February 23: John Muir, Stephen Ratcliffe, "Readings from John Muir's Journals"

I have been acquainting myself with John Muir recently, at the urging of a couple of my close friends.  It's not that I was unaware of Muir,  I knew who he was, but I have never read any of his writings, knew little about his life.

I have discovered that I love Muir.  His fearlessness.  Love of nature.  Dedication to conservation.  He inspires me to be a better person somehow.  Today is a John Muir Day.  I look out my window, and all I see is snow, thick in the sky and on the ground.  It just keeps coming and coming.

John Muir, with his love of nature and glaciers, would love this weather.  He didn't use the term "snowflakes" when talking about snow.  He coined the term "snowflowers" instead.

Saint Marty sees a whole garden of snowflowers in the air right now.

Readings from John Muir's Journals

by:  Stephen Ratcliffe

With eyes of the owl
& the jay's cry
I wake in the open air

to the slow of new day--
light in the oak & yellow pine,
the stream running into my ears.

*

Maple leaves from a winter
or two, or six,
dry cracked
     my voice, my foot
the measure of my climb.

*

Noon.  The mid March
sun begins
to penetrate my

skin, my bones, begins
to warm the lake
side where

waterlichen
has gripped down
for so long

*

The metaphysics of Indian
red madrone to drift
wood, riverwood, run

& weathered, the slow
decay, the sigh
of a time not mine.

*

April 4:  the silver fir,
the light, the Merced
dropping ever the falls,

the embroidered spray,
the sight, thunder
rolling from the height.

*

The cowslip, violet
deep at the stem, to sky
blue, to the jade

behind startips pointed
in a ring,
to no sound at all.

*

At the saddle ridgecrest,
where shade will come long
& cold, two deer,

California mule, graze
in the half light,
ears cocked, listening.

*

Late afternoon on the Sawyer
Camp Road, the wind
down on the lake,

the water deeply green,
the mating of ducks shrill
in the splash, there.

*

Mosaic was the weigh
of the sun,
           these
eyes in the blue
light of the sea,
          le ciel,
the wild
     of twilight--iris
blue in the curl
          & lash.

*

The full moon falling
all around me drips
from honeysuckle

leaftips to petals
where it pools in drops
casting a moonlit spell.

*

Across the way, rising
from a crest of pinetops,
a crystal sky full

of first magnitude stars
drifts, in flight, above
the sleeping, shadowed night.