Putting My Eyes on Mountains

by Dusty Bryndal

I am standing on the painted green
wooden plank back porch, just out of the tub,
naked in front of the bright, rising moon,
the mountains on terrific display before me,
the dank smell from the woods
almost intoxicating me.
It’s my spring break from teaching.
What are you doing for break? teachers asked.
I am going to a writing camp in the Catskills.
When I told people this,
I really had no idea what it meant,
nor how much I needed to be
in those mountains.
We loaded up our borrowed car
with snacks, books, and warm clothes,
and headed north, out of the city.
Driving on the road upstate was like a game,
how many farm stands do you see,
egg shacks, or piles of wood for sale?
You get points if you are the first to see something.
All around us, mountains.
Mountains!
We stopped to stretch our legs,
the breeze from the mountains
filled my lungs, gave me energy.
When we arrived at our rented house
that rested at the top of a hill,
I was blown away by the view.
Everytime I looked out the window,
I chanted the word, Mountains, incessantly.

Mountains, mountains, mountains.
My eyes and my brain craved
these hills, the pine trees,
and the birds chirping their sweet songs.
Out on the porch,
I would scan the trees
looking for who was singing their magic.
Where are you? I’d ask, until finally,
my eyes rested upon the nuthatch,
the downy woodpecker,
or the red winged blackbird,
hidden in the branches.
On the first day of camp,
everyone seated in a semicircle
in the cold barn turned event space
that smelled of woodsmoke,
with its concrete floors and rescued church pew benches,
a giant, wool, area rug filling most of the floor space,
there was lots of talk about a writer life,
creating a writer life, always
harken back to a writer’s life.
I’ll admit I felt a little out of my element at first,
all of these amazing writers surrounding me.
Some I’ve met, some I only knew their names
or their face from a tiny zoom square.
I was able to let those thoughts go,
for, am I not a writer, I asked myself.
On the second day of camp,
there was an exercise where we had to choose a photograph
that spoke to us, to use in a comic drawing workshop.
The writer sitting next to me, Mandy,
told me she almost chose the picture that I had,
a blue Craftsman’s house with a wide front porch.

When I glanced at hers, a picture of a sunny,
stone paved walkway in a small Italian town,
I was moved to see that she chose
the one I almost picked.
That means something, I grinned.
Everything means something, she replied,
and we widened our eyes
and raised our eyebrows at each other.
I began collecting quotes:

You can be expansive. —Ariel Gore

Sewing was my first way of storytelling. —China Martins

Y’all are my write or dies.—Christa Orth

We can do what we want.—Mandy Trichell

You are not here, my tee-shirt says, and that’s exactly the way I like it.—Cecile Somers-Lee

The tilt of my fans.—Nora Romelia

I’m still exorcising demons.—Ariel Gore

Feel the rhythm of your soul.—Avis Barlow

Home is where the mending happens.—Alyssa Graybeal

Our dead come with us.—Ariel Gore

Lean into it, you don’t have to do it any way but what makes you happy.—Ayun Halliday

Immediately it was the same as it always was.—Me

I scribbled notes on the sides of my journal:
Red winged black birds,
one of my animals,
calling to each other at the pond.
Woodpeckers pecking away
at the electricity pole.
Very Walden-esque with the pond
and the chickens
and all the spots to write.
Ariel said I could,
an idea for a tee-shirt.
I scribbled what someone said,
can’t remember who:
Ask yourself,
who has the authority over your book?
Your life?
Your world?
I spent time with the moon.
I didn’t know how important the moon
would be for me during this trip.
One night, there was a pink moon rising
taking place in the sign of Scorpio,
(my son’s sign).
We watched,

waiting and waiting for the moon to rise,
and she did, just as the sun slips into the ether,
the moon slipped above the mountains,
conveying to us, I was here all along.
She told me,
Open up, you don’t have to be quiet here,
you can be you.
It’s ok, everything is ok.
Christa taught me to put my pen
on the window sill, to rest in the moonlight.
You manifested this, my therapist said.
No I didn’t! (always ready to argue with her)
But wait, maybe I did, I think,
curious as to why I’m fighting it.
We all manifested this.
Look around, I want to say,
to this group of people,
as we sit in a semicircle,
writing out our hearts,
we could all be supporting
each other for a long time.
As the week came to a close,
I asked myself, as I think we all did,
How will I carry the community with me
as I head back to real life.
This community where we welcome
the young ones and the brand new one,
who, excited over meeting us,
repeated over and over,
I have been searching for this.
This lead me to thoughts about how
these are my people, these writers.

We are each other’s people.
Look around, I want to say,
we could all be supporting
each other

Dusty Bryndal‘s chapbooks are available from So Dope Books.