to make thinking difficult.”
So run the final two lines from Charles Simic‘s poem “Letter.”
Except often it’s just not (only) about us. Trees loom and leaf for their own sake, expressions of energy just as valid without any human presence to comment on them or arrogate them for a poem, however talented or honored the poet (Simic won a Pulitzer in 1990). And I say this as a bard, a devotee of words and their crafting. I like some of Simic’s work very much.
Yes, human presences make their trails, but the seasons also have their say, wordless though it is.
Here’s an autumn view of a hill on a neighborhood walk that blesses my wife and me whenever we take it.
And here’s the same path as winter dresses it:
We make our paths through a world immeasurably larger than we are, a great comfort, I find. Sometimes the part of the Druid is listening, without comment. Of course, by itself listening doesn’t get the poems written, the blogposts online, the books and songs and stories heard and known and loved. But listening … oh, listening and looking, may you two always come first, springs of lasting wonder.
A Druid Way 