Well, at long last I am sitting down to write a blurb on our time in Seattle at the Northwest Folklife Festival on Memorial Day Weekend, 2011. 13 storytellers from Leavenworth descended upon the Seattle Center and wowed an audience with the wisdom of Aesop’s Fables. Despite the roar of airplanes over head, the din of nearby steel drums, and a constant throng strolling by, the kids concentrated with the greatest ease, practicing their art, otherwise known as ‘theater of the face.’ And we certainly ended up with a face, a Luke face of a tailor in love with his new coat.  Thank you to all the parents for supporting this crazy venture. We may just do this again!

Dylan Thomas writes that poetry is , “… the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an over-clothed blindness to a naked vision.”  Good poetry tells a story, leading us out of the the many weeds of distraction into meadows of space in which we can finally see. It crystallizes the unspoken, the undefinable, the mystery, so that we can stand in awe of aliveness. We can deeply appreciate just being here, now as we walk through eternity. Writing this clearly is rare. Writing into these thin places is elusive. But, we must try.

John Muir writes, “I kept my lofty perch for hours, frequently closing my eyes to enjoy the music by itself, or to feast quietly on the delicious fragrance that was streaming past.” As he rode out a storm high up in a fir tree, he waxed poetic about the wind that roared around him. Wind, the unseen bringer of scent, the invisible energy that powers swaying tree branches. “Smooth, deep currents, cascades, falls, and swirling eddies, sing around every tree and leaf ….”

So, too, Wind as Spirit swirls around every person and soul. Ruach. The breath of God blows through, in, and around us all the time. We sway with the Spirit’s movement. Like Muir, we are up in that tree during storms experiencing the fullness, the magic of the Wind. When we then climb down, we are changed.  “We travel the milky way together, trees and men; but it never occurred to me until this storm-day, while swinging in the wind, that trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense. … our own little journeys, away and back again, are only little more than tree-wavings.”

Wave on and love those trees!