I thought you might like to see a little of the native life in this blessed part of the world. I took all but the two photos in which you see me, the first with camera in hand on the shore of Lake Lagunitas, the other a snap of me during the one time I was persuaded to do a talk here about ER and FDR. The railing and courtyard is my small deck, home also to my bikes and bird feeders.
These spring days I am getting mostly finches, sparrows and the omnipresent chubby mourning doves, for whom I have a special affection because they and their distinctive cry have been present without exception in every one of the many places I've lived.
For those of you who don't listen to (or read) Garrison Keillor's daily "Writer's Almanac," his poem of the day and reminder of whose birthdays occur this day (John Muir's among them), I also include from that source a favorite poem of a favorite poet, W.S. Merwin.
On the theme of the Merwin poem — the allusiveness and elusiveness of memory — I used to think that I could imagine what "I had a mind to do / and what I could imagine / going back to and finding it / as I had found it the first time," but like Merwin "I do not know / what I thought when I thought back then." Memories have always, even when young, been oblique and elusive, partial to wish and aversion, the song both new and old. That's part of what makes history, personal and social, so fascinating and so challenging.
The New Song
by W. S. Merwin
For some time I thought there was time
and that there would always be time
for what I had a mind to do
and what I could imagine
going back to and finding it
as I had found it the first time
but by this time I do not know
what I thought when I thought back then
there is no time yet it grows less
there is the sound of rain at night
arriving unknown in the leaves
once without before or after
then I hear the thrush waking
at daybreak singing the new song
"The New Song" by W.S. Merwin, from The Moon Before Morning. © Copper Canyon Press, 2014.
Much love,
Dad / John