a step; If seen as one step after another, I am better able to assimilate the move's value. Here are a couple of masters with advice:

“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.” 
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

Riprap

BY GARY SNYDER

Lay down these words

Before your mind like rocks.

             placed solid, by hands   

In choice of place, set

Before the body of the mind

             in space and time:

Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall

             riprap of things:

Cobble of milky way,

             straying planets,

These poems, people,

             lost ponies with

Dragging saddles—

             and rocky sure-foot trails.   

The worlds like an endless   

             four-dimensional

Game of Go.

             ants and pebbles

In the thin loam, each rock a word   

             a creek-washed stone

Granite: ingrained

             with torment of fire and weight   

Crystal and sediment linked hot

             all change, in thoughts,   

As well as things.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176577

There is beautiful birdsong outside the window.  And the sun is shining.