Morning Nuthatches

Even on this sharp dawn eleven days into the solar year a thousand eyes shine images, creaturely windows into waking being. We can deny our true bodyselves but here in cold wildnesses not so, stirring earth into bluey-black comes orange her original skin and ours. 

Friends,

Those who live by daylength measure time a little differently – the turn of the Solstice stretches the days and us – but is not every dawn a new awakening? And as it happened our last full moon landed on the Solstice or close enough with the new lunar year landing with her. Whenever it comes to each of us; that is, the feeling of hope and stretch and aborning of something wild and new, we can see the coming days opening before us. And our souls as well.

Feral days,

Jack Phillips

_{*Red-breasted nuthatch (Sitta canadensis) on the eve of Solstice, Washington County, Nebraska by Troy Soderberg. You can find them in the woodlands of western Iowa and eastern Nebraska right now, accompanied by their white-breasted cousins (S. carolinensis). For best results, wear good socks. **January 1st 2022 morning prose poem by Jack.} 

Cold full moon

oo…oh…

a snowy owl. 

_{*Snowy owl (Bubo scandiacus) in Saunders County, Nebraska just before the Solstice. Photo by Kirby Zicafoose. Lune by Jack Phillips.}

A lune? Winter is given to spare poetry and for this haiku is perfect. A lune is an American form of haiku and like other variants, it seeks to express the simplicity of the Japanese form in American idiom. We love to write them. A lune can follow a 5/3/5 pattern or 3/5/3; sometimes words are counted as in the method developed by beat-poet Jack Collom. The original form developed by poet Robert Kelly counts syllables. The wild poets in our coterie are less interested in counting and more concerned with shape and feel — the lines should make a crescent waxing or waning and the arc of the syllables should conform easily with a moonish sigh: oh… see the moon? oo… an owl!

She sows the seeds of self-seeded souls of lives that are lived as given.

_{*Photos by TNS member Joe Janowski, during his dawn meditation at Glacier Creek Preserve, Douglas County, Nebraska.}

_{**Poem at first light on Thanksgiving Day, 2021 by Jack Phillips. This poem takes the shape of American sentence, a modern form of one-line haiku. If you write a poem at the beginning of the day as many of our members do, the one-line haiku is a simple form that can help us to live the reality of a single moment. The standard conformation comprises 17 syllables, but counting is not as important as creaturely presence. And gratitude.}

Listen in close the first note of Mother Tree’s canopy pumpkin burns eyes of sky 

gives up beauty a gossamer spring (as sadly hunters knock on heaven) our  

feet hold the memory fallen tree holds our bodies warming earth 

gives a little more time whilst dancing leaves turn your friends to swaying take

just as long as they do.

* Our exquisite corpse, a collective poem to which each poet blindly contributes a line or phrase following a rule or theme — in this case a Samhain circle in the oak-hickory woods — as we ourselves are wildly drawn together. Photos by Tessa Wedberg and Jack Phillips. Poem by Kara, Barb, Joelle, Billie, Corson, Dana, Laura, Tessa, and Jack.

Dearest wild octoberlings, 

If you have been just now in the bush you have been seeing more snakes solitary birds now social (and obviously foxes) wee snapping turtles (lately hatched and yet to harden) gatherings of dragonflies to migrate (or just plain hungry) fungi in the throes of day-glow gigantisms and poets having no time for line-breaks or commas. Between the equinox and Samhain (say it: saw-win) is the time of zugunruhe the autumn toddler pitching a tantrum (at bedtime) the season of restive hubbub when October rolls over to steal the blankets a river’s barefoot dreaming (just yesterday) the only tadpoles left are the big ones (ripe hackberries some plums) later dawns and sooner moons of quietly disquieted sauntering letting nature have the last word as always we must, and do. 

Better get to it,

Jack Phillips

Mid-Ocotober zugunruhe in eastern Nebraska. Giant puffball (Calvatia gigantea), black-footed polypore (Polyporous badius), Douglas County; white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), Saunders County. Photos by Troy Soderberg.

October Damsels*

One normally thinks orange and hickory-butter on backside of equinox and less so blue below the eyelid of sky but one of our bluets (the odonata of autumn) may live a whole lifetime between two moons the sum of all colors come October and finding the unworn light we barefoot the still-warm river, not a bad way to spend most of your mornings or one. 

_{*You might have expected another one but I have to tell you my friends, It really works. Composing a poem feet in the river good boots on the trail makes us slower, quieter. Avoid heavy rhymes and correct punctuation — they make it harder to see and frighten the frogs. (Enallagma civile, photo by Troy Soderberg in autumn, Washington County, Nebraska. Prose poem by Jack Phillips.)}

The River Dreams of Nancy*
As you slide over these lines dear reader or as they slide over you a fox snake Mintomius vulpinus carries a new memory of skin. This liqueous serpent (the river takes reptilian Mind) slid-slithered over my palms and those of my friends we let our lovely squamate tongue-taste flick and lick surely her first humans an oddly-scented species neither predator nor prey at least not we. One calms a snake with open hands (as one might balance a puppy or pizza) and she being a water-spirit we completed our devotions and slipped her into riverine undulations once more to consider a cricket-frog or wet mouse, unaware of her smooth lingerings I can feel her right now. It was Nancy’s first snake and sweetly so to dream and the river’s first Nancy, tonight.

_{*What? Another poem? Poetry is that most liqueous way of speaking that tunes us to the creative generativity of the cosmos and is really good for river walking. For best results, remove your shoes. Top: fox snake on the Kickatuus River in late September, photo by Keith Lucas. Bottom: a new hatchling snapping turtle on the Autumnal Equinox. Photo by Cubby Phillips. Prose poem by Jack Phillips (for Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez), published in THE POET (UK), November 2021.}

Little Left-open Mercies*   

Hereabouts embodies some otherworldly energies, how else would you explain this? Most likely they left their little umbrellas open lanterns lit ponchos ready mycelial garb awaiting the rain (the middle-earth outerwear of mystical elsewheres) and yet nothing underfoot is unoriginal and secrets here belonging much longer most certainly than we, the unidentified mercies left unlisted and alone the presence of something other, but here. 

Wilder friends,

When our brilliant mycologist Kathleen Thompson can spend a few days with us, we habitually pause from chasing fungi and lichens and mosses and liverworts to read some poems and write some, make ephemeral art, or just wade the river to contemplate the barefoot mysteries. Some among us dance on the occasion of rain. You see, my friends, creative acts gather and throw the spores of wildness, draw us in and stretch the threads that web us all. Face to face with a slime mold or tree frog, a fox watching from a hollow, feathered chats and voices riding late summer breezes bring us to who we are where we are right now. And now. 

Love the little things,

Jack Phillips

*Prose poem by Jack Phillips. Photos by Troy Soderberg: Clitocybe nuda (top), Leucoagaricus rubrotinctus, Tremella mesenterica (bottom) in Harrison County, Iowa in September. Identified by Katie Thompson.

Slightly Bitter Rounds of Being by Jack Phillips*

Time picks up speed as it rounds the corner hopeful at once a little sad not to mourn the closing in of autumn but for another orbit come and almost gone. Thoreau gets credit for to drink of every season (as still he dominates kitchen calendars) but daily we live the lay of the land take nature in the raw let us write our own lines to swing the summer round keep the marble rolling under our feet, the purplish fruits of being a little bitter today but always worth the bite. 

^{*The poem above is a prose poem — a 19th-Century hybrid poetic form that allows the reader to make breaks in line and rhythm. Chelsea’s poem below is lined free-verse, a form that allows the breaks and spaces to multiply layers of meaning. In each case we invite you, dear reader, to write these poems with us in the ways that you bite and savor them. Both of these poems were composed with our mouths full of wild plums on a late summer saunter. Find wild fruits to flavor your eyes and tongues but only taste a few and leave the rest to nourish the wild.}

Black Elk’s vision as told to John Neihardt colors the cosmos in yellow and blue, red and white — round corners of the Sacred Hoop — and Native American medicine wheels throughout. These sacred colors imbue the spiritual imagination of our planet and brighten our local woods and haunts. And when the morning reflects and our celestial orb rounds just so, we get purples and oranges and hues in between.

And sometimes the Sacred Hoop makes a garden. The Naturalist School celebrated Neihardt Day where Joelle Sandfort and I read our Sacred Hoop poems in the garden designed by Neihardt himself. The hoop is cosmic and ever local, never bound by present time and space, but always found in the present. Find it where wildly you walk.

Round and round, 

Jack Phillips   

Read more about TNS at the Neihardt Center here: https://thenaturalistschool.org/sacred-hoop-ecology