Witches’ Butter

Our dogs, a path through a forest of ghostly American Beech, a fifty foot cliff of ferns, roots, and sycamore, spring just beginning to flourish, the ruins of a sand quarry that may have given us the green Coke bottle, three of my four grown children, a gray day in the midst of a global pandemic, and this thing shining off the edge of the trail with a leopard slug tucked in its folds: witches’ butter.

I suppose this is a reason to go outside.   Sometimes you know what you’ll find.  Most of the list above I could have predicted before we set off for Fern Cliff, the precious little nature preserve a few miles from our home in Putnam County, Indiana.  And that’s OK, but sometimes you find something you’ve never seen that you cannot name.  And, when you find out its name, you love the person who, centuries before you saw this strange yellow tree fungus called it witches’ butter or the others who gave it its scientific name Tremella mesenterica (trembling middle intestine) or said yellow brain, golden jelly fungus, yellow tremble.  I most like the name witches’ butter as it conjures a kind of churning madness and magic.  And given the fact that we saw a leopard slug on top of it after my daughter Ruth had spotted it – well, what a photo opportunity.  Slime on slime and, I’m no expert, but I believe the little black flowers are slug droppings.  Still, how can you not call this little piece of sunshine beautiful?

Here’s a forest in action. I’ve done a little looking around the web – Wikipedia, Michigan State’s extension program’s writer Mike Shira explaining how fungi work, the OED – and learned that witches’ butter loves dead branches or recently fallen branches and, as many mushrooms and fungi do, Tremella mesenterica breaks down the lignin, the tough cell walls that make wood hard.  Witches’ butter and its companion fungi break down the fallen limbs to create nutrients for all the green we’ll soon start seeing on the forest floor – mayapple spreading, tiny saplings poking through decaying leaves.  And, of course the snail without its shell, the slimy leopard slug, is eating and breaking down the fungus.  To put it crassly – slime and shit are good for the forest.  And, in turn, the forest is good for us.

Beyond our special find, we walked our dogs through a huge stand of my favorite trees in late fall, winter, and early spring: the American beech.  Here in the Midwest these gorgeous translucent leaved ghosts hold their foliage the whole winter.  So while you walk through a bare forest, the young American beech trees flutter like living clouds.

And at the cliffs—formed sandstone from the dead sediment of snails, scallops, crinoids, and brachiopods that lived in shallow seas over 300 million years ago—ferns, those equally ancient plants that flourish even in winter.  I’ve seen their deep green colors coming out of snow.

When people characterize Indiana as one big flat cornfield, I want to grab them and take them here to listen to the Snake creek snaking along the bottom on its way to the Wabash and the Ohio and the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico.  I want to let them climb down through the gaps of giant boulders to think about the last ice age and how these creeks were formed from the glacial melt of ten millennia ago.

And if they’ve had enough of my natural history lesson, I can take them down to the ruins of the Root Glass Company’s sand quarry that, legend has it, gave its sand to make the first Coca Cola bottles.  A special sand with minerals that turned the bottle “Georgia green.” (Click here to find out more from Mark Bennett at Terre Haute’s Tribune Star ).

From article linked above.  Root Glass Company Fern Cliff Sand Quarry. c. 1915

So witches’ butter, history, natural history, science, botany, names, beauty, and a place to walk your dogs.  Stay home, but if you can sneak away and keep your distance from others, go outside and open your minds and eyes and ears.  You don’t  have to go far.  Who knows what nature’s witches might make for you?

Be Well.

© Joseph Heithaus. All Rights Reserved. 

Edge

Yesterday I rode my bike through the mostly blank world.   Our town hunkered down.  I took the bike path out past our Walmart, the afternoon light down on cars and people in the lot.  At least from the distance of the path things appeared as they might have a month ago. I did some grocery shopping earlier in the day at another store and Hoosiers who normally look you in the eye and smile, are socially distancing, as directed, but also a little fearful, distant in a different way.  Most people, myself included, are on edge.

The word edge—no surprise—had its first purpose in English describing the sharpened side of a blade.  It appears in the Middle English of Beowulf as the ecge of a sword.   As you peruse the Oxford English Dictionary the metaphorical implications of the word quickly show themselves. More famous figurative uses pop out:  Shakespeare’s Tempest: “to take away the edge of that dayes celebration”  And in a translation of Montaigne love is given an edge.

I became more curious about the word when the poet Stanley Plumly, many years ago, took me for a walk around the poet James Wright’s childhood town of Martin’s Ferry, Ohio.  I was a new professor, a fledgling poet, and I had one great poet showing me another’s territory. Martin’s Ferry is a mythical landscape in Wright’s poems.  And we were walking through it.  I remember much of what Stanley told me.  As we walked, he began naming the birds in the trees, some by their calls alone, and he explained that for birders a great place to observe birds is at an edge.  A biological or geographic edge as in edge of the forest, edge of a stream, any border between one landscape and the next as that’s where birds of prey have the best lines of sight, where birds and animals in a field can seek quick cover.

So here we are all on the edge of a pandemic’s potential disasters, a blade’s edge sure to cut, but I think we are also on that fecund, populated edge as well.  I thought of the word edge on my ride.

Our trail is called People Pathways, much of it converted old rail line.   With the sound of my tires on the gravel, I watched faintest green coming up on the floor of the scraggly swaths of forest, only ten to twenty yards wide, on either side of the path.  Through the trees are mostly corn fields, a few industrial lots.  Among the scrub, you can see old telegraph poles, some with blue green glass insulators perched on decomposing cross bars.   It is mostly weedy trees, redbuds, honeysuckle, silver maples, with occasional bursts of staghorn sumac, their dried and blackened red berries still hanging on.

At times the trees meet overhead so the path becomes a tunnel of empty branches.  There are other sections where the trees disappear and I’m passing cows in a muddy field, or the stubs of last year’s corn, where a few broken brown cobs still litter the path.  But mostly I watch the birds and squirrels and rabbits that live along the path.  All that life alive on those tiny edges of forest.

I pedal steadily to the next town, Filmore, past the closed little two room restaurant, Bert and Betty’s, where I love to take visitors for the home-baked pies, and made from scratch everything of a Midwest breakfast.  After Filmore, the path opens up even more into long flat fields with only the smallest strips of scrub.  That’s when the flock of redwing blackbirds appeared in the branches.   As I rode closer, they’d fly ahead, in a strange game of chase.  This went on for several minutes until one part of the flock peeled off and headed south, spreading out over the fields, the late afternoon sun catching their wings, and another smaller group stayed just ahead.  I finally stopped my bike to turn around and I marveled at the males’ wings–that orange patch with that thin yellow line below it.   A small fire edged in body’s teeming black.

I headed back to our sequester thinking of all the edges I have felt lately between myself and others – my wife, my kids, our friends, strangers and how I take the edge off with a run, a bike ride, or a beer at night.  Worry over the edges of capacity in hospitals, and so many of us on edge.  But I also wonder this edge of possibility, rich with life, where the blackbirds and I have had our little dance.

© Joseph Heithaus.  All Rights Reserved.

P.S. The photo above was taken from my porch looking over at my neighbors yard.  It was a foggy morning.  The sun was rising and burning off the fog.

Given where are lives are now with most of the world at home, I thought now is as good a time as any to start writing again about the Earth as I read it.  More to come.

The Human Face

When my wife looks at an infant, you can feel the warmth. As her face brightens and her mouth forms coos, you can practically hear the hiss of logs smoldering in a hearth, smell wood smoke. The two of us have this in common; we become more receptive, more protective when we are around babies.  I think this is mostly true of humans. We generally feel something inside ourselves switch on when we look into the eyes of an infant. The same goes for when we look at animals, and especially the ones that resemble us.

Today, close to the dormitory at Santa Rosa National Park where our group from DePauw is staying, a troop of white-faced Capuchin Monkeys lounged in the near branches. A number of us lingered beneath them taking photos or just marveling. Earlier in the day we watched a howler monkey with a baby on her back move across the canopy. Last evening some of us spied spider monkeys making daring leaps from tree to tree.  You could feel something different seeing the monkeys than when the group stopped to watch a bird or examine some extraordinary tree.

I think that our sense of connection with other species spreads across a rather complex continuum. For instance, last night’s encounters with tarantulas on beds and in the showers didn’t stir up a lot of warmth. But, rightly, no one wanted to kill the hairy eight-legged visitors. We understood ourselves as the intruders and simply caught them in bags and carted them a bit further into the forest.   We’re here in Costa Rica trying to learn to respect the earth and its living things and the tarantulas have helped us along.  We’re here in a dry forest, perhaps the most threatened ecological niche on earth (even more so than rainforests), experiencing a cacophony of different species.  Still, when we’ve come face to face with monkeys there’s a pull on the heart.

Looking into the eyes of a young capuchin (or that monkey looking into yours?) engenders an almost cosmic bond. I’ve been trying to figure out ways to remind myself and others that our connections to the natural world are ancient and deep. We humans are related to all living things. Our bodies even depend upon minerals, which even makes us kin to the rocks. Our watery bodies connect us to the sea.  Yet when we look into that monkey’s face, it is impossible not to see our own.

The problem now, as our planet warms, is that we need to see the whole earth’s face like this and all its living things.  We need to feel that bond, that primal need to protect it.

© Joseph Heithaus.  All Rights Reserved.

Return

The beach was ours and the sea.   And the sky, of course was ours as well, freighting magnificent frigate birds, swinging pelicans from the finest filaments of wind. As we churned across the water toward the sand, the waves scatter of salt and breeze poured across the boats’ bows. We took in volcanoes in the near distance with their weather of clouds, and the dry forests along the shore with their mangroves, acacias, gumbo limbos and hundreds of other species.

For so many moments yesterday we saw no other signs of human life.  Only three boats with their two man crews, eighteen students, two guides, Maikol and Julio, two professors, Janet and me, and her two small boys, Aidan and Lucas—all of us surrounded by the protected lands and waters of Costa Rica. We snorkeled along a thin line of rock and coral out in Santa Elena bay before our lunch on the beach and then went out along an ancient island of rock and snorkeled some more.   I kept reminding myself that I was at work, that it was my job to be here. I thought of my father and how he’d shake his head at the luck I’ve had. “You have the world by the tail,” he’d say. I know he is right.

I’ve returned to Costa Rica with our students from DePauw University. They appear so far to have a quiet reverence for what they are seeing. At one point I lifted out of that strange singularity of snorkeling, that cocoon of water and my own breathing where my only focus was a blue fish with a white mouth and there we all were, 24 people in the water not far at all from one another, but each on our own taking in the mesmerizing world below the surface of the sea.

And now, after a long break from this little blog, I invite you to join me again.  I’ll try to post as often as I can.  My students have a blog as well of their own I’m managing at: https://tropicalecology.home.blog/

© Joseph Heithaus.  All Rights Reserved.

Quiet at 4

 

So yesterday I tried to take myself back to Costa Rica or maybe I had lugged the quiet of the Friends Meeting in Monteverde back to my community. I had organized, with little fanfare, something I called “Quiet at 4.” A half hour of quiet from about 4 until 4:30 on a Thursday.

Given the over-programmed university schedule, I realized early in the day, I was going to miss most of a 4:00 meeting which I had forgotten to put down on my calendar.  My humble event was already up against a gallery talk, sports practices, and the general lull that happens when classes are over at ten minutes to four.  But I was committed to trying this, even if no one came.

My class I’ve titled “The Great Invisible” finished right before.  As soon as it was over I biked to the Spiritual Life Center and was surprised to find that three other people, two staff members and a student, were ready to give this a try.  We sat in an empty room with lots of windows.

When I was a boy, our house had a room much like the one where we sat. My family called that room the solarium. It sounds pretty highfalutin when I say it—the solarium—as if we also should have had a library and a study and a den, perhaps a planetarium and a butler as well—but my family was eight people, two parents and six kids crowded into a relatively small house in northern Indiana.  Our first floor was a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, a hall closet, and that room named for the sun.

So with a brief introduction about what the Quaker meeting in Monteverde meant to me, we stopped talking, I glanced at my watch, and our little group didn’t speak for a half hour. Through the windows of this other solarium I looked out at the wide-spread branches of an old gingko tree and the spatters of sun that flickered through them.  I stared down at the floor where the windows were framing small spectacles of bright shadows and twirling afternoon light. I surveyed the ceiling. I noticed the cracks in the walls, flaws in the paint.

But soon I settled into the quiet I’d found in Monteverde that always came after that first and sometimes long wide look at the visible world. With a little curiosity and imagination, whole swaths of time can pass as you watch light and clouds and limbs, other faces in the room, the shapes and textures of the floor beneath your feet.

Then sometimes comes an awareness of the body— my posture, the weight of my head, how my legs feel, my hands, my mouth, my breath. But after one lets go of the senses, I, at least, turn to various lists in my mind.

I name my dead. Beginning with my grandparents, I tick off a long list of uncles and aunts all gone, which leads eventually to my parents, my dead brothers, my friends – the losses inch closer to the present and those more recent absences I still feel each day. That’s what’s first inside my quiet—my dead. And then, I turn to the living. Again listing  an array of people, big and small, for whom I’m an uncle or a great uncle, these are my siblings’ children, my wife’s siblings’ kids, then closer—my sisters, my brother, my in-laws, and then my own children, trying in some way to pulse my feelings across miles and moments to them. Wanting, with this quiet, to give them my love, my support, my faith. The Quakers call this holding them in the light.

This may sound hokey, but what else does one do with a half hour of wakeful empty time, the disciplined quiet of people choosing a silence not imposed upon them, but a quiet they’ve chosen to practice? Some might call it prayer, but it might be something else. What follows those lists, those names, those people who filter through my brain like light through the gingko’s turning fan-shaped leaves, is something very hard to convey.

This later quiet I sometimes find is a deep emptiness or to be more paradoxical, yet more precise, a fullness inside an emptiness. A sense of connection not just with dead and living humans in my life, but with everything else.  It is at once a feeling of chaotic connection, a muddled web in which all things are somehow caught but also a kind of freeing of the self. The way stars are linked in the vast emptiness of space or how a leaf lets loose from a tree, yet remains imprinted with an image of the tree itself.

Then our half hour was up. I stood up and shook hands with the others. I got on my bicycle and headed to the meeting I’d half missed.

© Joseph Heithaus.  All Rights Reserved. 

3200 Miles

Though the body lay on its side, the front wrists and knees were bent so two legs of the carcass looked like the deer was in mid-movement.   It was impossible not to imagine the animal running through the light of early morning, leaping a fence in that flow they have.  So akin to water.  A shining spill when a stream rushes over a stone.

This is what I thought about on I-70 maybe twenty miles into Ohio—a dead deer running—as the dawn reddened and pink mists filled the valleys of grasses and crops, timothy, soy beans, and rows of new corn plants only a foot or so out of the ground. At one point we followed a tanker of milk and in the reflection the road funneled into the shining convex oval at the end of the cylinder. All we passed—trees, power lines, signs, a truck-stop restaurant up on a hill, even us, were flung through that strange moving mirror and disappeared. I had woken at 3:40 AM anticipating a 4:00 alarm and got out of bed ten minutes early to shower and wake my son Paul. Today is truly the first day of the rest of his life, I thought. We were headed to New York City. He was sleeping beside me when we passed the dead deer and as I watched us, for a moment, inside the tanker of milk.  It was a Thursday. He would start at a media conglomerate as an analyst on Monday. College graduation was less than a month behind him.

This was my third drive of the week. The previous weekend, I’d attended June O, summer orientation at Denison University with my daughter Ruth who will start classes there this coming Monday. We had a four and a half hour drive on a Saturday morning, a lot of speeches and talks for the parents and activities for the incoming first year students in the afternoon and evening, a small cocktail hour for the parents, and I had a night’s sleep in a bare dorm room on a twin, extra long. Then the long drive home talking about the year to come, all excitement and speculation about these young people and their parents we’d met. I felt her coming absence from our house like a phantom ache.

The next morning that week, I woke in the dark to drive my oldest son Seth to Wisconsin where we moved him from an apartment in Wausau he occupied for the first two years of medical school to a new place in the town of Antigo where he’ll trail doctors in the county hospital for the next several months. He was still studying for his second year boards, so the drive was quiet as he turned the pages of a giant medical book. I listened to podcasts with headphones while he poured over the infinite details of human anatomy, pathology, and the treatments for ills. On the way back, a second nine hours, he gave me a break from driving and I quizzed him from charts in the book, mispronouncing every third term. He’d politely correct me and mostly get the answers right. I’m baffled by how he was able to keep so much information in his head.

By the time I arrived back home from New York in the dark of an early Tuesday morning, after helping Paul find an apartment, after visiting with some of my old friends, and then on Monday morning, watching him leave for his first day of work, I’d driven 3200 miles in 10 days. Fittingly, 3200 miles is the driving distance from our home in Indiana to Monteverde, Costa Rica, the town that was our home for ten months.

As I portioned out the monotony, rolling back across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, I often found myself on the trail from our rented house in Monteverde past a particular crooked vine, past one ever changing bamboo palm in a thick patch of forest, by the empty greenhouse (our house was owned by a plant biologist) to the driveway. Then down past flowering bushes and trees to the road. When I remembered that short walk, I was buoyed up.  I found a quiet area to place my thoughts.

It is strange how in the vastness of the U.S., I’m drawn to a narrow path, a steep driveway for which we never had a car, and a few miles of dirt road we walked daily. Yes, there were cars going by driven mostly by tourists, and motorbikes passing, and taxis going to or from the Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Reserve, but mostly there was quiet. A quiet filled with the clicking of leaves, bird songs, sometimes rain pelting down or the trade winds coming up over continental divide and shooshing mists through the mountain gaps.

In one sense, life there is no different than life here in the U.S.  I think of the valleys made by sky-scrapers in Manhattan, the winds and rains of the city or even my small town and the forest in a nature park here to where I often escape. We can find quiet anywhere as quiet is perhaps more inside us the listeners than in our surroundings. Finding quiet involves slowing down to a walk, or letting our thoughts drift down to a trickle even when driving on a long stretch of highway. It is just more difficult to locate that quiet here than it is in Costa Rica. So lately, I traverse in my head the 3200 miles from Greencastle to Monteverde. My breathing slows. A humming bird ghosts by. An ochre-orange leaf glows up from the forest litter.

And of course, with three of our four children now spread across the U.S., I make that travel as well. Imagining myself on a subway with Paul, walking the halls of a hospital with Seth, trailing behind a few white coats, or sitting in some cranny of a library imagining my daughter Ruthie’s face lit by the pages of an open book. I suppose, by just writing this, I’ve convinced myself nothing and no one is far away. We only need to stop, to imagine, and to travel those miles in a breath.

© Joseph Heithaus.  All rights reserved. 

Thread

On my front porch on the phone or reading the paper and I notice a geranium petal hanging by a thread a few inches from the floor. I think plumb bob of a spider. I think small beauty. I think tenuous miracle. A breeze comes and the tiny petal spins.

It is an old cliché, how life hangs by a thread. The saying comes from Roman philosopher Cicero who tells the story of unhappy king Dionysius II and his sycophant Damocles.  Damocles had remarked how amazing life must be when you rule the city, so Dionysius invited Damocles to experience the life of a king by treating him to a succulent feast. Damocles enjoys the meal until, midway through his pleasures, he notices the king has hung a sharp sword above his head. The sword hangs by a strand of horsehair.

I suppose as I have gotten older, witnessed death, felt loss, I’ve become more aware of the sword, the fragility of our hold on life. Still, I’ve also become aware of the curious beauty of the delicate and almost invisible threads that make up our lives. And these threads aren’t just metaphor. All humans were once attached to their mothers by a cord. I’ve had the strange pleasure of cutting a few such cords and watching that physical link dissolve into a bond that is deep and mysterious as space. My children’s sometimes tender, sometimes defiant connections to their mother are there, palpable as a strand of light coming down from a star.

So goes our connection to life itself. Our sense of the physical world—feet on a path, back on the trunk of a tree, hands in water, skin tingling from sweat cooled by a current of air—as large and familiar as these feelings are, they are finite. We will die. Our cord to this life will somehow and someway be cut.

Maybe lately I’m all too aware of this. My parents gone, two brothers perished, friends disappeared. Maybe this is just the ravings of a man in his fifties, but I’m trying to convince myself that such losses have, at the very least, a lesson for me.

While that insignificant petal spun, I thought my mother, my wife, my children, a dear friend, the earth. The spinning threads of the universe.  The incredible splendor of the seconds we take for granted. And even if in the moments after my fascination (so great that I ran to take a photograph) with a tiny flower petal and a strand of web, I went on to my general obliviousness, my callous trudge through the day, I still savored my own breathing for a time. Still acknowledged our strange and fragile hold on life.

© Joseph Heithaus.  All Rights Reserved.

Reflection

Almost exactly a year ago, on our first Saturday in Monteverde, Costa Rica, I took a photo of my wife and daughters bathing in a warm spring pool. Our new friend Sue, head of the school our girls were about to attend, had driven us to this place. We stuffed ourselves along with two new teachers, Chrissy and Monte, into a borrowed SUV and arrived at a finca, a farm, where we paid the farmer a few Colones to hike down past his bull and through his pastures to breathtaking views of our new surroundings and two small pools beside a mountain stream. The photo caught the morning light, the reflection of the jungle in the water—lush leaves and liannas, dark trunks, and even faint cloud forest clouds concaved into a foreground ripple. Soaking in warm water in the cool air of a place so visually stunning, looking about at surroundings that would be our home for months to come was like reading the first pages of a book you know immediately that you won’t be able to put down.

When I downloaded the photos from the day and found this dazzling shot, my wife and I agreed not to share it with people back home for fear we’d be besieged by visitors before we could even settle in. Who wouldn’t be drawn here to experience such a scene?

By October that pool had disappeared down the creek by the torrent of Tropical Storm Nate and the story of our hardships of that week kept visitors away for a while. But the cloud forest’s greens and blacks, the way light worked its way through the mists, the startling revelations of any single day or moment only grew in intensity over our time in Monteverde. What I didn’t understand about the pool in our first days there was that its reflections were a small cosmos that easily represents so much of what living in Monteverde would be for me—a place of reflection, literally, re-flexion, a turning and bending again and again in some constant cycle of light.

The Quaker meeting on Sundays became for me a pool of quiet where my thoughts floated in its ripples. I’d look out at leaves and branches, birds and butterflies, and the faces of others. My own dark waters would take them in. All things seemed to gather in that quiet, in that hour of reflection. And like that photo, I’d gather small moments of revelation and beauty. My own sorrows and frustrations and losses would, at least momentarily, lie on the surface of some a quiet pool beside a creek in a crease of a mountain.

I, of course, miss Monteverde dearly, but its quiet and its lessons live inside me. Our leaving feels like the toppled trees and vines, the twigs and fallen leaves that litter the floor of the cloud forest. I know that out of my distance from that beloved place comes some truer reflections on our life there. And that out of a kind of death we experienced in leaving, a different life will turn and bend and curl up to new light.

© Joseph Heithaus.  All Rights Reserved.

Revision

You go away and then come back. The idea is to return changed so you might re-see, re-envision, revise whatever you were up to before you left. This is a principle of writing. The slow process of drafting, walking away, and returning again to see anew what you had written to make it better. Even this paragraph has experienced this process in the last few days.

Tomorrow marks the day, one year ago, that I went away to Costa Rica. I thought at the time that I’d be gone for five months, but my family and I stayed on through May. Ten months. We were gone for so long, it felt for a while that we’d found a new home. In many ways we did, but in returning to Indiana, the state where we’ve raised our children and I’ve lived for almost thirty years, I see the landscape here anew. I see things I hadn’t noticed before.

Case in point: damselflies, specifically, Ebony Jewelwings. Somehow these had escaped my powers of observation or maybe I saw them and didn’t think to marvel. A few weeks ago after I’d discovered them, I learned their name. I gasped when I saw them hovering from plant to plant as I walked through some woods beside a stream in Prophetstown State Park.   I had a camera in my hand. If I were the first to name them, I might have used words like emerald or iridescent or maybe green-fired.

Of course, my wonder at all things iridescent and bejeweled began in Monteverde. A few days after we’d moved up to the mountain, I hung a hummingbird feeder and watched creatures appear shimmering and quick like sudden daydreams or some popping thought that surprises you. It didn’t take long before I began to learn their names, watch their behaviors, see the largest hummingbirds on earth, the Violet Sabrewings, swoop in and sometimes scare the other birds away. Or a particular Green-crowned Brilliant who came first to the feeder each day sometimes while I was still hanging on its string the red circle with its pan of sugar water underneath.

In Monteverde, I think I learned more deeply than I can describe that most of what we see and hear and even taste and smell remains nameless. While I loved the bird’s names, Purple-throated Mountain Gem, Coppery-headed Emerald, Green Violet-ear, it is the rush of seeing what I cannot name that makes me more alive. In Monteverde, in the midst of some of the greatest diversity of plants and insects and birds on the planet, I had to let go of knowing what each thing might be called. And there my ways of seeing were revised. The camera helped me see things twice – once with the naked eye and again frozen and magnified for further wonder. In those ten months I saw so much, my vision widened and became more inclusive. Back in Indiana, I look more carefully at flies, at flowers, at bark, at blades of grass, at the food I eat.

If we are to revise and re-see the world around us, it seems that going away for a time and coming back is perhaps the first strategy. I’m trying to figure out how to do so, not just with the natural world, but with my marriage, my job, my relationships with others. It isn’t easy. I’ve come to realize as well that seeing things anew isn’t just a private exercise. It is a political act. And regardless of where we sit on the continuum of viewpoints, walking away from them and coming back to reconsider and revise is central to crossing the staggering divides we’ve made between us. And all this can happen without even speaking, without naming. Go ahead, walk away for as long as you can, and come back to see anew.

© Joseph Heithaus.  All Rights Reserved.

Wild Rasperries

 

Inside them the slippery
scent of dirt. We popped
a few in our mouths
while picking the ripe
black and leaving
pinks and reds. This just
before the storm, feeling
the wind hot
then cold, a few cool drops.

My mouth and your
mouth alive
with what brought them
to this summer afternoon: late
autumn, bitter
winter, a wet spring
that exposed the dead stone
just below the soil—
once sea creature, once
bone floating
down to bed.

Each berry’s a mingle
of what’s stood, swum,
fallen. I put another
on your tongue,
and you smile and savor
the sweet circle around
each seed until

the fury lets
loose, and we pile
on our bikes
to escape the rain.
How things drop
and rise, grow out
of the earth
and sky to find us.

© Joseph Heithaus.  All Rights Reserved