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Erin Johnson | Thank you for being with us.                                    You will always be with us.

6/24/2017

 
Into the Darkness they Go, the Wise and the Lovely
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On Monday, my husband waits until I get home to say the words.

I go to unload the car and carry back tears.
Sitting, stirring, I begin to take out stitches on
a strayed shawl for the third time.

An artist and an adventurer, she sipped Dickle and ate meat
and raised chickens. She slept in a small house to live spaciously.
Erin was tall and never knowing of how she showed me to
express, explore, expand, to exist.

On a long ago Friday, with frayed Carhartt pants, we were
chatting about women, and their depictions in magazines,
Erin says,“Well, they’re not shaped like a real woman.”
For a lasting moment, I see from her wise and lovely eyes.

Erin is a stitch unlooped from our tight knit.
A drafty gratitude, a sudden shiver. She was here, with us, with the world.  
And now we are looping onto each other, tenaciously.
Even so, what are we to do with slipped stitches and this hole?

May we purl pain into artistry. All we have to do is add the t.  
So we will paint. And we will climb mountains.
We will tear and we will cry and live and bleed and die.
Until then, we have no other task than to knit ourselves together.

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Pepper Peak (ish)

6/19/2017

 
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Jessie and I met at the Eklutna Lake parking lot just after 11am. Our goal was to do a quick five mile hike on the Twin Peaks trail. I thought I’d be home around 3pm. As with all adventures truly great, it didn’t go as planned. It was one of those gorgeous Alaskan days. The colors cast by jewel blues and greens that relieve me.
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Our hike turned into a climb after the second bench, which is the end of the Twin Peaks trail. Jessie and I, not clear about where the twin peaks trail ended, debated whether to go left or right. At the fork in the road, we decided to go high. The climb towards Pepper Peak got confusing because it’s easy to take a game trail. We switch-backed and scrambled-up the spongy tundra until the rain clouds and distant thunder shooed us home.
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Taking the Waters
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I went to investigate a gently flowing stream
and discovered that it was
trickling up from the
 massive rock
we were climbing.


The water gurgled up and out,
then down onto smaller rocks
and then into finer rocks
that pooled the water so slightly.

Next, the history of “taking the waters”
trickled from the Romans
into my palms, and I 
splashed wellness on my face.

Eyes closed, coating my flaming cheeks,
the cold water squeezed a gasp from my lips.
I splashed again and gasped again,
and again, and again.


This, with such certainty, wells up in me now:
So much can be drawn from words.
​We go to the forest,
​for rest.

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