Waking up
by myself
to this senior Sunday
- Wild Wife Anna off for the weekend
to her 87 year-old father
four highway hours south by the coast
to take notes on her childhood and his -
I direct my Faber-Castell pencil
into a wonderfully simply designed
German sharpener,
thus simulating a supply craft
docking with the International Space Station
400 km above this surface
and the surface of this notebook page,
where a version of an outlook
appears, like a barbed wire fence
out of the mist

I barefoot down the curving wooden staircase,
heat some water in the kitchen
and climb back up
to a slightly warmer upstairs,
balancing a mug of hot, black coffee
to jump-start body and mind
and glaring, irresistible thought forms;
patterns of diligence and magic mirror images,
as I slip back into the cosy enclosure
of the woolen Indian cover
of The Great Ship of Dreams;
this broad double-bed that sails the oceans
of the Unconscious
when it's not just simply a retreat
for soaring mind
in the gentle caress of gravity
at G One,
in the exemplary company
of Henry David Thoreau's Journal 1837 – 1861,
in the Damion Searls edit;
the most thorough Thoreau edit to date
with its 667 pages out of the roughly 7000,
arrived at through a thought-through process
that Searls describes in detail in the preface

It is a luxury and an amazing grace to wake up
in this northernmost part of Sweden,
out in the scarcity of neighbours,
where all people have names
and each car passing raises eye-brows;
where the country side of countryside
is dominant;
where you greet old trees
like noble old men and women,
mature with experience and wisdom;
where tall, sturdy, slow-grown pines, spruces
and birches
stand erect 'round the farm,
bathing in the northerlies, branches outstretched,
the breath of polar bears in the soughing whispers
from the tundras way up under the Arctic Ocean,
carried from tree to tree
through the seemingly endless coniferous forest belt
that crowns the Northern Hemisphere
like another story's crown of thorns

I have to get dressed
to tend to the horses
- Moses, Eldur, Tornado -;
no hard chore
since they're still grazing the meadows,
but I shall see to it
that they have plenty of fresh water,
shovel manure
and prepare the stable
for the five, six hours they get to be inside
in their boxes, for a proper rest,
as afternoon slowly turns into night,
dark again this time of year;
Venus suspended, bright across the mountains

but in the back of my mind
since I picked up the pencil this morning
and sharpened it,
resides the realization – not new, but solid! -
that everything is natural, just phases
in the motions of evolution;
cosmic trials and errors;
from the dance of yellow autumn leaves
out from the birches
to Jaguar E-types and aggressive speeches
in parliaments
to Covid vaccines to poisoned oceans
and tasty raspberries!

It can't but be!
What could be unnatural in nature?
No matter how unnatural anything may seem,
it is always natural...
because that is the true state of everything
The Cosmos is natural!
Evolution is the way Cosmos behaves!
Our brains are simply places in space,
just like clams and clouds and corporations!

The sense that anything, anyone,
any species or dreamed-up deities
reside outside of nature,
is the greatest threat to this go of evolution
- BUT that is evolution too, natural as can be,
as even the idea of God is,
AND the denial of any god

But now I must put on my breathing mask
and my rubber boots and gloves
and start shoveling horse shit!

A thorough Thoreau will be waiting for me
when I get back in!

”Impulse is the best linguist!”
(H. D. Thoreau: ”Gleanings” - 1838)