The Writing Life

Beauty redefines

/ Gin Getz / 1 Comment

Beauty is redefined
By necessity
It is what we expect it to be
What we look for
What we are comfortable with
In context with our past
Our present is relative
As is the view before us
Now seemingly a bit odd
An awkward moment that sticks around
We shall get used it to in time.

Must beauty be big and showy
Blatant and bright
Or can it be subtle, slow, vague, and mysterious
A distant view revealed between dense timber
A play of light gracing the valley below
Through a break in the clouds while snow softly lands on our shoulders

Slowly we begin to see, to feel, to understand the difference. We absorb it all, the moisture in the air softening smiles, plumping out the creases the high altitude had carved on my paling skin.
Big trees thicker than our arms can reach around, with our noses touching rich and sweet bark.
Beauty that soaks in like the heavier air, damp and dark and a patchwork of long shadows.

My old mountains screamed. Blaring sun, rugged peaks, stark blue and white
These mountains sing, a quieter tune, we hear only if we listen and look through the trees
Softer, easier, but somewhere in them, I think, she holds secrets just as deep
She begins to open herself to me
I am the one now reserved
I need to let go and release myself fully
How else can we receive

How many layers can we lose and still remain in tact
Can we peel beyond naked and vulnerable
Down to bare bone
Hard and dense as granite
Expose the inner core
Then find what we are made of
Our essence
Perhaps no more than air and water
Thin and light and a little bit ethereal
That which holds us together
Or spreads us thin
Binds us
Or blinds us

When there is nothing else left to protect us
Contain us
Identify us by
But waters smoothly flowing
Over solid rock

Raven

/ Gin Getz / Leave a comment

Silent are the wings of the raven as he passes
Casting a shadow long against the withered brown grasses at my feet
Laid over in the wind like hair in my eyes
Escaped from beneath the safe and warm confines of a wool cap pulled tight

Under a still grey sky
Laid out above like the inanimate object
I try to reach and reward myself with a soothing touch
Something warm, like flesh, soft and pink
But feel nothing
Only the weightlessness of the air above

Raven on the fence post
Static statue on a barrier to no where
No boundaries to define in the fallow field
Like some random spot out in the open sea
Just a few posts remaining
Semi upright
As time and gravity pull them slower than the eye of a generation might see
Old cedar carved deep with creases like wrinkles on an old man’s brow
Then surprisingly speckled with a shock of brilliant chartreuse moss
Unexpected life where one might suppose no more than death
And a tangle of wire coiled like snakes hiding in the tall brown grass
Prepared to grab the unaware footstep

The world around me as a mirror to my soul
Now tired and tamed and worn by the wind
Dreams and desires whisked away for the season
Seed heads reaching mid thigh
Dancing like drunken old men leaving the bar past midnight
Leaning on one another as they make their way down the twisted cobbled alley

Where does it lead me
As I seek a trail through the woods
No more than a tangle of vines and fallen trees
Leaves from the past scattered like forgotten promises

A stir in the stagnant air
Raven takes flight and the flapping beat
Throb like lungs of a running horse
A deep and guttural pulse as legs pour forth in a frenzied rhythm
Across the wide wild open plains

A breath I can hear and feel and smell
Warm and sticky and so wonderfully sweet
And for but a moment
I am carried through those parting grasses
And my dormant wild ways are awakened
For but a moment
I am unbound
And take flight with that feral black bird

Deer Season

/ Gin Getz / Leave a comment

Leaves fallen
Feathers plucked
Skin left naked and raw
Open to the whim of the wind

She steps away
Stripped of her robe
Fallen at her pale feet
Exposed and vulnerable
And lies upon a new land
Cold and hard and uninviting
Not a whisper spoken to her
No secrets to show her yet
Nothing but a cold blank stare
Impenetrable
Unfeeling

She longs to feel
Against the freezing ground she presses her boney spine
Arches her neck and looks up at a sky she does not yet recognize
A stranger above her
Her eyes roll back
Hiding blue as a sky behind thin clouds
White reveals a void
Releasing a guttural moan
An unfathomable sigh
Giving in
Giving up

She remembers standing up
Taking a stand
Vaguely recalls what she stood for
A dream behind billows or a dancer behind a veil
And for a moment she blends into the brown and rotting leaves
Blowing about her like a dirty halo
The rich musky perfume overwhelms
Dulls her other sense
Her wildly racing thoughts
And she rests
Quiet as the sleeping doe
Awaiting the hunters footsteps

A little world

/ Gin Getz / Leave a comment

Snow falls. Fat wet flakes. Big and chunky, each the size of cornflakes on a ground as white as milk.

A secret between the mountain and me. There is no one else around. She sends me off with this intimate moment. A soundless farewell. Words, song, fanfare, lights and crowds would not suit me, do not suit her. We need not speak, only stand together, I at her soft and white and unrefined alter.

This silence of heavy snow. It is mine. As a ballerina on a muted stage with no one there to see. We dance together uninhibited. We sing of silence in darkness.

I stand on the porch, the overhanging roof protecting me; the warm glow from the kitchen door left wide open spills a perfect rectangle on the snow. The dog returns with big white spots across his head and back.

My little world. Unrealistic I have been told. But who defines real when I feel taste touch and smell what one might call serene, but see no deeper than the smooth surface? Snow, thick and heavy like a warm blanket tucking me in to a world I am about to leave. The satellite dish is covered. Communications are cut. I am isolated. Why are we told that is a terrible thing when I find myself so safe within these silent arms? I am content talking to the dog.

There is no sound, no smell, no movement of air, only the softly falling flakes in a quiet dance, a silent film in black and white, I stare out the window and wait now for the lightening of day to reveal more to me. And for a moment my mind is as tranquil and subdued as the world around me. My little world.

My side of the mountain

/ Gin Getz / 1 Comment

Lost and found
I lose myself in my big back yard
Consumed by her presence
I’ve become almost comfortable
Such stances dull the senses
Noted as I languidly lie back on her still warm hillside
And breathe for but a moment between bursts of vigor
Bouts of anger and so much still to do before I leave.

Soul food
She has fed me from her flesh of rock and soil
Nurtured me with her cutting wild wind
Filled my belly with raging storm and thundering tempest
When the earth and sky merge together as one
And quenched my seemingly insatiable thirst for wide and white and wild
Then let loose her uncontrolled wrath of waters in spring
When no one else would stand by her side
As if she were no more than a shallow sunny summer face.

She showed me her subtle still side
Her dark side
Deep side
I dove in
Where the sun dips behind her mid afternoon silhouette and her skin turns frigid in a flash
And the world is a blinding white and black and blue
Or the brown grey cold wet simple season of spring
That no one cares to see
Her seemingly ugly side
A raw face before the fanciful adornment of warmth and leaves and light.

Now she is stripped bare
As tourists turn their backs for a warmer ease
The elk for lower ground
Foliage for their resting place on the leeward side of bunch grass
Surrendered for the season in tired tangled and torn tan mounds
Or deep in the woods beneath the silent silver trees awaiting their blanket of snow
And the geese begin to congregate on the delta flats
Their final farewell sounded by loud squawking that carries up the side of the freezing mountain
Two miles or more as I stand on the front porch and hold my breath to listen.

Learning to live

/ Gin Getz / 2 Comments

It’s not what I was expecting
Is it ever?
Or are we best learning to live without expectation, allowing each day to unfold as it may, and remain in the present? Can we really survive as such without memories of the past and plans for the future?
I think not.

It’s all about balance.
We are products of our past, and crops for our futures. Is that really so bad? And can’t we accept that and still enjoy the present? What kind of a fool feels today is all that matters?
What matters? The air, the mountain, the river cutting through hard rock? Elements, harsh and mild, wild and calm. My husband, my son, my dog and cats, horses, birds in the back yard, the hawk hunting in the willows out on pasture. The feel of wind chapping my cheeks and rain tapping my hat and snow falling soft on my sweaty face as I tip my head upward and taste the simple sweet essence of changing seasons.
All of it.

That’s what I want.
Not just today. Certainly not just yesterday. And not only tomorrow. The whole enchilada. Life. Rich and full, hot and cold, pleasure and pain, birth and death and every day I am allowed to live in between the two.

Touch me
Soft and wet and warm
The fullness of life like
Water rushing over pale flesh
At times too deep to breath
I find myself in the middle of
A river I cannot stand in
Flowing too fast for a foothold

Tearing away

/ Gin Getz / 2 Comments


Do not shed tears. Hold them back. Contain them for now. And then I will let them burst unbound. Soon. Then they will be for joy. They will fall upon a new land, enrich and nourish parched soils, merge with a new river, and flow with a freedom I have not felt in years. An exultation. A release. A flood of emotions pouring forth with a saline surge held back for too long. As a child, uninhibited, lost in passion and release from a comfort she does not fully understand, only trusts that this is how it meant to be.

Is this what they call blind faith?

Perhaps I am learning to believe.

Last night the rain turned to silence and our world turned to white.

Such a familiar state. For nearly half my days living here have been in snow. I am more comfortable with the cold white world than I am with the few warm weeks that pass in the blur of summer.

I hear the old rooster crowing in strong defiance. He too is too familiar. He knows what winter brings. What he doesn’t know is this. He’ll be relieved of this burden soon and allowed to pass the last of his days two thousand feet lower in elevation in an aviary owned by a neighbor of a friend. Rooster retirement. I never said I was not a sucker.

End of color

/ Gin Getz / Leave a comment

And then it is over
The gaudy display
The song and dance
The brilliant appealing attractive spectacle

After weeks of the gradual climb to climax
Suddenly it comes to an end
Blown away
Stripped in one windy afternoon
The gradual crescendo
Followed by the Grande Finale
Now the audience claps and clears the theatre

Her inner core is left exposed
And therein lies her greatest beauty
Raw and unrefined
Real and without fanfare and comforts and attractions ready made
And for the first time in ten years I won’t remain
At the one time I belong

I long for wild
My wild winters
What has allowed me through the rest
Will I find this calling somewhere else
Or will I lose that part of me
Silenced in the din
Of traffic, talk and schedules
Based not on the rise and fall of sunlight
But on the numeric display on your modern phones

It won’t be long
It’s who I am
How I define myself
My wild side is dominant
Now dormant
Unable to awaken
But I do not let tears flow unless they may nourish and join the river and rain
Perhaps another river
And a rain storm building above another range

The wind is silent now
I do not hear the mountain
I do not hear myself
Instead I hear the wild call somewhere farther
Somewhere else
And I shiver to think of joining her there soon

A poem behind a rain streaked window

/ Gin Getz / 1 Comment

Rain on the window sill like anxious fingers drumming on the top of a table
The unsteady pulse of traffic below
Kicking up puddles that flash florescent in passing low beams above the slick ink black pavement covered by two days of rain
And above the colored flashing chaotic lights of town
The mountains calmly stand serene
An instant space of silence
Secrets hidden behind veils
Layers unfolding
As skirts on such a grand Victorian lady
Ashen coating softens the deeper you dive in
Irresistibly drawn
Back into the seemingly endless sea of jagged peaks
Back towards the richest of treasures
Sparkling a faint silvery gold
Diamonds in coal
There before me
Changing views as the heavy clouds
Languidly rolling about her hips
Unveil new secrets just long enough for me to question
To draw me in
Back there
And all that is or was the foreground suddenly disappears
My breath calms and gaze widens and I am there
Somewhere between the sea and sky
In the layers of grey fading like a childhood memory
A blurred vision I saw once in the back seat of the station wagon
As the motor hummed and my family loudly carried on
A faded photo with colors washed out over time to a pale patina of light and dark
There before me the view which lifts me over the lights and noise and now a siren I think I heard
Now so far below me
As I somehow progress deeper and higher into the infinite wilds
A place with expanding boundaries
Is anything anywhere left untouched
That I may be the pioneer I dream of

Simple words after a storm

/ Gin Getz / 2 Comments

Oh for peace of place

I seek around me

And all the while

Forgetting to look within

 

Calm and quiet after stormy skies

Have spent their fiery passion

Leaving moist grass in the dramatic evening sky

And let me be still to listen