Chattermarks

They say it is winter here in the North Cascades. With the shadowed days and the sting of cold to cheeks as you step outside, one might even believe it is true. But missing from this crisp landscape is also the white beauty of snow. While it is easy to lament the bare ground in January or the undeniable wish for skis and snowshoes, we can also find appreciation in winter’s more subtle forms. The hoar frost feathered like brandished fur on a fallen twig, the crunch of elegant crystalline ice rods pushing their way through hardened soil, the prominent, frozen stalactites dripping from mountain wall. Winter is here, and while we eagerly anticipate a world transformed by snow (the next couple weeks, they say!), we can still appreciate its other poetic manifestations.

Below, a few winter inspired poems.

Winter Song in the Foothills

Tim McNulty, from In Blue Mountain Dusk, 1992

 

On the colder nights

when the scattered chips

of winter stars

light the valley with frost,

the frozen lakes will sometimes

sing to themselves.

 

Their song

echoes through the snowforest hills

and still dense midnight air

like a great kettledrum

rumbling deep and hollow

in the belly of the earth.

 

Plates of ice shift and settle

against their banks of pasture

and wood,

while this strange and restless music

drifts past the frosty ears

of cows, owls

tucked in the hollows of night,

the gentle sleeping bears,

 

and carries up the hillside creeks

to startle us from sleep

- no song like we ever heard before -

and rock the house softly

on its moorings of ashes and dust.

Crystalline rods of ice, formed during cold, clear nights, push through moss and soil. Photo by Kiira Heymann.

» Continue reading Poetic Visualizations of the Winter Season

As members of the current M.Ed. graduate cohort, we often have opportunities to assist with North Cascades Institute programs and courses outside our regular teaching schedules. Last month I had the awesome opportunity to assist and participate in the 12th Annual Thunder Arm Writing Retreat offered at the Environmental Learning Center. Poet Tim McNulty and essayist Ana Maria Spagna led three dynamic days that dug deep into self-exploration through prose. Below I’d like to highlight my experience and reflections of the retreat and showcase a poem I wrote over those inspiring days.

I’m an Environmental Educator with an English degree. Simply put, I love reading. Reading has the ability to transport the reader and as a result has enchanted me my entire life. When I volunteered for the retreat it had been some years since I last wrote creatively but only a few weeks since I’d delved into a book. In school I was trained to dissect another’s writing through close reading and critical analysis, not to freely capture my own thoughts through creative writing. The essay for me historically evokes a sense of drudgery, as words like “term paper” and “final exam” flood into my mind. At the beginning of the second day of the retreat, Ana Maria gave a craft talk titled “Peeling Back: The Movement toward Honesty in the Personal Essay.” Through group free-writing exercises she demonstrated how the essay can be viewed as a door to get at the truth of the moment. For the first time my academic experience of an essay transformed into an organic process of self-reflection and natural development of ideas. Both Ana Maria and later Tim McNulty demanded that as writers we trust our voice.

» Continue reading Reflections on the 12th Annual Thunder Arm Writing Retreat

An alder leaf on a trail. A chance encounter between a weasel and a hawk. The mad rush of a waterfall.

These images – and more – were captured in words by the participants in the North Cascades workshop Sit, Walk, Write: Nature and the Practice of Presence, held at the Environmental Learning Center on October 23 – 25, 2009.  For the past two seasons, Kurt Hoelting and I, Holly Hughes, have had the pleasure of leading this workshop the last weekend in October. At this workshop, we literally sit, walk and write as a way to more deeply engage with the natural world. Kurt- a writer and teacher of meditation – and I -poet, essayist and teacher of writing – both believe strongly in the value of combining meditation with writing as a way to deepen and reflect on our experience of the natural world.

Our time together goes like this – We begin the day with sitting meditation, followed by a brief period of walking meditation or Qi Gong, eat breakfast together in silence, then gather to read poems and prose that illustrate the practice of paying attention that meditation encourages. In the afternoon, we hike with an North Cascades Institute naturalist, learning more about the woods around us, and spend the rest of the day writing and reflecting on what we are observing. In the evening, we gather to share our writings then end the day by sitting together in meditation. Throughout, we are practicing attention – attention to our breath as we meditate, attention to the shimmering gold of the aspen leaves as we hike up a trail. Our hope is that by paying attention, we will become more present to ourselves and our world, and in doing so, we might feel called to bear witness.

» Continue reading Watching the waterfall, bearing witness

If you know anything about Gary Snyder, then you can understand why we here at North Cascades Institute are incredibly excited about his forthcoming visit to Seattle on May 27. Strands of Snyder are interwoven in to the Institute, our mission, our staff and our North Cascades Environmental Learning Center, and his poetry and worldview have an almost totemic presence in our work.  The 50 years of poetry, interviews and essays that Snyder has produced has educated, inspired and illuminated many of us in many different ways. Some of us came out west after reading one of his books on the mountains and trails of our region. Others have been impacted by his writing about community, culture, watersheds, ecology and sustainability — concepts he was exploring decades before they became influential buzzwords in our society. I know of people that have become fire lookouts or trail workers, poets or environmental educators, Buddhists or off-the-grid pioneers in part because of the example Snyder set in both his lifestyle and his writing.

Has Gary Snyder likewise inspired or informed you in some way? Has a particular poem crystalized some thought or feeling for you? Did one of his essays change the way you look at the world ? Which of his writings have impacted you and why?

We’re curious and hope you’ll share your Snyder story with us. Everybody who responds to this post with a germaine comment will be eligible to receive a free copy of Snyder’s book Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, a compendium of mountain poetry that is turning 50 years old this year. I’ll give folks a week to respond and then randomly pick three lucky winners, announcing them in the comments early next week.

» Continue reading Gary Snyder and “Riprap” book give-away