This dawn the equinox moon is waning a black belly with a left-handed crescent and waxing with frog bubbles puff-up sparrows ferny fiddleheads popping bloodroot in vernal burgeoning. Certain poets (the Beats in particular) prescribe some shack simple those rough-hewn days of dharmas and canned beans in a far-out hovel to revive the talent for being on earth and a wider sky to wander the skills to deeply breathe and be. But a shack is not required only the space a body takes not silence but stillness enough to let a spider finish a thought not in the woods necessarily but somewhere finding ferity maybe not barefoot but ever stepping softly not poetry per se but the creaturely exuberance of waking up.

Jack Phillips is a naturalist, poet, and nature-writer wandering the woods and prairies of the Missouri and Kickatuus watersheds. The progeny of Syrian immigrants, Jack (Abuyusef Samaan) Phillips has sauntered from the Levant to the Tongass and now teaches creative sauntering and poetic generativity closer to home.