Water, Rocks and Trees Quotes

“Bury me where I fall, or throw me in the wind. The rains will find me either way and carry me home.”
― James Scott Smith, Water, Rocks and Trees

“Crimson   Autumn is of letting go, returning to the ground in slow surrender. We rise, then fall, once green, now crimson, pouring out to earth like the blood of the covenant. We wonder most in autumn if there is something beyond everything. Hold on as long as strength allows to flare into the charis-wheel of burning mortal glory, ‘til the sweetness is as it should be, seeped into the rhizome rooted dark and deep. This, the season we learn our names, leaves in the wind, loose and long lost into everything.”
― James Scott Smith, Water, Rocks and Trees

“Echo II   I wait for moon to die below black and jagged pines as I lay my aging body down on terra firma, my faith, my dream, the grand mystery, in and above all that is. I have no fear of night, for it is day without light, when all that is green suckles in dew and loon turns beak beneath wing as wolf is curled in silence.”
― James Scott Smith, Water, Rocks and Trees

“say good night to the moon as it steals the sun’s light to give away to the owl and raccoon.”
― James Scott Smith, Water, Rocks and Trees

“Inheritance   My hands are worn and holding an aching memory of yesterday’s efforts to plant a tree that will live five hundred years. I was thinking it would be eleven or twelve generations from now, a child rooted of my line might look to see some splendid legacy still yearning into earth, still reaching for the sky, having once been pulled from a bucket and placed in the ground by hands aching to turn the world around.”
― James Scott Smith, Water, Rocks and Trees

“Wild Rose   In a forgotten garden after all its occupants had long since receded into the ground, wild rose, native beauty of flower and thorn, stood rooted, still reaching through blight and neglect on a landscape of absence and exile. I have witnessed this fixity of green life ‘long game trails unsullied by hoe or human resolve, adorning the floor of the forest as finery, so simple, so forthright, so attuned to the unity. So, I took up this rose to the house there transplanted as if house were tree and sidewalk, the trail. Pruning only the matter that died in years of despair before I arrived, wild rose now thrived, buxom splendor, alive, your pedagogy truth and goodness your virtue, a revelation and substance of creaturely being. I root and I reach for becoming a man belonging as native to this my new land among those in presence as I am of flowers and of thorns.”
― James Scott Smith, Water, Rocks and Trees

“Sky Burial   Standing ‘mongst the dogs all squint of eye and crane of neck until I named the circling turkey buzzard speck of cumulus nimbus. Such scavengers bring me pause. Earth was lying easy on her back and breathing into blue, a thermal sigh, lifting bird and wonder to where this one might fly. The expanse so vast along the glaciered seam of plains and mountains, distance and the silence held still a dusky moment for the bird to preen in copper light on rocky moraine, preparing for its earnest work. In Tibet, whether monk or peasant, in breaching death, the empty vessel is washed in water, in prayer, carried by solemn procession into thinning air, laid prone, left alone, sacred fare, shared by vultures as spirit migrates to a new birth, born again somewhere. If we are attending to the way, we pass through many deaths. Birds can be a sign of such transitions. Yes, the buzzard had me thinking I was once a starling lost in false murmurations. Today, my name is lone hawk on bare limb.”
― James Scott Smith, Water, Rocks and Trees

“Stones   I dream of gathering stones when I am empty of the virtues, when I cannot bear a voice that speaks in words. Silence is the boundless realm of unknowing, rendering me to all that is, to everything other, within the steady solitude of a wild faith, a great sea, not of what the eye sees, not of what the mind thinks, but the frightening depths of presence. My only praise: to gather stones along the shore and throw them back into the unity.”
― James Scott Smith, Water, Rocks and Trees

“Echo I   I am a man of melancholy and mirth. I believe, this symbiosis of uncultivated contraries, and for reasons outside of reason, is native to the ancient echoes of wolves and loons lamenting to a dusky moon somewhere in the northern sphere of water, rocks and trees. It is a grief and it is a bliss.”
― James Scott Smith, Water, Rocks and Trees

“The Shore   I read the skies and am rendered silent. This would be a day for walking long on shores of vast expanse. I have been the sort of man I fear would rise again in moments of resolve. When I see him on the street or in the pew or in the mirror, his translucence quivers close to the frequency of fleshliness until I blink him down into the backwash, into the riptide of graces, for he was full of judgment. So I must walk. The tall grass of the dunes is tossing like the ocean’s anemone. Waves are faithful of the sands shaped unseen under the great breathing of the tides. Wind upon grasses. Waves upon sand. Some steady drawing of my surfaces out into the depths and gone, out into the piercing light. Return for more, o mighty patience, o mighty love of the wild and unspeakable, til I am wind and wave.”
― James Scott Smith, Water, Rocks and Trees

“The wildflowers are striving into October as sunlight still conspires with the soil, with the hidden in dark places. Those domesticated and once potted, are drying on top of the compost pile. I was out walking in the immediate and peculiar. I sensed within me a labyrinth unraveling, loosened out into a vast realm of the new earth. I said to the dogs, there will be a great accounting for the parts of ourselves we have planted in pots. When I worry should I go back to stake some claim in the depleted soil of convention, instead, the next step forward turns real and I must take it. When I doubt a warm love for a free faith something immediate and peculiar appears to bring me warmth in the hidden and dark places.”
― James Scott Smith, Water, Rocks and Trees

“Death is birth awaiting. Wildflowers have taught me such things.”
― James Scott Smith, Water, Rocks and Trees

“Antipathy   This day will not yield its sublimity. My heart turned hard to see the heron with a torn wing standing stalwart, offering herself to our world’s great hunger. I see why, last night, I dreamt of coyote. For dreams are the naked utterance of the soul. While prayers are spoken rote and regulated by the ruling council of convention, dreams will come shred the veil in lathery jaws of instinct and desire. I do not know if I am bird, if I am canid, or if this disdain I feel for life not having loved me as I once imagined is the cause of this ruin. All I know is that I am not leaving in search of some completion, some pacification of my yearning. There is Love. I am standing in the shallows waiting for her to tear me open in the night.”
― James Scott Smith, Water, Rocks and Trees

“Winter Bird   When I become the winter bird, shivered in the cold and grey solitudes of melancholy, I turn to a stark deliberation: First, I walk, out into the unbound spaces and with each step remembering the quiet genesis of my faith. Second, I work, setting my hands to the real of the commonplace in unadorned moments of steady toil. Third, I stand, in gratitude for the share of this life I am given to; to tend, to mend, and to want for nothing less than revelation. Finally, I listen, and as you will hear, the winter bird is no stranger to the drawn acoustics of emptiness. So fallow, at a time for no words to be spoken but “hush man!… walk, work, stand, listen”. And in that dark silence, for the one with ears to hear, there will come in the unforeseen hour, a song fit for the downturned and the embittered no part of which the sun would dare disparage. “Blessed are the poor in spirit… blessed is the winter bird!” And through each, the winter birds of this strange and beautiful creation, there is a gospel being proclaimed; some sole and holy refraction of the great light of the world.”
― James Scott Smith, Water, Rocks and Trees

“Why Wolf Became Dog   I know how wolf became dog, why is the critical question. So awful an offering, some forerunning, I would say, today, fifteen thousand years from whence she wandered along tundra’s expanse, wolf heard a cry, a mourning song, a terrible, swelling sehnsucht from beneath a new mindfulness dwelling upright in the world. Being was being observed by its own, and there was shame in it, it seems. Wolf, from ridgeline, raised her ears at village clamor, desperate chanting, her empathy stalked shadows dancing as vapors of yearning rose into empty nights where all mythologies are spawned. Wolf lowered her head and approached the conscious savage estranged from its origins. She did what had to be done. Wolf, from primal domain, a higher terrain emptied herself, taking on mortal burdens morphed for more than survival’s sake, and nuzzled into homes, hearths, hearts living and dying in service to the great turning. Dog leading the lost, in her unequalled ways, to the new earth.”
― James Scott Smith, Water, Rocks and Trees

“Swallows   The peppered sky chimes in the key of swallows. Arcing northward from Central America, dual citizens of the torn world, though native to the unity, wonderful yet I find myself dispossessed of wonder. Like the birds, we all sleep under bridges of one kind or another. When the core competency of a culture is strategic judgmentalism many things go rancid into the mean and meaningless. The routines set in, the procedures, the long, slow death-drone of sameness. The occasional lone hawk feathers up a bit of mild novelty here and there, then gets wing-clipped by celebritism, homeless in a cage. If my faith was real, I would abandon my luxurious pursuit of a mythopoetic identity and go fetch water for the dying. We are each and all the dispossessed if one child stands at our gates unwelcome.”
― James Scott Smith, Water, Rocks and Trees