from Old Stones Understand, by Stacey Murphy

   Leaves Let Go

It is not the way of leaves

to care about how they fall.

It doesn’t matter

whether there are heavy, thunder-filled

clouds overhead

or miles of bright blue and sunshine.

A leaf doesn’t

cry out in pain if a harsh wind

tugs it from its twig

nor does it giggle with mischief if it

manages to break free on its own.

A leaf doesn’t

fret over which is better —

to swoop down in a wild, swirling canopy,

a rustling riot of yellow magic with hundreds of others,

or to flutter demurely to the ground

in a quiet, private moment.

No leaf even considers holding on,

resisting its destiny,

its part in the inevitable pattern.

For the leaf, simply letting go

is the thing.

—Stacey Murphy, Old Stones Understand

from Singing the Land: A Rural Chronology, by Chila Woychik

Outside our artificial constructs—house, vehicle, shops, and schools—the real cosmos teems. We pass it or ignore it day after day, and then life ends without us ever having shimmered in the moonlight or cajoled along a rocky ridge bereft of civilization, without our letting the cry of the coyote raise goosebumps on our evening-chilled flesh.

We cart in pinecones to decorate our fall tables, embellish our cabinets with turban squash or yellow gourds. Organize perfect rows of viburnum or bottlebrush buckeye in a landscape stripped and homogenized to look like every other landscape for city blocks. Then we wonder why our eyes weary and our spirits sigh at the sameness. Why “getting away” often entails a trip to an uncultivated, disorganized setting; for rather than chaotic, nature is merely free, as we so often wish to be. Structure helps us achieve; random helps us breathe.

—Chila Woychik, Singing the Land: A Rural Chronology

from Singing the Land: A Rural Chronology, by Chila Woychik

The cold October air settles around my neck and I don’t really care that I left my scarf inside. The chickens still need fed and the sheep bleat. They need me, I tell myself; I am valuable. Then I finally realize I may never have anything earth-shattering and brilliant and Pulitzer-worthy and puddingish and great big like that one oak tree with the split trunk and diameter that would take three people to get their arms around, to leave a legacy about, then, when, it all and suddenly turns okay. There is peace. A softness falls. Sometimes it’s the simplest things.

—Chila Woychik, Singing the Land: A Rural Chronology

from Singing the Land, by Chila Woychik

Makes sense Iowa feels home to me. Crop plats so large you drive a mile and the spread keeps going. They say South Dakota’s are even bigger, some five or seven miles square.

Grandpa’s piddly seven acres behind the old Illinois homestead with a kitchen pump handle and no other plumbing grew corn. The John Deere tractor’s flywheel took all that three-hundred-pound man could give it before the characteristic pop pop popping began. But he didn’t work those rows for nothing; his payout was mealtime when he ate and ate and ate. Half a dozen eggs, half a pound of bacon for breakfast. Sausage gravy and biscuits some days. Roast and potatoes, supper. Fried chicken. Corn on the cob. And homemade pies tasty as anything you ever had. The crank on the ice cream maker hardened along with the ice cream when the rock-salted ice started melting in earnest.

This was our growing-up, the land and seasons, the old-timey meals and the Hicksville blood running agrestic, green, and good. But our strange breed also had a German mother, as European as they get, strange indeed when you realize we settled smack in the middle of a provincial Midwest. Mother, lover of all things wurst: knockwurst, liverwurst, bierwurst. Maker of spaetzle and dumplings, red cabbage and rouladen. A small cold beer with each dinner meal.

The palate learned diversity that way, tongue split along the lines of Bavarian and backwoods. I took a twenty-year hiatus from that lineage to experience urbanity, discovered fine restaurants hold charm, hefty prices, and unique savor-jumpers, but even so, those memories of youth hover hard, and I’ve never junked the urge for home-cooked meals.

In my own kitchen, I fumble, knowledge, a lost vision in the presence of such worthy childhood ghosts. The acumen, I have, but lacking is desire, except the desire to be a child again alongside Mutti’s counter, watching her make Bavarian Zwetschgenkuchen, fresh plum cake, attuning my ears to her lovely throaty phrases, hearing an old German polka record spinning on the turntable. Or in Illinois Grandma’s cold winter / hot summer home where I felt secure, ran free, and feral, where her third-grade education and stories of working in the humid Arkansas cottonfields at age eleven gave rise to imagination and family strength and a can-do spirit of endurance still bound tightly to our pith in the face of each new adversity.

—Chila Woychik, Singing the Land: A Rural Chronology

from Relationship Determines Decision, by Peter Hoheisel

the world of seasons and change,
the world where death and life are twins,
where daylight and darkness make sense
because of each other,
will always teach you
where you are, and what you need
if you will only Listen.

—Peter Hoheisel, "Welcome," Relationship Determines Decision

from Still Point Arts Quarterly, essay by Florence Hazrat

Krzysztof Golik WC CC

With every stroke of my arms, the clamor drains out of my mind into the lake. The rest is silence and thoughts in all the lake’s greens. As I reach the bobbing buoy, I cling to it, relaxing my legs and breathing in the scenery. But I want to go further. I want to lose all touch with the land. I want to be the smallest, most insignificant dot in the vastness of the lake. Swallow me. Make me your own. One day, my hair will be flowing algae, my feet luminous stones, my tongue little blue fish, and my eyes the heart of the lake. I will be the lake and the lake will be me. I am water. I am wave. Green.

Florence Hazrat
“All the Names of Green: Days at Lake Geneva”  
Still Point Arts Quarterly, Summer 2019

from Still Point Arts Quarterly, by Florence Hazrat

HGolaszewska WC CC

Nature is resilient and compensates. I need to be resilient, too, and bounce back. I need to be nature.


Florence Hazrat. “All the Names of Green: Days at Lake Geneva,” Still Point Arts Quarterly, Summer 2019.

from Still Point Arts Quarterly, essay by Florence Hazrat

l.montanari, 2014. WC CC

That this is not quite true, that nature cares not one little bit about borders, and that it’s me, actually, who’d like to have a cleaner and neater reality, is something I am yet to learn.

Florence Hazrat. “All the Names of Green: Days at Lake Geneva,” Still Point Arts Quarterly, Summer 2019.

 

from Still Point Arts Quarterly, essay by Brent Martin

Rick Shu, 2015. WC CC

To think that we can finally get it all together is unrealistic. To seek for some lasting security is futile. Believing in a solid, separate self, continuing to seek pleasure and avoid pain, thinking that someone “out there” is to blame for our pain — one has to abandon these ways of thinking. Hopelessness means that we no longer have the spirit for holding our trip together. It’s all suffering, it’s all despair, and the sooner I can accept this the more beautiful and sad it all becomes. I know I have to let go; I can’t keep going on at this age with such feelings of rage and emptiness. I love the world and the temporality of it all. And despite my long visit to the dark side, I see the light. I can emerge and find a new path. The world has always been this way.

— Brent Martin, "Pushing Through," Still Point Arts Quarterly, Summer 2019.

from Still Point Arts Quarterly, essay by Alistair Herbert

US Forest Service, 2009 WC PD

When you sign up to plant trees because you think this place is owed something more of your life, or because of flash floods, or for any other combination of reasons, sometimes you only get blisters and bee stings and a word of thanks. Sometimes you get a new friend. Sometimes you get butterflies, sometimes lukewarm soup. Sometimes you come home and, a day later, understand suddenly how you ought to live. Sometimes you only pull a deer guard into the sun and watch as ants scurry, water falls, spiders scatter, slugs slip, young moss tumbles over your knees. And sometimes, in the smallest of spaces, you get a new view of a new universe — seven thousand times. The transaction is impossibly uneven — it always was. And the dirt of it, because there is always dirt, will probably stick under your fingers for a long time to come.


— Alistair Herbert, "The Deer Guard: Planting Trees and Discovering New Worlds in the Upper Calder Valley," Still Point Arts Quarterly, Summer 2019.