Center of Experience
When you think, on those walks in the mountains that the world is falling into your heart like a snowflake into water, maybe it’s the crystalline edges of you drifting down into the heart of the world. You look around – nothing but blizzard. Everything’s falling the trees, the rocks, the river the juncos scattering from bush. A storm of selves, you among them falling and falling flakes into indiscernible water a heart you can't claim to the small cavity of your chest. Walker Abel's delicate poems are like carefully held embers carried across time and space. Each one suffused with a haunting sense of distance and yearning, yet twined with Abel's rapt attention for silent heartbeats that only owls hear and bent grasses left by passing deer. These are poems that illuminate and fill the wild, living places out of which they were born.
David Lukas, author of Language Making Nature and Sierra Nevada Birds Walker Abel’s luminous writings take us into the landscape like few others can. With his words, we are suddenly traversing the blurred boundaries between the buzzing creatures we live amongst, and the buzzing attention of human consciousness. These poems are, in essence, about being in landscape as a fully present human. I am often reminded when reading his poems, of the experience of being out in the backcountry — when awareness stills and the mind can be a reflective mirror, as the lakes and waters he describes. I am grateful for his work and for the light it offers, for his commitment to attention, and for paying homage to the sacred quality of the life of which we are all blessed to be witness and a part of. Renee Lertzman, PhD, author of Environmental Melancholia In these poems of desert walking, sea winds, and the drifting of smoke, Walker Abel reveals the stillness at the heart of this movement: the unseen, the unborn, the “one fire that does not move.” Reading his poems is an act of meditation. They invite us to venture out with him, to ponder “the shape and the shapeless” in the concrete details and unfoldings of the natural world. The wilderness has led Abel to moments of deep appreciation, awareness, and insight, and using the skillful means of poetry, he evokes such moments in us. Chris Ives, PhD, author of Zen Awakening and Society and Imperial-Way Zen. |