Poetry as a conversation with the landscape

Over the past couple of weeks I have been practicing poetic reverie in various environments around the Golden area while my dog, Ishtar, takes me on her daily walk. Occasionally we walk up the gravel path that parallels Clear Creek, sometimes on the network of trails on top of South Table mesa, and occasionally around her favorite rabbit chasing grounds on the CSM campus at night. There is a stark contrast between my recent walks and those I took before being exposed to poetic reverie. It is as if a layer of depth has been revealed in any landscape I pass through. Over the past few years I have made a consistent attempt to be present in the moment as I walk through nature, but usually I just try to feel the ground beneath my feet, breath the crisp air, and to clear my mind. Often when I walk in this manner, I end up fixated on watching Ishtar romp and hunt her way through the brush, which is an extremely entertaining affair. Every walk is an adventure, but my mind runs thin with fodder for the stories I make up about her hunting antics. I enjoy hiking in nature every time, but sometimes it has a special depth to it; a tangibility that is unique to the outing, as if the landscape is alive, breathing, whispering stories into my perception. This state of expanded awareness is usually hit or miss for me, even when I am focusing on bringing my presence to the walk, sometimes I am just not able to go that deep into the sensory experience.
I have found recently though, that the mental state that I access when engaging in poetic reverie will consistently lift the veil of the landscape. As I meander down the trail, pondering each sensory input as a potential musing for some piece of creative output, the depth of the experience increases with every step. My first couple poems of the walk are superficial, similar or identical to thought sequences that I have followed in the past. No matter how many times I witness Ishtar hunting mice in tall grass, pouncing like an arctic fox, it will never fail to elicit a smile from my face. But as I continue down the trail, the environment begins to speak a more intricate language to my creative process. Previously unrevealed relationships between myself and the world around me open in every sensation. Thirty steps on the trail now feels like a fairy tale: a mystery hiding behind every leaf, every smell sparking an emotion. The atmosphere shifts, every photon of reflected light has more intensity and feels full of life. Every object in the environment breathes life; the misty air, the flowing and roiling water, the crystalline pebbles building the ground with their skeletons, vines weaving up from the earth through wavering branches, into the canopy of photocells, meeting the sky and distilling the sun into life, a cycle, the seasons, birth, death, rebirth. I watch the intricate web of relationships between every natural phenomena play out as a flow of visual imagery and thought forms constructed of poetic tools; alliteration, onomatopoeia, rhyme, metaphor, and consonance. All of these devices extend the possibilities for storytelling. The depth of experience is indescribably beautiful, and the sense of inspiration that arises from even a momentary glimpse into this dream realm can fuel pages and pages of poetry. More importantly for me though, is the relationship that is has helped me to build with my environment. Feeling intrinsically connected to the landscape is a vital sensation that I believe is missing from many modern humans experience of reality. There is hidden universe in everything. The potential for infinite depth in every object, process, and creature. It can be revealed by many various practices, specific perceptual microscopes, but one of the most easily accessible that I have experienced is the trance-like state of poetic reverie.