Native Echoes by Kent Nerburn

Author:Kent Nerburn [Nerburn, Kent]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-9800046-1-8
Publisher: Wolf Nor Dog Books
Published: 2017-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

BLUE

I smoke with the Great Spirit.

Let us have a blue day.

—Sioux song

I walked today, knee deep in snow that had a sparkle on its surface. Each footstep lifted clouds of winter diamonds, azure blue and crystalline, like firesparks of ice.

It is a day of blue, this winter morning. The blue-hued snow betrays its water source within. Tree trunks echo blue in sympathetic harmony.

Even the wind blows blue — cool, edgy, soothing and serene. And above it all a cobalt sky vaults insurmountable in cloudless brilliance, casting shadows long and lavender across the land.

It is the palette of a genius painter, this winter day; a Chinese watercolor, but with edges sharp and cutting as a knife.

If you would live in winter, you must give yourself to blue. Not as a color, or as a wistful sadness, but as a distance, receding from the surface, that turns at every point to meditation. It is like the echo in a vast architecture, a footfall in a great cathedral.

I step. The snow crusts beneath me. Its surface breaks like the shattering of glass. Above me, a jay perches, then swoops, his actions leaving no track or trace, his flight a fugue against the sky.

Not so, with me. The tracks I leave do not return to stillness, but shape a landscape of intent. Into the blue soliloquy I send a march, a cadence with a purpose.

On days like this I do not love our mortal grounding. I am revealed too much for who I am. I can push forward into endless purity. But if I turn, as honesty demands, I see my history revealed, and my single path betrays the gentle vesper of the land.

We may, as Wordsworth says, come trailing clouds of glory. But once that glory touches down, we leave our mark.

I would rather seek the margins of the woods than cut a razor path across the land.

If I must live in counterpoint, let it be a gentle sound.

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