Autumn cloud, single turtle, crabapples, Twin Ponds park

This weekend marked the 2nd yarzheit (anniversary of the death) of Chris Weaver, my favorite friend I never met in person.

His poetry blog Metaphorest Walk was a shooting star, a luminous node in an expansive blog-net of friends and colleagues connected by Open Space Technology. Chris would gather up images and words from our comments and previous days’ posts, combine them with his own deep soulful perspective, and write mysterious and yearning, tender original poems. After 4 months he closed it up and after that we stayed warmly occasional email friends for a long time.

Every autumn I think of these lines from a poem Chris posted in 2004, now in his physical absence so much more acute.

yellow autumn light
...it is just a precious day, as all days are too, but this one
is lit all the way through with that yellow autumn light
so acute in the heart...
...the usual
drill, the daily work as it is, precious
beyond all knowing, and these leaves
overhead speaking softly, getting
ready to let go, to say farewell
to their tree, to fall.

Here, a lapidary remembrance by mutual friend Chris Corrigan. It includes some music about which Chris Weaver had written, “& if my life has a theme song, that’s it,” and which he thought he’d want played for his remembrance: “It rains in the forest long after the sky has cleared”

(And here is a version of Metaphorest Walk that Chris left up after closing the original one; there are no comments woven through this one, but it’s still so beautiful)