Stone & Light

Welcome to the latest installment of the Fog Chaser newsletter.

🎵 This month’s piece is in G minor.¹

Traveling through the Badlands National Park in South Dakota — “the land of stone and light” — I am softened by its desolation. Its isolation. This landscape is otherworldly. Peaceful. Silent.

The sky stretches uninterrupted, sweeping above hills and canyons etched by eons of erosion. We wind through this ancient and haunted landscape, crossing a threshold — between seasons, between chapters, between places. Between one life and another.

📷 This month’s photos were taken with a DSLR in Badlands National Park.²

I invite you to sit with this month’s song, photos, and poem and make them a small part of your day, whether that’s your morning ritual, afternoon break, or your evening wind-down.

As always, if you feel like it, let me know what you think in the comments. I’d love to hear from you.

Thank you for being here.

---

Keeping quiet

by Pablo Neruda (translation by Alastair Reid)³

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

---

Listening to

• A Trick of the Light by Villagers (Listen)

  • 🎧 I put all the songs shared in the newsletter into this Spotify playlist

Reading

• The Overstory by Richard Powers (Bookshop)⁴

Sharing

• The song I wrote for

  Laura Pashby
  ’s new book, Chasing Fog:

a walk in the woods with fog chaser

• The Friendship Series from

  Seven Senses
  — my friend Sabrina was kind enough to include me in her beautiful new project exploring friendship.

  Creative Soulmates

• Tom Pendergast
  looking sharp in his new Fog Chaser t-shirt. Click here to get your own.

• Last year at this time:

  • September 2023:

    Meditation 025 | Beneath the Woodbine

    • Coincidentally, this song, which I wrote for

      Taegan MacLean
      ’s documentary Woodbine, is coming out on streaming platforms October 4. Pre-save it on Spotify.

1. Stone & Light in G minor / Written, performed, and produced by Fog Chaser

2. All photos shot on DSLR (ISO: 400)

3. Taken from Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems (2017 / Grayson)

4. The Fog Chaser Bookshop is hosted on Bookshop.org, where 80% of profits go to independent bookstores. I earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.