SageGreenJournal.org
voices out of the West, mostly poetry, personal to planetary
Joanna Spindler
Telluride, Colorado
Joanna lives as caretaker on a 200-acre ranch outside of Telluride, Colorado,where she communeswith the mountains, a sizable garden, bees, livestock, and no small parliamentof great horned owls. She came to this part of the wild west following her fierce love of climbing ice and rock, and stayed to work at Telluride's Wilkinson Public Library, where she is currently Adult Programs Coordinator; she has also been a private librarian, freelance writer, emcee presenter, and adventure nanny.
Joanna found poetry as a very young soul and realized it taught her Freedom. She's been chasing it ever since.
The Practice
To hunt is to spend long romantic hours with the land,
settling slowly into her innermost innards.
To hunt, I think, is much like holding vigil:
sometimes, of course, doing the breathless hunting thing:
of actually watching prey.
The rest of the time, I must confess, I'm mostly sitting,
taking in the most personal details of the daily forest.
The impeccable indigo parabolae of a steller's jay in flight;
the jaunty leaps of friend coyote sniping voles from the tall grass;
and- just yesterday, from nearly half a mile away,
I sat and watched with blushing intimacy as
a herd of elk, twohundredhead or more
arose from slumber:
each golden neck unfurling gracefully
from where they had lain curled.
The sweetness almost did me in.
Above me, nightly, great Orion rises gently to recline
just so along the crests of our home mountains:
totally at rest—and yet with his bow tightly drawn. Last night
there was a great-horned owl,
perched monumental on one tall stump. In moments she
unfurled her mighty wings to swoop
an unsuspecting rabbit from the field,
silent as a dying breath.
I guess the upshot is, I'm not the only hunter out here.
To hunt. To be hunted:
this is all the gift.
To hunt is to be swallowed whole by land.
Some days, chewed up and spat,
and others, just gulped right down—
and—if I'm lucky—
what comes out again of me is more
absorbed in wildness
than before.