More Poetry: This time with spiders

Mount Madonna County Park, Watsonville, California.

A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider,

I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,

Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,

Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,

Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

— Walt Whitman (from Leaves of Grass)

Thinking about relationships right now …

A picnic table at Swanton Berry Farm on the Pacific Coast Highway

Relationships, of all kinds, are the most simple and yet difficult of things. In my head it should be easygoing like this picnic table, a place where you can sit down and share something plain and beautiful, face to face, under a perfect sky. But then there were many days of rain and fog to make the grass beneath this blue table so very green, right?

It’s sealed: Welcome, New Year

It’s become an annual pilgrimage, the mating of the elephant seals. For the second year in a row, my dear friend Tony and I have followed a guide around the dunes of Ano Nuevo State Park and marveled at the sights and sounds of these wild, cumbersome and bizarrely shaped creatures.

I am enamored of any mammal that can plumb the depths of the sea. (Jealous might be a better word for it.) I can only go to a hundred forty or so feet, and these days I rarely go near that deep.

These Northern Elephant seals spend all but a few months of the year far out in the ocean, never sleeping, and diving hour after hour from the surface of the waves to beyond the reach of the light. Down, down, down they go, thousands of feet, to feast in the darkness below, the depths to which you or I could never go .. At once a nightmare and a dream.