Living in a temperate zone where green returns after gray slumber, I always find the leafy proliferation a wonder. It’s a festive temple, of sorts, and a comfort.

Restore your soul in its abundance.

~*~

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Rarely do you stand at the summit. It’s a lesson of life.

Even on the trail, the climax awaits, somewhere overhead.

We need something to look up to, from infancy on.

And then there are clouds – or the surrounding range.

Or the streams, threading together, below.

~*~

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The lessons remain:

• Travel light.
• Take no more than you need.
• Leave a campsite cleaner than you found it.

Not a bad model for a poem, either. Or a whole collection to pack along the way.

~*~

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The Olympic Peninsula is an extraordinary extreme in continental United States. It juts out in the far upper left-hand corner, surrounded on three sides by ocean and inlets and featuring a jagged mountain range in its center. Much of it is lush and tangled, and there is relatively little human habitation.

It could be a land of the gods, as its very name suggests. Or as the Native Americans, with their stories still intact, will relate. Forget Zeus and Hera, then – this is a panoply arising from American roots and its westward focus.

Come along into the rainforest and then camp just in from the beach. As I did, collecting these poems.

~*~

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