Slowing down to the pace of wisdom

A poem as I looked out my window

Bucket List

How could this be boring

This morning northern view.

All is quiet.

One, just one, Douglas fir,

Spared the subdivision axe,

Towers above the stillness of the morning

Each bough always at the same tilt

As if a window dresser placed it so.

The roof lines of my neighbors’ houses

at their crisp tilts, secure atop their solid houses.

The geraniums in boxes atop the railing on my deck

A steady red all summer.

The jagged peaks of the North Cascades

Never changing

The deck still standing

The tall chair where I sit at sunset

At the just-so angle I set years ago.

Yet, everything is so alive.

Lichens slowly grow along the railing

Busy with the work of turning

This solid house to dust

Some many years from now.

Each geranium globe blooms and fades

While its roots spread throughout the window box.

Until, come winter,

I pull their withered bodies

and send them to decay in the compost bin

That’s also busy with breaking down

What I have made.

The dark bellied clouds move so slowly across

The sky that, when I’m busy, I just call them sky.

And what work these water carriers do each day

Making rain somewhere that makes everything grow.

Ah, there, the spindly tip of the fir grows

Slowly, an inch or two a decade, while below

The aspen grove is bushy with green leaves

That, work done, will drop in Autumn

To reveal the scraggly aspen bones.

And offer glimpses of the placid water of the sound

That moves twice a day with the tide.

And there, the solar panels on

A neighbor’s roof, are busy turning the power of the sun

into power for that house.

And last, but not least, the feeder

That at any moment comes alive with

sparrows.

My life, with age, has not narrowed.

I expand beyond the rigid confines

Of who I thought I was

In the noisy, busy, summer of my life.

Slowing down

Stillness comes alive.

This, then, is my bucket list

Writing this poem

This morning

From the torrent of words

That, at every moment,

Rush through the rapids of my mind.

In this growing older,

I too grow

Like the grandmother tree

Busy with her work

Of showing how

Past and future

Are wider than the limits of our years.

My stiff knee might slow my step

As I go down the stairs

But in slowness

Water from my inner well

Surfaces.

My imagination fills.

My soul’s view expands,

And wisdom ripens

Slowly.