6/29/2015

What Works

I took this picture while out on a run this morning (I love running with my iphone), and had most of this thought/poem written by the time I puffed my way home ....





What Works

I've spent my life learning by listening and thinking and practicing,
not often enough by simply doing.

Countless hours reading about cooking and writing and training my dogs,
time that's gone, like stones thrown in a deep lake.

Running away from a heart-attack this morning, I watched the world wheel around me,
precise and perfect, a dancing millions of parts with no missed steps.

The fawn crossing in front of me has learned not by sitting in a series of classrooms,
but through a thousand generations of fawns that didn't live to reproduce,
too slow in front of a truck, abandoned fear of the bear or coyote or rifle-bearing hunter.

Roadside blueberries didn't plant themselves along County Route 50 for us to pick,
small beasts ate tiny berries containing minuscule seeds which emerged later,
ready to sprout, but most don't germinate ... only the right ones do.

Each leaf and needle holds just the correct amount of water from this morning's drizzle,
no plans, just surface-tension and gravity,
and the drop's angle of repose relative to the leaf or needle.
{I know this term doesn't fit exactly, but it works for my brain ... so deal with it}

Nature has no plans, holds no 'truths', knows no secrets,
she improves infinitesimally, day by day,
through messy and disastrous and bloody failures,
endless and varied.

I need more of this in my life,
not disasters and bloody messes
but more doing and less thinking ....

To leap and dare to fall,
in the kitchen,
in my writing,
with my dogs (and family and friends and strangers).

I think I need to fail more,
and grow comfortable with the failures as a part, and process, of learning,
or bettering,
or just exploring failure.

Nature's best never came from plan or classroom or book,
and nor will mine.


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