This was part of the Banff Mountain Film Festival that I saw in Durango a couple of weeks ago. This amazing picture and other short films took me to ends of the Earth on things like a bike, skis, parachute, and rowboat with all the moments of elation and pitfalls.
If this film festival is in your area and you love adventure, it’s a must see. I’m signing off to a snowy winter with lots of sweet pow, and hopefully next year we’ll have just the same (or maybe more). Injoy…
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles—
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
“How does one become a butterfly?” she asked pensively.
“You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar”.
“You mean to die?” asked Yellow, remembering the three who fell out of the sky.
“Yes and No,” he answered.
“What looks like you will die but what’s really you will still live. Life is changed, not taken away. Isn’t that different from those who die without ever becoming butterflies?”
“And if I decide to become a butterfly,” said Yellow hesitantly. “What do I do?”
“Watch me. I’m making a cocoon.
“It looks like I’m hiding, I know, but a cocoon is no escape.
“It’s an in-between house where the change takes place.
“It’s a big step since you can never return to caterpillar life.
“During the change, it will seem to you or to anyone who might peek that nothing is happening – but the butterfly is already becoming.
“It just takes time!”
“And there’s something else!
“Once you are a butterfly, you can really love -the kind of love that makes new life.
It’s better than all the hugging caterpillars can do.”
This is a book that I cherish and read aloud to my kids often. It has so many parallels to living, loving and learning.
