[Image: “The Scripture of the Landscape,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]
From whiskey river’s commonplace book:
Dark Pines Under Water
This land like a mirror turns you inward
And you become a forest in a furtive lake;
The dark pines of your mind reach downward,
You dream in the green of your time,
Your memory is a row of sinking pines.Explorer, you tell yourself this is not what you came for
Although it is good here, and green;
You had meant to move with a kind of largeness,
You had planned a heavy grace, an anguished dream.But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper
And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper
In an elementary world;
There is something down there and you want it told.
(Gwendolyn MacEwen [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Erosion. Gnarled roots. The carcass of a dead deer. A flight of swallows. The high spirals of hawks. Bladed reflections of rushing water. Just budding bare branches. Gray rock, cracked, shattered, and worn. A fallen tree. A lone cloud. The laughter of plum branches. Even a little circle of rocks beside the trail—who put them there, or did any hand arrange them, and no matter which, what are the secrets of that circle?
There are a thousand meanings in every view, if only we open ourselves to see the scripture of the landscape.
(Deng Ming-Dao [source])
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