Memories That Have Not Yet Been

Today’s prompt is to write a Praise poem. I have been thinking about the way the Future sometimes seems to be coming back toward the present to embrace us, so:

I Praise the Future
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

for she rushes back toward me from the bend in the road,
for she holds out her hands, calling, “Come! I have something
especially for you!” and holds me with her twinkling eyes,
for she embraces me and calls my name, and then
she whirls and races back to the turning,
leaving laughter in her wake–it rustles with the fallen leaves
as her feet stir them like memories that have not yet been.

Today’s Quotations all seem to be about the inside and the outside:
Adrienne Rich: “When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility of more truth around her.”
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“Walked for half an hour in the garden. A fine rain was falling, and the landscape was that of autumn. The sky was hung with various shades of gray, and mists hovered about the distant mountains – a melancholy nature. The leaves were falling on all sides like the last illusions of youth under the tears of irremediable grief. A brood of chattering birds were chasing each other through the shrubberies, and playing games among the branches, like a knot of hiding schoolboys. Every landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each detail.”
—Henri Frederic Amiel; 1821 – 1881
*
“Part of the tragedy of our present culture is that all our attention is on the outer, the physical world. And yes, outer nature needs our attention; we need to act before it is too late, before we ravage and pollute the whole ecosystem. We need to save the seeds of life’s diversity. But there is an inner mystery to a human being, and this too needs to be rescued from our present wasteland; we need to keep alive the stories that nourish our souls. If we lose these seeds we will have lost a connection to life’s deeper meaning—then we will be left with an inner desolation as real as the outer.” —Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Gratitude List:
1. That very red oak tree down Ducktown, across from Flinchbaugh’s
2. The way the sycamores along Kreutz Creek raise their white arms upward
3. The Dawn Redwoods and larches, which are turning a sepia brown and getting ready to release their needle-leaves
4. The maples along the highway, which turn orange to red on one side, while staying greenish on the other
5. All the blues of the clouds today

May we walk in Beauty!