112 Letting Go

Episodes 109-112 move us from summer to fall. In this episode we discuss the letting go and a grandmother's kazoo band. Gathering word: The Consequences of Death by Pattiann Rodgers from Firekeeper: Selected Poems (2005) Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis.  You might previously have thought Each death just a single loss. But when a plain gray titmouse dies,  What plunges simultaneously and disappears too Are all the oak-juniper woodlands,  The streamside cottonwoods, every elderberry Bush and high spring growth of sprouted Oak once held inside its eye.   And when a sugar pine splits, breaks to the ground, falling with its fiestas and commemorations of blue-green needles,  long-winged seeds, the sweet resin  of its heartwood, there’s another collapse coincident - a fast inward sinking and sucking back to nothing of all those stars once kept in its core,  those clusters of suns and shining  dusts once resident in the sky of its rigid bark and cone-scales. We could hear the sound of the galactic collapse as well, if we had the proper ears for it.   And when a mountain sheep stumbles,  plummets, catapulting skull, spine,  from cliffside to crumbling rock below,  a like shape of flame and intensidy on a similar sharp ledge on the other side  of the same moment, out of our sense,  loses balance, goes blind.    Because of these torn paper-shreds  of gold-lashed wings, this spangled fritillary’s death, somewhere behind the night a convinced declaration of air and matter a and intention, silenced, speaks no longer of the god of its structure.   ______________ Andi Chatburn: https://www.andichatburn.net/ Audre Rickard: https://www.saturatedgrace.com Heather Fignar: http://www.heatherfignar.com Irene Dunlop: https://www.tendsoulcare.com    Rewilding Retreat on Dec 21, 2023 https://www.andichatburn.net/retreatmt/p/wild-winter-solstice-dec-22-23-2023