I have been living in Arkansas for around 6 months now.
Here are some of my preliminary notes.
We crawl through time shown image after image of incomparable beauty, small interlocking universes of dancing colors. Unfortunately, our wonder can fade from habituation, time accreting in lugubrious sheets.
This is a spell against the squanderment of beauty—a spell to remind me to remember to count each leaf—to appreciate love’s hazel eyes anew each day.
| Mom came in and asked me if I wanted to see a turtle. After a spring rain, I notice juniper-apple rust for the first time. Orange jelly on evergreens. Red dirt foretells destruction and construction. Watched a deer waste away in the yard. Now it’s in a trashcan with some dirt. The flooded field is dotted with crawdad castles. I am noticing snake strawberry for the first time. Ephemerals spreading across the land in waves, a beautiful locomotion of establishing and extinguishing. A brown colt laying down in the grass sunbathing. Cows in a pond! Around the pond are trails worn orthogonally in the grass: Cows approach indirectly. At the dock, a mama map turtle nips at algae, turtlets in tow. A red barn disgorging vines. Another barn leaning, reeling from the passage of time. A stop sign crowned with honeysuckle. After touching a hairy lacquer vine, I regretted it. I shed urushiol oil for days. I planted painted hill corn with heavenly blue morning glory. The neglected cow field is empurpled with thistles; the canker of a chicken coop is pierced heartily by a tree. Noonday Juneday wind. Hot walls of air. A sign of a hotter season, of gyres gone awry. Blackberries along the lake trail, facing a field. Cleaning my teeth, taking remaining seeds sideways in between front teeth and splitting them open. Walking at night, we heard a deer snort. A heifer calf with comically long ears. A mosquito's buzz: extending my delicious arm and waiting for someone to land there. Back to dreaming of an old chokecherry tree, small fruits thin fleshed and mostly stone.  have a nice day!! - casey |
〝Look at this land; look about you. This is your kingdom, the kingdom of life. This is your immortality. Look at the hills, the mortal hills. They do not endure forever. The hills with the living grass on them, and the streams of water running.... In all the world, in all the worlds, in all the immensity of time, there is no other like each of those streams, rising cold out of the earth where no eye sees it, running through the sunlight and the darkness to the sea. Deep are the springs of being, deeper than life, than death....〞
- Ged in The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. LeGuin
postnote: i have started archiving these letters at sowe.li/binomial/ 
