The wisdom of Jim Harrison -
My musings and his answers.
Let us watch the sky.
Often, lately, the night is a cold maw
and stars the scattered white teeth of the gods, which spare none of us.
and stars the scattered white teeth of the gods, which spare none of us.
At dawn I have birds, clearly divine messengers that I don't understand
yet day by day feel the grace of their intentions.
yet day by day feel the grace of their intentions.
Birds are holes in heaven through which a man may pass -
These things look like cancerous polyps, shown to me by my gastroenterologist.
I hope to define my life, whatever is left, by migrations, south and north with the birds and far from the metallic fever of clocks, the self staring at the clock saying, “I must do this.”
I can’t tell the time on the tongue of the river in the cool morning air, the smell of the ferment of greenery, the dust off the canyon’s rock walls, the swallows swooping above the scent of raw water.
So - once every 800 years, we see a thing.
Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more
I want to move, but I find comfort in this small, false security.
Of late I feel a cold blue wind through my life and need to go backwards myself to the outback I once knew so well. (I'm) thinking of driving again the gravel backroads of America at thirty-five miles per hour in order to see the ditches and gulleys, the birds in the fields, the mountains and rivers, the skies that hold our 10,000 generations of mothers in the clouds waiting for us to fall back into their arms again.
Fifty years ago I learned to jump off the calendar
but I kept getting drawn back on for reasons of greed and my imperishable stupidity.
In 1958 a friend in San Francisco burned out his veins shooting up hot paregoric, a cheap high.
It’s safer for me to continue smoldering just below the temperature of actual flame wondering if there’s a distant land where life freely flows like a river.
