I walked outside at two in the afternoon today and the sky felt heavy with the low clouds and cold, cold. I was not made for winter. Last Friday, after a long drive, I pulled the down yellow sleeping bag out to the couch and set the fireplace. The cat crept in. I slept for hours and woke up only to read a bit, Katz and his fermentation stunts (The New Yorker). I now have four cabbages and a pound of sea salt. But that's another weekend story. What I have now is this fast rustling storm that sets a man inside, one you want to look out of windows to see, glad you are not out in it. But really, we are all out in it. Deep as we ever thought.

Sometimes I look back through the pictures for something to hold on to. And I don't mean people or faces, not that they don't count -- they do, dearly. But it is the places, filled with bending trees, or the way an old car looks sitting out in a field, straw grass window high. It is the thin cut of an upland trail and the crack of a hand painted wall out of a breakfast city window. It is the sounds of a hundred horns, voices that blare at volumes distinct for their age. No decade plays the same notes. So when you reach back to hold on, everything moves.

There is danger in these tectonics. Our North is ever-shifting. And if the poles don't melt, our center brews in anaerobic turbulence. The core is molten and I know that from color school books. But I can not touch this, and it does not yet burn, so tonight I look through glass at winter limbs. There is truth in change, honesty in the vast cloud above us, tumbling past so it doesn't end as rain on some unplowed field in South Carolina. This is when is reach, and there is nothing to hold on to.

Gary Snyder knows something about this, I think. Every week or two I see what he might say:

--

Not Leaving the House

by Gary Snyder

When Kai is born
I quit going out

Hang around the kitchen – make cornbread
Let nobody in.
Mail is flat.
Masa lies on her side, Kai sighs,
Non washes and sweeps
We sit and watch
Masa nurse, and drink green tea.

Navajo turquoise beads over the bed
A peacock tail feather at the head
A badger pelt from Nagano-ken
For a mattress; under the sheet;
A pot of yogurt setting
Under the blankets, at his feet.

Masa, Kai,
And Non, our friend
In the garden light reflected in
Not leaving the house.
From dawn till late at night
making a new world of ourselves
around this life.