Category Archives: Reflections and Poems

Waterfalls

Carmen and I hurriedly zip our jackets and hunker down in the cold while I struggle to attach my camera to the tripod and put on the right filter. Horsetail Falls in the Columbia Gorge must be perpetually in winter shade for Carmen notices how some of the mist coming off the falls turns to […]

January 1, 2017 – 6:00 pm | By Dan Oestreich | Posted in Listening, Power, Reflections and Poems, Transformation | Comments (8)

Waking Up the World

It is a strange time, he said to me. No one can question that. Daily life goes on, but against a fractured background. Trust is naive, wouldn’t you say? And our imagined, much lauded future for a long time’s been little more than a broken puzzle. Problems have mounted, wouldn’t you say? A pile of […]

August 11, 2016 – 6:50 pm | By Dan Oestreich | Posted in Changing the World, Listening, Reflections and Poems, Wounds | Comments (1)

Pelvis with the Distance

An ekphrastic poem is a poem about another piece of art, often visual art — in this case a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe called “Pelvis with the Distance.” I saw the painting last weekend at the Tacoma Art Museum here in Washington State, part of a collection called, “Eloquent Objects” about O’Keeffe’s still life paintings […]

April 7, 2015 – 1:03 pm | By Dan Oestreich | Posted in Consciousness, Reflections and Poems | Comments (4)

How We Learned Our Language

We gathered around the stony hill and watched it as the seasons turned, and years went by with heat and cold, rain-lashed, sleet-lashed, snow; and then, wan light returning we considered it all and some began to call it patience. There were places we gathered, there and there upon that hill, near the flowing pines […]

October 17, 2014 – 3:24 pm | By Dan Oestreich | Posted in Reflections and Poems | Comments (3)