Ben's Impressions

Ben is a geologist and experiential educator who recently completed a 30-year career in environmental consulting and now teaches high school environmental sciences. Orinda, CA.

Also in the video is Kate, a high school Special Education teacher committed to the cross sections of social justice, environmentalism, and spirituality. Oakland, CA

Expressions: Poetry*

Ben's Poetry Introduction: My EOA experience craved expression. Having never written poetry before, I found in excited disbelief that these words started bursting forth through dreams. I’m still not sure I could sit down and write a poem, and yet the words continue to appear...

Found

I went to the desert
To find myself,
But the desert found me first.

It was on her terms
That I sat alone,
And hungered for more
And less.

I asked for who
And why and how
And for the oneness of it all.

She gave me stars and tears
And empty space
And a bit of myself as well.

She offered me company:
Granite and barrel cactus,
Cholla and fattening moon.

And I left the Mojave
With more to learn
And less to know
Befriended, full, and found.

Here

(dedicated to Kerry)

Here
Come sit with me on the land
Where stardust meets the spark of life

Here
Where songbirds telegraph
Your very existence

And here
Where the morning glistens on webs
In diamonds of cosmologic water
Older than our sun

Come
Sit

Hear
The whispered voice of the earth
That beckons you to soften your gaze
And open your heart

GRANITE MOUNTAINS

Unyielding, unmoving,
Our mountains sit,
A jumbled pile of
Huge heads without noses.

Formed miles below
In the womb of the earth
Then pushed: up, up, up, and emergent.

In our time they change
Only with the passing shadows,
Sunup to sunup.

But in earth time
These mountains
Melt below the eternal caress
Of sun and moon,
Melt into the sensuous rounded forms
Of their mother.

Then gone.