I read Jim Harrison’s River Sequence I – VII aloud, and while I read River III the fully-fledged idea of quitting my job now and living cheaply here in Montana to focus on my work, kept me from hearing the words. I read it again. The need behind his words, the desire to be devoted to ones work, had by-passed all logical thinking and appeared as a plan to make it happen. I don’t want “the corpse of the spirit to gradually become water and wait for another.” I want to both see the clouds and trees and fish and hills, and to learn the light yet firm hold that allows nothing to get away. Seeing teaches me to hold my heart in the same way, or is it the other way around, or are seeing and holding lightly the same thing? Jim Harrison’s poem was not a sign. It was not a message from the universe. Nor was my plan a good one. But I can taste a need to be in a place conducive to not letting another one get away.
