All that was left
was the only freedom we could speak without shame,
the weather, winter, the harmony of all things.~Romeo Oreogun, from ‘Flyway’
photo: a champion bald cypress, about 1,100 years of age at the time of this photograph captured from a kayak, a silver-tone overall, but a somewhat reckless use of what was very bright and warm light for a winter day from 2005, which has added to its appeal over the years, black & white seeming to always work perfectly for clearly stating the case anyway, an all-time personal favorite from out in the Cache basin swamplands of southernmost Illinois: this one transports instantly, seated with an arm resting at the base – there’s a notch on the left side there, perfect fit for a canoe – a sun on the warming slick trunk and my own face, trying my best to calculate time using only millennia of centuries of seasons as the metric, noticing much later how everything that seemed so critically important before going out there was completely and even more so forgotten, if only for a while.