wow...beautiful! really, awesome!

I was going to send an email, but since I can't find your email address, I'll make this an extended comment instead:

I've been vowing to keep in better touch; as of my writing this appears to have gone the way of countless other good intentions, but perhaps I can take a step towards keeping my vow now. I read with eagerness your updates about South Africa. I am glad to learn you have been fired so passionately by the experience, and indeed I envy your strength of purpose. Likewise, I read your poems with anticipation. You have spoken of your love for Gerard Manley Hopkins, and I can see the influence. The line from your second-to-last about "distant skies and diamond tears" stayed with me.

Things are well with me here. I'm on work crew now, wandering the backcountry with tools on my back, constructing trails and bridges, cleaning bear cables, and attending to sundry other maintenance issues. It allows me to see more than I did last year. For a while, I was actually a foreman, in charge of a crew; a temporary promotion while the original foreman recovered from a knee injury. As it happened, his crew had been stocked with the unwanted of the conservation department. Most of them were varying combinations of stupid, lazy, and insufferably obnoxious. I cannot say I particularly enjoyed it, but I console myself by saying it was "a learning experience" (for example, I learned just how spectacularly useless some people we hire are).  

I have other things I intended to write, but time grows short. I still plan to send that email, if you'll give me your address.

Thanks for your prayers and the comment.