Back From the Field

All of August has seen me immersed in the outside world. I’ve been doing my job. Two weeks were spent in Detroit where I conducted All Game workshops as part of a training program for two new All Game Guides. Am also training another soon-to-be guide here in Virginia. And arranging a ‘core’ group of guides who will facilitate the spread of this self-discovery tool. Soon a new Website will be online.

This kind of work I’ve been engaged in for the past 24 years. Sometimes, the work takes me totally way from writing projects, including keeping up a blog presence.
And as well, I long to get back to my novel project, Manuel the Barber. The poor guy has been waiting and getting impatient about it to boot. He wants his story told. Soon, I tell him. Soon.

I want to get back to the quiet life I love so well. Blessed with a place to live that is set in nature, adequately distant from city life, I’m home once again; ready to sway in unison with my tree friends. They surround our house and speak to me about conditions. News of the real world delivered by sundry breezes. Many shades of green absorbing light from the sun, full of a mellow kind of exuberance this early autumn day, flitter the wind-message.

“Come out and join us,” I hear. The call fills my bones with pleasure and desire. After this blog is posted, I will gift myself with a walk in the pasture. I’ll stumble over the uneven ground (it is like getting a foot massage), talking to my tree friends as I go.

“So, are all you leaves ready for the changes coming?”

I think of Rilke’s autumn poem. “Lord, it is time. The summer was so grand. Let these last rays of warmth drive into the grapes that sweetness you know so well.”

It goes something like that.

I’m eager for such conversation.

This is much different than people talk, which speaks mostly to my head, luring me into frantic dialogues. No thanks, people talkers. I’ve had it for a while. Give me the sounds of peace, contentment – content, life content, real life – not that made up stuff we designate as the sign of civilization.

“Blessed be the dappled things…”