The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.
Browsing category: Health
One of nature’s healing gifts …
One of nature’s most healing gifts to us . . . is its reminder to us to stay grounded and connected to the natural cycles of life . . . For it is this that keeps us . . . whole and natural and awake with our feet on the earth and our heart wild and free. We are earth, water, wind and fire. The same cycles and rhythms that move the moon, drop the rain, and draw sap through tree veins operate inside us as well.
At whatever age …
At whatever age, under whatever circumstance, if a poem arises in your mind or a desire to write poetry comes to you, treasure the poem or the urge. You honor yourself by writing it down…
Whatever we live through …
Whatever we live through becomes real to us as we turn raw experience into the story of what’s appening. We speak stories over and over, deepening our understanding of their significance. The parts of our experience we write are our lifelines.
Woman must ‘come of age’ …
Woman must ‘come of age’ by herself. This is the essence of ‘coming of age’ – to learn how to stand alone . . she must find her true center alone. She must become whole.
We might be better off …
We might be better off if we could separate food as nourishment and pleasure from food as the currency of care that leaves so many women laboring long hours to prove affection in that semantic muddle called nurturance.
Looking
What was I looking for today?
All that poking under the rugs,
Peering under the lamps and chairs,
Or going from room to room that way,
Forever up and down the stairs
Like someone stupid with sleep or drugs.
Everywhere I was, was wrong.
I started turning the drawers out, then
I was staring in at the icebox door
Wondering if I'd been there long
Wondering what I was looking for.
Later on, I think I went back again.
Where did the rest of the time go?
Was I down cellar? I can't recall
Finding the light switch, or the last
Place I've had it, or how I'd know
I didn't look at it and go past.
Or whether it's what I want, at all.
The Woodcutter Changes his Mind
When I was young, I cut the bigger, older trees for firewood, the ones
with heart rot, dead and broken branches, the crippled and deformed
ones, because, I reasoned, they were going to fall soon anyway, and
therefore, I should give the younger trees more light and room to grow.
Now I’m older and I cut the younger, strong and sturdy, solid
and beautiful trees, and I let the older ones have a few more years
of light and water and leaf in the forest they have known so long.
Soon enough they will be prostrate on the ground.
This Shining Moment in the Now
When I work outdoors all day, every day, as I do now, in the fall,
getting ready for winter, tearing up the garden, digging potatoes,
gathering the squash, cutting firewood, making kindling, repairing bridges over the brook, clearing trails in the woods, doing the last of the fall mowing, pruning apple trees, taking down the screens, putting up the storm windows, banking the house—all these things, as preparation for the coming cold…
when I am every day all day all body and no mind, when I am
physically, wholly and completely, in this world with the birds,
the deer, the sky, the wind, the trees…
when day after day I think of nothing but what the next chore is,
when I go from clearing woods roads, to sharpening a chain saw,
to changing the oil in a mower, to stacking wood, when I am
all body and no mind…
when I am only here and now and nowhere else—then, and only
then, do I see the crippling power of mind, the curse of thought,
and I pause and wonder why I so seldom find
this shining moment in the now.
Do I Really Have to Write about What Seems Most Scary?
Isn’t it enough I’ve fought against
it with ballet classes every day,
often more than one? Do I have
to tell you about the letter
from a woman who says, “Now
in the gym the men stop looking”?
Do I have to joke, “Pull the plug if
I can’t do ballet,” laugh when a
friend says, “I didn’t sleep with him
because I’d have to get undressed”?
Do I have to remember my mother
saying she’d rather be dead than
lose her teeth?
I think of the friend who
says she doesn’t worry about what
poem she’ll read but about what she
will wear. Another says she wants
plastic surgery but doesn’t think
it’s right for someone in the arts;
shouldn’t she care about loftier things?
I think of another woman who will
be photographed only in certain
positions. Do I have to tell you what
I’m thinking about isn’t death?
Delivered
She lived there for years in a
small space in a high rise that saw
her winter years dawn. When the past
became larger than her present,
she would call and thank us for cards
we gave her when we were small;
for Christmas, Mother's Day, her birthday,
our devotion scrawled amidst depictions
of crooked hearts and lopsided lilies.
She would write out new ones,
and we found them everywhere—unsent;
in perfect cursive she wished us joy,
chains of x's and o's circling her signature.
And when her time alone was over,
the space emptied of all but sunshine, dust,
and a cross nailed above her door,
those cards held for us a bitter peace;
they had finally been delivered.