trees – Beguine Again

Daily Practice for July 1

Word: I am still obsessing on peacemaking circles. Those “in the know” talk about them coming from the First Nations people of the Tingum Tlingit or from the Māori. Well, as someone who is not ethnically connected to any of those people, I wonder about cultural appropriation of a practice so deeply central to their peoples. I also wonder if there is not something in my heritage that has these practices. Cultural appropriation is “adoption or use of elements of one culture by members of a different culture without invitation or permission of use.” So, I guess I am not appropriating the practices exactly since I’m being taught them. But, I think I can do some work to ground my own practices in my culture. My ancestry is primarily Welsh/Irish/Scottish then a healthy chunk of German

the smell of wood, the scorch of fire

Joy, poem, Poetry

this rough-barked sequoia stump, sitting in majesty in its coastal home, victim of wildfire, burned down to its gnarly roots, its nicks, holes and char, eons of scars, life seemingly cut off, goddess snake alive inside the concentric circles, the smell of wood and scorch of fire, at the verge of our infinity, in its truth ~ pristine rugged pulsing haunted by the geometry of limbs, the calculus of green, the algebraic eloquence of a world within a world ~ So present. So essential. So primal. it sings to itself in the marrow of our bones . © 2014, poem, Jamie Dedes (The Poet by Day), All rights reserved; Photo credit ~Bay Nature.org: "The Bay Nature Institute, based in Berkeley, California, is dedicated to educating the people of the San Francisco Bay Area about, and celebrating the beauty

History With the Sky

Joy, Nature

over mountain edging sea sun contemplates the trees the trees eat up the sun they blossom, the rivers run and wise old rock by time inscribed shares history with the sky © 2013, poem, Jamie Dedes (The Poet by Day), All rights reserved; photo credit ~ Caliliver and released into the public domain