notes on crows and wind.

(late afternoon, November 2024)

Wind tears at me. Tattered rain whipping the hood of my sweatshirt. I can’t catch my breath in the grit teeth of it, the tiny explosions of rain against my cheeks, against my cold hands.

Rub them together to warm them, blowing cupped breath into them.

The sky edging dark gray into black at its edges. Behind the bare trees, falling off past the hills.

To make sense of things by walking.

Rain beaded on my glasses. Cold passing through them, convexed light.

Below the wind, this twisting stretch of Appalachian Trail boardwalk. Rain dotted in resistant half-globes on the sealed wood. Clinging to the dried grasses tunneling this path, that graying black light refracted in the bending reeds.

A pair of crows ripped out of this darkening sky, darker black, blurred still photos hung on the wind.

What’s real here: how true is this blackening sky. These tatters of crows.

Slats of the path twisting, a path of winding turns. That black light, the crows peeling this path up, slat by slat, steel framing rising psychedelically and bending in that wind into helices, messages in sequences of wind, of light, that sound tearing at me.

Crows tearing at the light. At the path. At the twisting, lifted steel.

There’s sense in the walking. Sense in numb fingers and the ripped wind and tattered sky.

Crows tearing at the sky: at this walking, stepped mind, bending thought into peeling, bending spirals. These rupturing splitting bonds loosing a teacher’s eyebrows, opening a road: this torn path.

The logic of this body. Ratcheting cold dark light. Moving through this open wind. This blasted walkway. This blackening sky. Passing through my translucent hands: fingers hollowed bone. How true is this cupped breath, these cold raw hands.

Crows sheathed in burnished black feathers.

Sense in the torn wind.

Your comments are always welcomed and encouraged. I’d love to hear from you.

One more thing.

As a zen priest I’m a student of Tenshin Fletcher Roshi at Yokoji Zen Mountain Center. For more info on Yokoji, please visit www.zmc.org.

I’m also the caretaker of Warwick Zendo, a small in-person and online sangha based in the lower Hudson Valley of New York. if you’d like to check out our practice community, we’re at www.warwickzen.org.

How this works.

I plan to post at least once a week, at minimum. The Freeside offers those weekly posts, which will always be accessible. Payside will (eventually) offer access to some longer writing and ongoing investigations into practices both literary and zen.

Payside also helps to sustain this project, and this practice. Like any creative project, keep sweeping is a kind of labor, and as such, your support to sustain that labor is much appreciated.

If Payside is not for you, that’s all good. The posts will keep coming on Freeside. The support of your reading and attention is a deeply appreciated gift, and I thank you for being here.

You won’t have to worry about missing anything. Every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox.