Vibrant Village ™

It is simple. If I'm not there, I miss whatever may happen. This reality became foreground for me with the 'red fox' experience that became this poem.

Red Fox

Morning sun illuminating
his long lustrous fur,
a solitary red fox runs,
as if levitating, through
beige and green grasses
that fill the still marsh.
I am thrilled by his beauty
his speed, and that he is not
dead on the side of the road.
In moments he disappears
in a dense cluster of trees.
Had I turned for more coffee
there would have been no fox.

The more time I spend in the natural world, the more I feel inspired to write. It may be the long horizon out over the sea or mountains that gives my mind and spirit space – room to float and expand. I seem to need this to get my creative juices moving. (Then it is so often the deadline that pushes to a final form). And, too, it is those tiny macro moments when the smallest detail fills me with wonder, sometimes then leading to bigger questions.

In the forest
a dying mushroom curls
in on itself, appearing
as a new bloom.
Who’s to say,
end or beginning.

And how I am reassured that my inside emotional world often mirrors my surrounding natural world. Even though I always see the same scene outside my house, sometimes the feel is sluggish and humid, sometimes crisp and clear with bright stars and then others, stormy, blowing and wild.

Dark fingers of storm
swirl in wind driven tango -
bright black shifting sky

I love the power and excitement the 'fingers of that bright black wind driven tango' massage into my brain. Again, it gets those words and images swirling around. Of course, I have to then participate and write, paint or photograph or the swirl is lost in the general ooze of experience. I guess this is where my love of words and images sustains the process. When the piece is ready, I want it to join a bigger dialogue, I want to share it with the hope and intention that it will strike a spark in someone else and continue the creative dialogue through them.

Brooks has simplified into using one name. She has spent most of her life on a coast and now she and her partner live in a wild North Carolina marsh. Nature feeds her and art of all kinds gives her expression. She has earned two graduate degrees and worked in education, therapy, art, theater and the marine world. Her poetry chapbook will be published in 2010.