I did a rain meditation this morning, sitting outside in a damp rocker. My bare, wet feet felt too chilled, at first, in the forty-two-degree morning; soon they adjusted, or I forgot about them.
And I went into a sweet reverie as I gazed up at the luscious ring of trees edging our property:
What would it be like to borrow:
that alder treetop over there – the leafless, ever-more branching one – to paint across a
giant canvas? would it produce an arteries-and-veins pattern, the very image of the human circulatory system?
the hemlock with its curved tip? might it be capable of marking feather patterns through paint across a page?
one of the Douglas fir cones? any chance that “mouse tail” shape would arrive intact as prints along paper?
might a hunk of pigment-drenched moss mimic fur as it touches paper?
or would lichen reimagine itself as splotches with negative-space holes?
what inside of us – in the very deepest recesses of this Earthly body – would likewise arrive as painted markings on the page?
As I walked back inside, I remembered the orizomegami class I took three days ago:
my thrill at the unpredictable ways the colors saturated and arranged themselves on the
folded-and-paint-dipped paper!
And in that small memory, I felt the indelible patterns of the natural world painted across the walls of my bones.
(Orig. posted Jan. 2019)
