Lost and Found
A few months ago I blogged about Found Magazine. I am still fascinated with “found literature” and “found art” we can discover right under our noses in our everyday lives. In college, I had a professor of Romantic Poetry, not coincidentally, named Dr. Reed (believe me, we did some close reading of texts in his class) who encouraged us to look closely for poems all around us that the universe presented. One example I will never forget is a little, yellow, pedestrian traffic sign out in front of the post office - as you cross Franklin Street - that reads, “Walk with light.” How’s that for a found poem?!
This week the universe presented a work of art on a trail that I have run a zillion times. I “found” this amazing flower somehow imprinted, by God, in the center of a sawn tree.
Lost
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.- David Wagoner
No two trees are the same to a Runner.
(thanks to Randy for sending me this poem)
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Joan:
I’ve never seen an interior print like this. Very unusual. I can explain the star like points around the center. That is a common look where limbs grew from the tree all at the same distance from the ground. White Pines produce limbs that way. When one chain-saws through a log through the center of limbs, a pattern can be produced this way. The unusual appearance with this log involves the points not extending to the outside edge. This means the limbs must have been cut back flush with the trunk many years ago and the tree kept growing.
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing.
This comment was sent to me by Mike Mabe, http://www.pfafftown.blogspot.com, who owns and operates a saw mill in his spare time (so he knows trees).
Comment by mike — 1/23/2006 @ 8:42 am
My favorite found poem is from a physics text:
“No force, however great
Can stretch a cord, however fine
Into a horizontal line
Which is absolutely straight”
No two trees are alike - nor bushes, as well. There’s an exercise in the workbook of “A Course In Miracles” where one stops and looks at things and says “I see only the past in this tree…I see only the past in this keyboard…I see only the past in this cloud”. It’s a way of realizing that I rarely ever actually look at anything without seeing all of the other things of that sort - filtering my perception of the thing through what I already know about other things like it.
One day, while running on a singletrack trail in Saguaro National Monument in Tucson, I stopped (standard runner reason
and found myself looking at a creosote bush. It suddenly occurred to me that it was entirely possible that *no one had ever actually looked at this creosote bush the way that I was looking at it* - and it was fascinating. There seemed to be a light around the edges that celebrating the uniqueness of this one bush…
Comment by Fat Charlie the Archangel — 1/23/2006 @ 1:53 pm