Feral friends,

In winter  — the solar dawn of the New Year — our wont is to read cosmogonies on ice, or if the ice is thin, on the bank or in the woods above the pond. Funny that creation stories are always local and tell the stories of a people and a place every bit as much as cosmic births and spins. 

And in the telling of ancient stories we make them ours, fitting in pockets or satchels, native birds in attendance laying their songs over bobcat/fox/coyote tracks and spoor. And turkeys. Thus we weave with them our presences in a braided lai of the land. And the deep silence that lets Nature have her say. In these crystal moments she reveals her cosmogonic essence: every moment is a new creation, a burgeoning forth of being. Try this:

As you stand or sit in stillness in the woods or meadow or beside a pond or creek, close your eyes with every in-breath and open with every out-breath. Slowly. 

Slowly…. Let the wild world become new with each opening. Let your body and eyes and breath call into being something new. Listen for sonic births, rhythms, rings and vibrations. See them on the water or in naked canopies, trembling leaves and raptor skylines. Changing blue. Every moment: new. The nature of wildness is becoming. 

Behind a cloud the cosmos dreaming.

With the breezes ripples tune their ice-harps.

Beneath our feet rustles write stories.

In a single breath a woodpecker drumming.

After a period of contemplative stillness, write a simple cosmogonic micropoem. One line, a single phrase like my examples above. Write your little cosmogonies throughout the winter as wild silences find you. Tuck into your notebook or pocket, save them up to weave a world and let yourself be woven.

— Jack Phillips

_{Photos: Solstice dawn deeply ponders silence. Southern Loess Hills, by Jack. Wasp’s nest slime mold bejewels a log as Pawnee dawn wakes the day. Tribal lands in Saunders County NE, by Katie Thompson. A Harris’s sparrow paints a winter day in Washington County, NE by Finn Soderberg. Below: writing winter cosmogonies with UNO MFA students with TNS poet Angélica Perez, Fremont County IA.}