A Gold We Need Not Mine

Out of a Cæsura, a Dream

Dear Friends and Family,

The sun is shy to surface this morning beyond the near ridge to the east, the smell of campfire distant in this brisk air, everywhere the surround of amber and gold. Leaves of Aspen clap in a breeze as if to applaud the beauty they bestow with Alder and Beech, Black Spruce and Fir, and Horsetail rising up from the water, rust-colored and motionless, is a forest unto itself. Gone are the Damsel Flies swishing through them just weeks ago. It is autumn here.

It might ring tones more alarming if this aroma of wildfire were not so pine-resin sweet, if it did not recall waking to the smoldering memories of s’mores and campfire stories, the ones that get dredged up in the dark of night. But it does recall and it is sweet and it does not alarm because I am distant enough from danger. Which, even though this is so, seems callous to even whisper, given you who’ve been called to fight such fires and you who’ve had to flee and you whose belongings and homes have burned and you whose loved ones were lost in a fire’s sweeping rage.

Every step beyond the front door is a reminder of how complex our existence, how intertwined we are with one another and all that is, how delicate and yet fierce the force we call life, which is not mine or yours but an unending unseen living us into being moment by moment. It is not that we live life. It is that life lives us.

Wildfire smoke hangs thick over the northernmost passage into British Columbia from Yukon

But for a detour to Prince Rupert on the coast for one final taste of this salt-sea air, I have snailed along for days—deliberately slow—toward the crescendo of ‘real world’. First came livestock and pastoral parsing of land. Then came better roads and faster speeds and two Ptarmigans swallowed by the front grill of the van; confused, they flew toward not away, a move too sudden for me to stop. I hope their death was just as sudden. I pray the agony was my own. Then came power stations and long tracks of lines. Houses soon were not clustered around village, town, or small city centers but spread along the corridor from one town to the next—humanscapes populating landscapes. Did I drive through time?

I have paused at Kager Lake, off the beaten path in the Lake District of British Columbia, Prince George still four hours to the east. Absent but one here are any hints at this crawl toward ‘civilization’. Even the road is dirt and washboarded, recalling the effort to get somewhere. One cell-phone bar, that one hint, keeps a good tether and lets me reach you today, a (surprise) letter I had not expected to send until next week, and so, there’s not much, and maybe this is best || a cæsura, a pause in a poem tending at times toward a turn, answering perhaps without answering pointedly how the poem began—this one a prosody on mine.

I woke from a dream in the night. It was a short dream, one mere moving image, not unlike a meme, only it didn’t repeat but couriered then vanished. It came with promise for you and me and these times and so, I thought to share:

In the distance, a green-gold mountain in the early days of autumn—everywhere autumn in the North and South and spreading evenly East and West.

The mountain, a face—not a human or animal face, but the face of Life itself.

On the mountain, trees—dark green, nearly black-green, the concentrated color the within of the blossoming green-gold; everywhere an outpouring, as if the inside is endlessly pouring out of an endless black ampoule into unending gold.

Between the mountain and the person who sees, people moving amongst one another amongst a row of trees—moving through silence, not speaking but together knowing.

The people the chameleon coloring of the mountain—standing out not at all; discernible by their movements alone; harmonious and as one; colorscaping not with but as the mountain, coloring itself the goldblood flowing forth from within.

I’ll say no more for today but look forward to sharing next week reflective insights that have come in the long quiet and turning in the days ahead to your reflections in comments from last week and this week, too, should you be so inclined. . . .

Ever in gratitude and with love,

Renée