a way to dialogue

i wanted to tell you, my friends,
what it felt like to step out
moments before dawn onto a
well-trodden path (moonlit
minus the stars) and fall in love

but i knew that if i started there,
you would not have believed me when i told you
that the thing
i fell in love with
was history

how come, how come
I anticipate nothing as intimate as history

perhaps if i explained this:
those walks
had become a daily ritual, a rite
performed faithfully in the slow
awakening of each morning.
and this:
at first i did not know the way.
the path was unfamiliar
(though not entirely unknown)
and i was weak and young.
but i stayed with that soil –
i had been told that it was
the only way.

Stay with this mud,
this granite. Every other step you take
will be a revelation.

can you imagine what it felt like
when the ground itself
began to teach me?
when the earth, as guide and course,
would show me how to tread it
if i studied it
if i took care enough?

indeed it was the strange pedagogy
of that prairie path
which taught me (a longer lesson) the meaning of
give and take.
it took the testimony of my steps
whether or not i was willing to give it
and eventually taught me to trace
in the grooves of its earthy floor,
the stories of others who had walked there,
who had also loved its worn-out soil.
everyday those stories caressed my fresh soles,
shaped them, taught them, hardened them,
until they began to respond, in kind,
with tales of their own. i learned
to tread carefully – always listening –
but also writing as i walked,
inscribing my story into the dusty path
until finally, one day, my own soles (aged by then)
could no longer recognize which marks were mine
and my story no longer belonged to me.
then, like every good teacher,
the earth (and i – which are one)
spoke less and less

Birds, singing, move
among leaves, in leaf shadow.
After many years you have come

to no thought of these,
but they are themselves
your thoughts. There seems to be

little to say, less and less.
Here they are. Here you are.
Here as though gone.

perhaps now, my friends, you would believe me
if i told you that i did fall in love with history
but you must also know that it is not unbelief
which keeps me quiet

(excerpts are Dionne Brand, Luci Shaw, and Wendell Berry)