My friend has asked me, what am I currently working on?
I'm working on working in the current.
The middle fork of the Willamette River rises from chuckle springs and indigo springs.
In these mossy places, water comes right out from the massive root system of the dug fir trees.
Some places it rushes out fast and burbling, and it certainly does make a chuckling sound.
Not 12 inches away, another spring emerges silently from the protective hillside,
falling into a green pool that ripples and turns before wandering off,
as all these dozens of little emergencies do, to join the loud, fast creek plunging down the forest hill
to become, eventually, the big Willamette River that slides under the bridges
and around its great curves near my home many miles downstream.
I have often stood or knelt in the presence of wild springs as they emerge from the forest floor,
and I know the yellow monkey flower, the fairy-slipper orchid, and the smallest violet.
Even now, I can hear the echoing bird calls, the sound of rushing water,
and the feeling I always have in such places of being in the presence of the primeval, the profoundly wild.
I feel the biological complexity of the place, and, too, the knowledge lodged in my DNA
that in such a place is everything I need to survive and thrive.
There is such a spring place at the core of my nature, springs that rush and chuckle,
springs that deepen into green and reflect bits of the indigo sky.
All I need as a poet, as a writer, as a teacher, or as a digital storyteller, emerges from this place.
A leaf falls and turns in the water, and that image will be my next poem, project, or digital story.
The ideas constantly emerge from the old growth duff of my lived experience, more go by than I can catch.
In part, the springs are deep memory, but the springs are also native waters,
some hidden, emerging source charged with the vitality of mystery.
Memories, dreams, reflections, shimmer and turn, rise and fall in those changeable waters.
That is what is called source imagery.
Each one can become something else inside my camera, inside my story, inside the gathering river of my dreamed life.
I catch as catch can, and that is always what I am currently working on.
The current is everything.
