Low-angled light, especially in the morning, different angles of light at different times of the year.

The low-angled light through the forest when it’s amber colored or even tawny if there’s wildfires.

How the impressionists were drawn to that area in the south of France for the quality of light. The mix of warm hues and soft colors, natural light.

How that light with the calming breezes and sounds creates its own painting for us to walk into.

Here, a waterfall of moss on an old tree stump with broken spires jutting up: lichen patches like tooth plaque, the color of mint-flavored toothpaste.

From a distance these shapes can look like a bear squatting if you’re coming around a bend.

Or the clumps of moss aping burls, perhaps a burl jumper in fact, nearly fluorescent it’s so green. Hues of lemon, lime too.

One stump with a broad, ribbed face and a patch of volunteers springing upwards gives it a comical look like a flush of hair.

Downed trees, leaning trees, dying or dead trees with that copper dead leaf pattern.

The raspberry or Himalayan blackberry vines sprawling out, arms that would devour everything.

Then on the path faced downwards the broad-leafed maple leaves perfectly displayed in golden brown: final thoughts before departing.

How you can just stand here taking it all in. The season’s first quiet rustlings as the breeze comes on, from whispers to small cracklings, the audience growing restless in their seats.

The low-angled light slowly climbs across a clearing, reaches the tops of the tallest trees, extends out those shades of green and yellow, bits of brown beneath.

A fly says, it’s time to go.

Down the Devil’s Backside trail it’s darker, turning from the sun and descending around the lip of a ravine, it’s gone quieter and the trees are darker here, more conifer, long branches leaning across the trail from up above create a cage-like effect or like walking beneath a big steel bridge, strange shadows below.

You can stand at the base of these tall trees and sense life pulsing beneath you, how they signal to one another through the mycelium, you can wonder what they talk about or if they even sense you.

Any angle is a painting, really. Or the sound of a far-off owl’s final cries. The forest freshly bathed in full moonlight, the owl did not make her catch. It is a long, solemn cry, a dry whistle, a stone’s throw from the top of a tall bridge.

We move through life at different rhythms and see things differently at different times of life, different seasons.

Here I have no fear, though there are sounds I do not know,

I have come to be a part of where I belong.

I am myself the most when I am lost in the woods:

“Still life, in low-angled light.”

Dedicated to Rosemerry, lifelong friend of the low-angled light.

Categories: Poetry, prose

Tags: pacific northwest, Poetry, prose, spirituality