Glenda Burgess Books

On roadsides,
in fall fields,
in rumpy bunches,
saffron and orange and pale gold...
- from "Goldenrod," Mary Oliver, 2004

I hiked the bluff trails early this morning. In these mountains the coming fall brings crisp air to the lingering warmth of summer. The trails were absent of a certain joy however. Absent my dog, McDuff, a sturdy little wheaten-colored Scottie. McDuff passed in December of 2012, and the years since are marked by the absence of his beautiful presence at my side. Today I dedicate my blog post to McDuff, and revisit a post from late summer 2010.

September 3, 2010:
Yesterday afternoon McDuff and I headed out to the bluff, lulled outdoors by a late afternoon warmth. Pools of mellow light fell through the trees. We walked through wild oat and dried thistle, the hillside adorned in a palette of caramel, dusty tan, and white yellow, the sweetness of summer at its fullest. Fall hovers at the edge of the valley in crisp mornings and cool nights, but here on the bluff, summer fiercely holds court.

As we walked, a wordless song played through my thoughts and Duff fell behind, his nose in a rabbit hole. I stopped and stood a moment, looking across the valley. A raven cry drifted up from somewhere near the creek and I was filled with an inexplicable happiness. As if everything truly had its moment, and this moment had now. My thoughts touched on my son and daughter, far away, anchoring into a new school term at university. I felt the river width of time, the slow flood across geography. The delicate knots and stitches that bind us, one to another.

Here, the final stanzas of Mary Oliver's poem, "Goldenrod" -

I was just minding my own business
when I found myself on their straw hillsides,
citron and butter-colored,

and was happy, and why not?
Are not the difficult labors of our lives
full of dark hours?
And what has consciousness come to anyway, so far,

that is better than these light-filled bodies?
All day
on their airy backbones
they toss in the wind,

they bend as though it was natural and godly to bend,
they rise in a stiff sweetness,
in the pure peace of giving
one's gold away.

May all of you find delight in summer's last song.

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WILDERNESS
When I lay down, for the night, on the desert,
on my back, and dozed, and my eyes opened,
my gaze rushed up, as if falling up
into the sky,
and I saw the open eye of night, all
guileless, all iris of a starshine grey,
scattered with clusters of brilliant pupils.
I gazed, and dozed, and as my eyelids lifted I would
plummet up out of the atmosphere,
plunging and gasping as if I'd missed
a stair. I would sleep, and come to, and sleep,
and every time that I opened my eyes
I fell up deep into the universe.
It looked crowded, hollow, intricate, elastic,
I did not feel I could really see it
because I did not know what it was
that I was seeing. When my lids parted,
there was the real -- absolute,
crisp, impersonal, intimate,
benign without sweetness, I was roaring out, my
speed suddenly increasing in its speed, I was
entering another dimension, and yet
one in which I belong, as if
not only the earth while I am here, but space,
and death, and existence without me, are my home.
- Sharon Olds

This poem by Sharon Olds transports us into the boundless mystery of the universe. To be under the stars, open to the darkness, where as Olds shares, "there was the real -- absolute, crisp, impersonal, intimate, benign without sweetness." Olds unveils the familiar strangeness of the universe at night. The presence of what can only be described as an encompassing unbounded living pulse. A life force more felt than it is defined. And so we trek to the wilderness. To reach and touch a greater-than-the-known truth, singing from afar.

A song deep in the quiet.

We encounter moments of unbounded awareness throughout our lives. Sensing what more there may be to what we think of as the entirety of our existence. Perhaps lying on a lake dock under a tent of a million distant stars, or seated by a beach bonfire, watching as sparks pop and pirouette and splinter upward into the dark. That moment that causes us to pause, chasing fireflies in the dark of a meadow. Before dawn, bathed in the illumination of the Milky Way.

At the edge of a pond, unaware of the night heron yet aware of us.

We experience a shift of dimensions as the poem "Wilderness" opens. A softening of borders, an awareness of strange yet familiar truth. As though diving beneath the surface of a still lake, into a universe hidden below what we take for granted every day. One dimension among many. One part of an integrated, endless layering of existences. Visible and unseen. Present and past, known and distant.

Look long into the velvet sky with me. Seek the tiniest point of fractured light. Do you feel how we belong?
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