This "warm little pond" has grown a dense wall of tall reeds,
mysterious in their watery roots. Ducks paddle behind their
shadow. A bird lands on a bench, tilting its head to listen to

what can be said that can be said, by winged, and wingless
beings who share the same air as "a single ecosystem with
many differentiated parts."

I stand and make my own kora, wary not to trip over past traditions.
No robes, no sandals, no tefillin, no mumbling old prayers; but dog
shit, horse shit, mountain bikes' prints, deep-cleated shoe prints, a
few cairns and stone circles, “new forms of memory and forgetting.”

 

 

 

warm little pond: Letter from Charles Darwin to J.D. Hooker, 1 Feb. 1871, speculating of the origin of life on this planet.
reeds: "In ancient Egyptian mythology, the fields of Aaru, known as the Field of Reeds, is the heavenly paradise where Osiris rules once he had displaced Anubis in the Ogdoad. It has been described as the ka (a part of the soul) of the Nile Delta." Email, B. Smylie, August 7, 2020.
a single ecosystem: U. Le Guin, "Coming Back From the Silence." In, J. White, Taking on the Water. San Francisco, 1994.
kora: Tibetan Buddhist counterclockwise circumambulations, usually around a sacred mountain.
No robes: "What I wear is pants. What I do is live. How I pray is breathe." T. Merton, "Day of a Stranger." Hudson Review, July 1967.
new forms: B. Szerszynski, “The Anthropocene and the Memory of the Earth.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqr6bH_U0-o