Kent Fackenthall

The sunrise was crimson & wide. Deep grey clouds. Warnings for folks to keep inside. A windless cold. Swinging arms for warmth. 

I don’t need much else these days. Inside & outside in synchronicity. 

A heavy snow that turned quickly to hours of rain & then froze with a snap. The creeks in our forest are mostly iced over. I call Sadie back from its edges but she likes to tempt every fate. I sit with back against this tree on most of our walks, drink luke warm coffee, maybe eat half an apple, have some cold, cold water to wash it all down. 

Sweat drips down my temples even though it’s minus ten or even less. One snowshoe after another breaking the crust, slides back on the sugar powder underneath. I knock my head on a tree bent right over the trail – defense in action, lack of attention to boot.  

Back home there is coffee &, remarkably, over fresh raspberry strufflewafen from our neighbour. Sadie finds my daughter in bed where it’s warm. I do my very best to keep my eyes open, but my feet are up, quads still protesting & the heater is on. 

Teaching is mostly about space: openings & creating. It’s best to extract all kinds of words that make it feel like an office. Working, managing, tasks, deadlines, evaluation – poison darts of sterility & control. Artistic vocabularies settle in: creation, imagination, exploration; patina, base coat, framing 

Classroom as studio, a lab, sometimes a garden or a library. Never an office, never a factory. Never a court or a prison. Sometimes just the street, an alley, a grotto, fen.

Back to walking in the dark. A direction that hardly seems to understand itself. Projects in my mind make it harder to discern where I’m going. Still. 

It is quiet & familiar. Stars help encompass. My breath is frosted but moving warms me quickly.  

Time moves slow; we are born geomancers. The sit following breaths and letting thoughts be & go is a sometimes even painful reminder that we are rushing, we are not being rushed. I actually have no where to go & nothing that needs to be done. 

Think carefully on this when it’s quiet – boredom & stiffness is life at its finest. So, when lsist are making demands remember that. This life is mine & can’t be bought. I am freedom incarnate, tracks without blood in the snow. Life is slow. 

Tracks in morning snow, barely a shake of sugar on a freshly baked pastry, tell stories, but they’re short. A rabbit crossed here, a fox walked straight down the path. My dog Sadie stops & sticks her nose deep into a hole under a tree stump. A clump of fur with no blood has us both mystified: the closer we get to it, or turn things over on the ground & in the mind, the further this event seems to recede.  

Winter hasn’t really come – snow melts & rain freezes. I’ve been wearing grips on my shoes for a month. Some mornings a thick fog rises & seagulls still fly in flocks. There’s a heron in this forest that we’ve seentwice now silently gliding overhead – if these are signs, I can’t read them, but that’s alright. It would probably only terrify me; instead I’ll just try to silently get the point. 

I’m a black & white photo – coffee precariously balanced on ice, feet stretched out in front, back against a tree. The forest hums & chants its own poetry; the stream, thawed, is a torrent, all percussion.

As with the sophisticated tendrils of fungi, so too the growth of branches & roots, sinews of nerves & axons & dendrites & veins flowing with blood, so too patterns of brooks & streams to rivers & mountains cascading over & into one another through valleys & so too the pathways of our lives. 

All philosophies know this to be true: language is our house & home. All desires & plans to stave off extinction know this to be true: our language must reflect that we are one with nature, a part of it & not apart from it. That language must also be allowed its wild. 

So, what practices will hone & delight in this? Walking, sitting, being with. A cultivation of slow life & presence. This is the only valid gnosis now.