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.
Browsing category: Nature
The fundamental problem of our society …
The fundamental problem of our society and our species today is to discover a way to flourish that will not be at the expense of some other community or of the biosphere, to replace competition with creative interdependence. . . . We are in need of an understanding of global relationships that will be not only sustainable but also enriching . . .
How much, I wonder …
How much, I wonder, of our life’s reflection is whispered to us from the distance of valley floors and high chilly winds? Places we’ve never been or only imagined color our notions of place, while landscapes live outside our door and call to within our souls.
Everything really interesting …
Everything really interesting and powerful happens at borders. Borders team with life, color, and complexity.In nature, we find the most diversity where different ecosystems merge. We call these places “edge habitats.” Think about the borders between things—between the United States and Mexico, between history and geography, between science and art, between childhood and adulthood, between men and women. Edge habitats are a good place to look for material.
We often forget …
We often forget that we are nature. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.
To experience a place …
To experience a place I need to walk in it as often as I can. Abenaki native poet Joseph Bruchac says, 'We need to walk to know sacred places, those around us and those within. We need to walk to remember the songs.'
A drive toward wholeness …
In WomanSpirit, many women have written about how a new sense of their connection to nature has changed their feelings about their bodies. . . A drive toward wholeness, toward healing the splits between people and nature, body and soul, reason and emotion, culture and experience, is evident in all the forms in which women’s spiritual quest is expressed.
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.
The New Song
For some time I thought there was time
and that there would always be time
for what I had a mind to do
and what I could imagine
going back to and finding it
as I had found it the first time
but by this tie I do not know
what I thought when I thought back then
there is no time yet it grows less
there is the sound of rain at night
arriving unknown in the leaves
once without before or after
then I hear the thrush waking
at daybreak singing the new song.
An Early Start in Midwinter
The freeze is on. At six a scattering
of sickly lights shine pale in kitchen windows.
Thermostats are adjusted. Furnaces
blast on with a whoosh. And day
rumbles up out of cellars to the tune
of bacon spitting in a greasy pan.
Scrape your nail along the window-pane,
shave off a curl of frost. Or press your thumb
against the film of white to melt an eye
onto the fire escape. All night
pipes ticked and grumbled like sore bones.
The tap runs rust over your chapped hands.
Sweep last night's toast-crumbs off the tablecloth.
Puncture your egg-yolk with a prong of fork
so gold runs over the white. And sip
your coffee scalding hot. The radio
says you are out ahead, with time to spare.
Your clothes are waiting folded on the chair.
This is your hour to dream. The radio
says that the freeze is on, and may go on
weeks without end. You barely hear the warning.
Dreaming of orange and red, the hot-tongued flowers
that winter sunrise mimics, you go out
in the dark. And zero floats you into morning.
Night Below Zero
3 AM, the night is absolutely still;
Snow squeals beneath my skis, plumes on the turns.
I stop at the canyon’s edge, stand looking out
Over the Great Valley, over the millions —
In bed, drunk, loving, tending mills, furnaces,
Alone, wakeful, as the world rolls in chaos.
The quarter moon rises in the black heavens —
Over the sharp constellations of the cities
The cold lies, crystalline and silent,
Locked between the mountains.
Citizen
I am in full support
of whoever invented fields of sunflowers
tilted together to face it, to take it in.
I cast my ballot for their sturdy stalks
and fat seeds. I pull the lever
for the straight sunflower ticket.
I tuck my voting receipt
in the change pocket of my jeans
and when I get home
I plant it.
That New
At the market today, I look for Piñata
apples, their soft-blush-yellow. My husband
brought them home last week, made me guess at
the name of this new strain, held one in his hand
like a gift and laughed as I tried all
the names I knew: Gala, Fuji, Honey
Crisp—watched his face for clues—what to call
something new? It's winter, only tawny
hues and frozen ground, but that apple bride
was sweet, and I want to bring it back to him,
that new. When he cut it, the star inside
held seeds of other stars, the way within
a life are all the lives you might live,
each unnamed, until you name it.
Global Warming
When his ship first came to Australia,
Cook wrote, the natives
continued fishing, without looking up.
Unable, it seems, to fear what was too large to be comprehended.
What Kind of Times are These
There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light —
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.
Testimony – for my daughter
I want to tell you that the world
is still beautiful.
I tell you that,
despite children raped on city streets,
shot down in school rooms,
despite the slow poisons seeping
from old and hidden sins
into our air, soil, water,
despite the thinning film
that encloses our aching world.
Despite my own terror and despair.
I want you to know that spring
is no small thing, that
the tender grasses curling
like a baby’s fine hairs around
your fingers are a recurring
miracle. I want to tell you
that the river rocks shine
like God, that the crisp
voices of the orange and gold
October leaves are laughing at death.
I want to remind you to look
beneath the grass, to note
the fragile hieroglyphs
of ant, snail, beetle. I want
you to understand that you
are no more and no less necessary
than the brown recluse, the ruby-
throated hummingbird, the humpback
whale, the profligate mimosa.
I want to say, like Neruda,
that I am waiting for
“a great and common tenderness,”
that I still believe
we are capable of attention,
that anyone who notices the world
must want to save it.
A Republic of Cats
Nobody rules. They all
take turns. I can never
tell who will chase who
playing war over the couch
and chairs, round and
round again until suddenly
they stop as if a whistle
blew in their heads.
Five of them, aged fifteen
to two. Who will curl
together making one cushion
of patchwork fur? Who
will painstakingly lick
a friend, washing and
cuddling. Who will growl
at their friend of last hour?
The one rule is where each
sleeps at night, their spot
in the bed and with whom?
It is written in bone.
The Seven of Pentacles
Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure, make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
Ask Me
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
An Act of Faith
In the water I see stars, among the reeds
the mountain of my face,
and across a distance two geese
in the twilight of a lake, like stilettos.
So many touchstones. I lean toward life,
I unbuckle the flowers’ roots,
hold birds
and know the privilege, know the trees
as vessels of shadow.
And if the sky is gray and anguished gray
above a field
before a storm-
and the leaves shake, shake, shake
with a spiritual palsy-
I look over my shoulder unsure: am I observed
or do I observe?
Let show all things splendid,
in their darker nature
splendid also. Lord, you know the mask
of my face, how I peer at the world
from under a leaf, from under the squint
of my intelligence.
I can’t comprehend, or find contradiction
in evidence of past millenniums, the broken
ancient skulls,
galaxies behind the sun. Certainly all creatures
pause, and gaze benignly
into the air, into the light where birds fly
and are gone:
this is the Light I lean toward.