In Praise of the Ordinary

“Never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame. I asked for wonder, and he gave it to me.” –Abraham Joshua Heschel

Spring has arrived in the Northern Hemisphere, the calendar says. It’s raining outside today but two days ago the world was full of sun and wildflowers. Walking in a field of wildflowers isn’t like walking in the Queen’s Garden at Regents Park, a world redolent with roses, stuffed with enormous, full blossoms filled with color, rich with light.

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Wildflowers, on the other hand, are generally small, their forms simple. One might even call their appearance ordinary. But these ordinary flower folk spread across a hillside delight the heart. People long for their appearance, often travel miles to see them, and walk across hillsides for hours in hopes for a glimpse at their ordinary faces. Milkmaids, Douglas iris, buttercups, sun cups, shooting stars, though their forms are ordinary, come spring we long to greet them.

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We long for the newness and color spring brings. We want to breathe it in, surround ourselves with swaths of landscape tinted with blossoms–the pale pink blush cherry trees wear, plum blossom’s gowns of white lace, and azalea’s soft pastels. We want to swim in rivers of bluebells, dance through fields of poppies’ brilliant red skirts swirled around their narrow stems. “Colours are the wounds of light,” said Blake. Indeed, as if smitten with Cupid’s dart, springs’ flowers can make us swoon. Though these spring blossoms are small, they can be myriad, their bodies singing in a great chorus their love of being alive, their wish to give more life. Wildflowers come to us of their own accord, not because of something we do. They are an unspoken embodiment of grace, a reminder of all the earth bestows on us, a love letter soaked through with color, wound with light, written in the language of pollen and petals.

There’s nothing a person can do to impress a wildflower, yet in the wonder of their ordinary forms their beauty repeatedly impresses us. In his poem, “The River of Ordinary Moments,” Max Reif writes,

I am stunned by the beauty of the ordinary,
so that sometimes the ordinary seems mis-named, and yet
it is ordinary because it is quiet with no fanfare
…
No one is famous to the ordinary,
you can’t impress it.

If one stops to think about it, the most ordinary of moments in life are also simultaneously filled with the extraordinary. Wildflowers, for all their appearing simplicity in their forms, nevertheless support entire ecosystems. They don’t need pampering. They just want to grow. As Ire’ne Laura Silva writes in her post “Where Wildflowers Bloom,” on the Texas Highways site, “Wildflowers are not just pretty spots of roadside color or willful weeds; wildflowers are a reminder that where life ends, it will return. That beauty endures. That the stubborn and glorious earth harbors and nourishes and compels life to bloom again and again.” Life is in continuous rebirth. What an extraordinary thing to consider as we think about our own life’s revolutions.

When you look more closely at what wildflowers do, it turns out that wildflowers aren’t exactly ordinary. Flowers have an electrical charge to attract pollinators. Our life sustenance depends on those who depend on the pollinators. One of every three mouthfuls of food depend on pollinators. Insects need flowers, and we need flowers too.

Most of us live what we likely consider ordinary lives. We rise each day and do our work. We make plans with family members or friends, experience loss and pain. We learn what we love and celebrate with neighbors. We grow, we change. Humans share the collective knowledge across millennia. If we consider the trajectory of history and the struggles everyday people have faced over time, human experience isn’t particularly ordinary. Leymah Gbowee, who had a significant part to play in ending Liberia’s ongoing civil war, says: “Everyone has a role to play in changing the tide in our world. It has nothing to do with your academic background or your social status. It has to do with your tenacity, your strength and your willpower to want to make change.” Even our own personal struggles to adjust to ongoing change, adapt to new roles and successes, or to cope with our particular illnesses, ongoing pain, or griefs–all of these things require courage, even bravery in the most ordinary of days.

Our lives are made up mostly of these ordinary days. Each of them are full of wonder. It’s wondrous to have rolled topsy turvy across the grass as a child, to have tasted the spark of snowy cold on my tongue, to have jumped through my own arms, felt ocean waves pull against my calves, smelled the sweat from a horse I rode after racing across a meadow, and to have sung with my mother at the piano. It’s wondrous to sense the warmth of my partner’s hand in mine, and to feel my cat’s calm presence beside me. Wonder abounds.

Emily Dickinson wrote “I am Nobody! Who are you?” It’s perhaps out of fashion to be Nobody. These days voices clamber everywhere to be heard. Everybody seems to want to be Somebody. As does all of nature, wildflowers simply want to just go on being what they are. What they are in all their ordinary wonder is needed. They are part of a greater interbeing. Reif goes on to say in his poem,

I do not want to be
taken from the flow of the ordinary
to any pinnacle or promontory from which
I will only have to climb, or fall, down again,
I do not want to be special in that way,
I want the tick of thoughts in my mind to run out
and the storehouse of thoughts to be emptied
and not replaced by any others,
I want to disappear, disappear
and become that current
that all distinct drops are lost in, and then
the ocean into which all rivers go to die.

Flowers bring us together and share their beauty. They fill us with hope. Whether you are able to see wildflowers in person or view photos of them, or simply stand in an open space remembering them and wishing for their presence, may you sense their lives fill you with joy and carry you into a place of gratitude and wonder, and give praise the ordinary.

I leave you with this short film Gratitude with Louis Schwartzberg’s time-lapse photography and words from Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast. I’ve watched it many times and the beauty it reveals still fills me with gratitude for the wonder of being alive.

The Season is Now

Sandhill Cranes, Staten Island, California

Now is the season to know
everything you do
is sacred.

–Hafiz

Recently, I traveled to Staten Island in California’s Central Valley near Lodi, California. An important wintering spot for migratory waterbirds, the Central Valley supports 60% of wintering waterfowl in the Pacific Flyway and 20% of the winter waterfowl in the whole of the US. According to the Audubon website, “The four Central Valley regions hosted approximately 65 million migratory land birds in the spring and 48 million in the fall.” My purpose in the visit was to see the sandhill cranes. Since the cranes like marshes, bogs, agricultural lands, river valleys, and open prairie, California’s Central Valley is a perfect wintering location for the birds.

The largest gathering in the world of sandhill cranes is in Nebraska, where over a quarter million sandhill cranes gather in spring on the Platte River. Witnessing the multitude of bird life gathered in that location, the air filled with their wing-flutter, their voices calling to each other across fields, and the enormous energy of their life-force could carry one into a state of awe. The Nature Conservancy’s excellent short video of the sandhill cranes’ spring presence in the Platte River Valley enables people to visit the spectacle vicariously. Viewing the film brought me into sharper awareness of the myriad worlds that occur simultaneously alongside our human one. 

Sandhill Cranes, Staten Island, California

At least 3,000 years ago bird migration patterns were noticed in various cultures of the Pacific islands as well as in ancient Greece, and are also referred to in the Bible in the books of Job and Jeremiah (Wikipedia). While humans are out traversing the highways, working in fields, gathering in buildings, or sitting in around the dinner table discussing who to vote for in upcoming elections, sandhill cranes and other migratory birds have their own motivations and are flying by the thousands upon thousands to locations they’ve gathered at for millennia. 

While we move through our day unaware of nature’s larger rhythms, a great cycle of being is unfolding all around us and we are part of it. Like an Indian raga, the movements of animals flow in cyclic rhythms of time across the globe in circuitous routes, increasing in volume, size, and energy at different locations, then quieting down and moving on as seasons change, only to be repeated again the following season. Flyways and the myriad patterns of many other animals moving across the globe–leatherback turtles, whales, monarch butterflies, bats, salmon, pronghorn deer, each following ancient rhythms, can be seen on interactive maps like this one, as well as this video of global animal movements.

Geese flying above Staten Island, California

The whole of creation is in a state of continuous change. Though trees are rooted, Chelsea Steinaur-Scudder and Jeremy Seifert, in their article in Emergence Magazine, “They Carry Us With Them: The Great Tree Migration,” describe tree migrations that have occurred over millennia, and that are presently taking place as a result of a variety of factors not as yet totally clear, but including “changes in climate, past and present land use and management, the proliferation of native pests and plants, the introduction of non-native species, and the built landscape.”

A big part of my reason for wanting to see the sandhill cranes is because many of my great aunts and uncles were born in Nebraska. I’ve been writing about them, and want to experience more of the landscape they inhabited to better imagine their voices and to sense how the land there might have shaped their lives. Though they lived at Nebraska’s western edge and not in the Platte River Valley, they may well have experienced the cranes’ migration, and I like the idea of my life intersecting with a vision of these birds that may have also been a vision they had. My ancestors migrated from the eastern US states to Nebraska. I never met most of them because by the time I was born, my parents had migrated to California. My great grandparents, as well as several of my great aunts and uncles, died before I was able to meet them.

Geese, Staten Island, California

In Western culture we like to think of time as linear and often depict history on timelines. A different way of looking at existence is to imagine it as circular or a great spiral–the spiraled twist of DNA helix, the chambered nautilus’s fibonacci whorl, the swirled currents of wind and water, and the cosmic curled tail of our galaxy. We are all part of the great movement of becoming. In our migrations, we say goodbye to what was and reach toward what will renew and nurture us in body or spirit. To live is to be part of the great cycle of birth and death. There are many deaths and births before we let go of our bodies.

Humans generally like firmness and solidity. We live in a certain location or in a particular period of time. Nevertheless, it’s also true that humans have been migrating since the dawn of their existence, as this National Geographic map shows. Many times, people move from their birthplace to other locations. According to the UN, “more people than ever live in a country other than the one in which they were born.” When we choose to move elsewhere, we generally hope the move will carry us to an environment we perceive is better than the one we left behind. These maps depict human migration in recent times, making it clear not everyone migrates out of choice. Whether people migrate from their own choice or not, letting go of one’s former life carries with it a kind of grief.

Gail Rudd Entrekin‘s poem “Finally,” (used with her permission) found in her excellent book of poems, Walking Each Other Home, takes a close look at what it’s like to come face to face with losses we don’t necessarily expect during the migration of our lives as we move from birth toward maturity.

Finally

Every morning now it’s the big girl pants
and they are not black silk with lace, but cotton
voluminous and white. You’ve seen them
hanging on clothes lines back in the day,
functional pants for women who mean
business. They mean to get things done
no allowance for pain, don’t mean to spend
a single minute caressing their losses. These
women look straight ahead and forget to smile
at children, forget to touch their husbands’ hands,
their old husbands wandering like children,
these men who were supposed to be gods
and fell unable in their duty to protect, left
these women to drop their peacock feather earrings,
chop off their long thick hair, toss their wild
photos into an old shoe box, and take charge,
grow up, finally, grow all the way up.

The poem brings us into the world of navigating inside those difficult migrations life inevitably brings our way. The underwear described in the poem aren’t black silk with lace. They are “functional,” the kind perhaps our grandmother or great grandmother might have worn, women so busy trying to survive they didn’t take time to soothe themselves regarding what they lost. We need dear ones close by to help steady us but for various reasons, we don’t always have the support we need.

Often times when entering into difficult life passages, we recognize the journey’s challenges and find ourselves needing to turn serious and grow practical. Entrekin’s poem describes these women, they who no longer do such things as wear their lovely peacock feather earrings. They cut their thick hair, and toss the photos of their wilder days in an old shoe box. In confronting hardship, they’ve let go their adornments and spontaneity. Out of necessity they “take charge, / grow up, finally, grow all the way up.” There is such sobering responsibility and finality embedded in those words. Courage and bravery too. I read the lines and think of people I know right now who are having to do just that as they confront various difficulties.

There’s also a sadness there, a sorrow in this letting go of a former self in order to “take charge.” Things that have delighted and brought us joy are important touchstones to memories that helped shape and give texture to our lives. Even if out of necessity, we don’t want to stuff them away in a shoebox never to be seen again. We need the things that give us beauty and joy in order to keep going. Nevertheless, eventually, as we approach our life’s last days, everything we’ve held so precious will need to be set aside. We will need to let go of everything we’ve ever held dear.

Egret, Staten Island, California

Entrekin titles her poem “Finally.” When we retire from work we felt dedicated to for years, or when someone dear to us becomes seriously ill or dies, we leave one world behind for another. These situations and circumstances require us to leave behind a familiar reality for a different one and are a kind of interior migration as well as a death of a former way of living.

The arrival of bodily death is the ultimate finality. Contemplating our death can help us recognize what it is that truly matters. To help us do this, Buddhists recommend people practice reading or reciting what they call the Five Remembrances:

• I am of the nature to grow old. I cannot escape old age.
• I am of the nature to grow ill. I cannot escape sickness.
• I am of the nature to die. I cannot escape death.
• I will be separated from everything and everyone I hold dear.
• My only true possession is my actions.

Frank Ostaseski, head of the Zen Hospice center in San Francisco, California, in his book, The Five Invitations, encourages us to sit down with “sister death,” to have tea and conversation with her because in doing so we learn how to live more fully. Ostaseski suggests that as we turn toward the griefs we carry, we become more whole. “Every time we experience a loss, we have another chance to experience life at a greater depth,” he writes. “It opens us to the most essential truths of our lives: the inevitability of impermanence, the causes of suffering, and the illusion of separateness. We begin to appreciate that we are more than our grief. We are what the grief is moving through.”

Geese at Staten Island, California

“In the end,” Ostaseski goes on to explain, “we may still fear death but we don’t fear living nearly as much. In surrendering to our grief, we have learned to give ourselves to life.” Ostaseski’s talk about poetry and the end of life, is moving, and I recommend it.

The other side of grief is love. For me, both Entrekin’s poem and Ostaseski’s insights emphasize the preciousness of every moment. The simplest things are treasures: sitting in the presence of those we love, the taste of a good meal, a walk under billowed clouds spread across a wide sky. Life is ephemeral. This is why in the end, acts seemingly as simple as walking across a room are not simple or trivial. They are rich and lavish gifts of being. As the 14th century Iranian poet Hafiz wrote in The Gift, translated by Daniel Ladinsky:

Now is the Time 

Now is the time to know
That all that you do is sacred.

Now, why not consider
A lasting truce with yourself and God.

Now is the time to understand
That all your ideas of right and wrong
Were just a child’s training wheels
To be laid aside
When you finally live
With veracity
And love.

Hafiz is a divine envoy
Whom the Beloved
Has written a holy message upon.

My dear, please tell me,
Why do you still
Throw sticks at your heart
And God?

What is it in that sweet voice inside
That incites you to fear?

Now is the time for the world to know
That every thought and action is sacred.

This is the time
For you to compute the impossibility
That there is anything
But Grace.

Now is the season to know
That everything you do
Is sacred.

In the Shadowlands

“The unchosen thing is what causes the trouble. If you don’t do something with the unchosen, it will set up a minor infection somewhere in the unconscious and later take its revenge on you. Unlived life does not just “go away.“–Robert A. Johnson

The shortest day of the year, the longed-for turning point when the earth again travels toward light, has come, and passed. The earth now journeys toward longer days again, slowly leaving behind the long periods of dark. But while the days are still mostly full of shadow, I want to take time to grow quiet and explore that space a bit more. 

Many find it challenging to pay for food, rent, and meet basic needs. Throughout the world, innocent people are suffering, hungering for peace. From within and without people ache for greater sustenance, mobility, improved eyesight or foresight, connection, and love. When hard times and difficulties come, most of us long to leave them behind. Desertification, trillions of micro-plastics in the oceans releasing toxic chemicals into the water, and the food chain, loss of species—the very body of Earth cries out for support. 

Reading through news feeds and social media voices everywhere call out for attention. “We are presently dealing with the accumulation of a whole society that has worshiped its light side and refused the dark, and this residue appears as war, economic chaos, strikes, racial intolerance. The front page of any newspaper hurls the collective shadow at us.” Writes the Jungian psychologist Robert A. Johnson. How do we take it all in and go on living with so much need everywhere? Johnson suggests we begin by stepping in closer toward those shadow parts of ourselves and our culture. We’ve have participated in creating our shadows, Johnson explains. Instead of ignoring or running away from them we can, instead, turn toward them. “…our own healing proceeds from what we call that overlap of good and evil, light and dark. It’s not that the light element alone does the healing. The place where the light and dark touch is where miracles arise,” explains Johnson. “The tendency to see one’s shadow “out there” in one’s neighbor or in another race or culture is the most dangerous aspect of the modern psyche. It has created two devastating wars in this century and threatens the destruction of all the fine achievements of our modern world. We all decry war but collectively we move toward it. It is not the monsters of the world who make the chaos but the collective shadow to which everyone of us has contributed.”

I recall seeing logs with cryptic squiggles on them looked like some kind of calligraphic writing while camping at Wright’s Lake in California Sierra Nevada mountains. These mysterious markings are made by bark beetles as they eat between the bark and the tree trunk. Stressed, diseased, or injured trees are susceptible to bark beetles attacking them and sometimes the trees can’t adequately protect themselves against the beetles. The beetles carry fungi that further weakens the tree’s defense. When the tree dies and loses its bark, we can see the squiggly pathways the bark beetle left. Bark beetles are only about a quarter inch long, but they feed on the trees living tissue and make the tree unable to take up the nutrients it needs for survival. 

Like the bark beetle, our shadow sides can eat away at that part of us that carries our life. It’s best to turn toward our shadows. “To honor and accept one’s own shadow is a profound spiritual discipline. It is whole-making and thus holy and the most important experience of a lifetime,” writes Johnson. 

In Western culture, we pay so much attention to control and rational thinking. French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, Blaise Pascal wrote, “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of… We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart.” In this time of lingering darkness, I want to lean into the wisdom of the heart and learn from it more of what the shadows have to teach.

As a child, my mother brought me out on the front porch at dusk to listen to the sounds as day changed into evening. We listened to voices of coyotes echoing through the valley, of owls, became aware of the cooling air, then later the star light pricked night. In this experience, whole other worlds and ways of being in the world emerged. Listening to the spaces between seeing and the challenges of seeing, knowing and not knowing; leaning into the voices speaking from below the surface, the half inaudible voices–what might we sense nudging at our hearts? 

Ted Kooser, in his poem, “A Letter in October,” describes a scene where he used to be able to sit at his window at dawn to see a doe 

“..shyly drinking, 
then see the light step out upon 
the water, sowing reflections 
to either side” 
but now sees “…no more than my face, 
mirrored by darkness, pale and odd, 
startled by time…
… And I, 
who only wished to keep looking out, 
must now keep looking in.”

Sooner or later it seems we will all be confronted with ourselves and the need to look inward. Why not begin now? Sit by the night window, on your night steps, or take a night walk, dance with the lights out, record your dreams, pull out photos of your ancestors long gone if you have them, tune in to the turning point in your breath. By attuning ourselves to that in between space of knowing and not knowing, belonging and not belonging, comfort and discomfort, giving this a name perhaps as if it is a presence, and making friends with it, what might we learn?

A song for wholeness, by Melanie DeMore. “All One Heart.”

Drawing From Great Roots

We did not come to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves like the trees, Trees that start again, Drawing up from the great roots.–Robert Bly

A short time ago, I visited the Angel Oak in South Carolina. A live oak tree that shades 17,000 square feet, is 65 feet tall, and has a circumference of 31.5 feet. It received its name from those who owned the property in the 1700s, Martha and Justus Angel and is thought to be the largest tree east of the Mississippi. So many trees were cut down as settlers made their way across what has now become the United States. It’s estimated that less than 10% of the forests remain that once covered North America (see more here.) To stand in the outstretched presence of such an old and enormous tree felt like a blessing. While this aged oak is thought to be 400 years old, the age of the Cypress of Abarqu in Iran is estimated to be between 4,000-5,000 years old, and is thought to be the oldest tree in Asia. Imagining the weather, wars, and other disruptions the cypress has been through in that stretch of time and the many changes the tree endured, it’s astonishing that it survived. Yet there are other ancient trees throughout the world as well. The baobabs in the African continent can live as much as 2,000 years. A Patagonian cypress known as Lañilawal or Alerce Milenario is estimated to have sprouted 5,000 years ago, and the Tjikko spruce in Norway is thought to be an astonishing 9,550 years old. 

Reflecting on time and trees, the concept of the family tree comes to mind. While researching for the book I’m currently writing connected to ancestors who lived in Nebraska, Wyoming, Iowa, and South Dakota, I’ve noticed that I don’t have to go more than a few generations back in time and my ancestor’s lives fall into deep shadows of the unknown. I have photos that were given to me of ancestors I don’t know the names of. Because their stories weren’t told, I’m left to imagine them. I’m like the character Pip in the opening lines of Charles Dicken’s Great Expectations, who never saw his father or mother, and conjures up what they are like based on the shape of the letters on their tomb stones. That’s a bleak world to be born into. The writer Barry Lopez states, “Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.” I can’t help but think that part of the collective grief of our era is at least in part that we have lost the stories that connect us to the land and the people we come from and are connected to. 

In various parts of the world people set up altars to their ancestors. I recall seeing these in Asia, often containing photos of family members who have passed on. Ancestral altars are a way of remembering how our individual lives are part of a much larger interconnections reaching back in time to places and ways of being and knowing beyond wherever it is one currently situated. Mariella Segarra, in her NPR article, “How to deepen your connection with your ancestors,” describes the altar she has set up in her home. “Altars are for everybody,” she states, and goes on to explain how to create one using objects your ancestors may have carried, used, or that assist you in imagining them—a pen, piece of jewelry, handkerchief, dried leaf or flower, a pebble, or scrap of wallpaper. The point of doing this is to help people recognize we’re woven into a social, historical, environmental fabric and the objects help us remember this. Our lives are not single threads blowing about in the wind. Scientists are discovering the bacteria in our gut can affect our emotional wellbeing, and trauma people experience can be passed on to those around us and possibly to those who come after us as well. How we respond to ourselves, to each other, and the earth we walk on matters. The struggles we may be experiencing are connected to a wider, longer story. We are, so to speak, part of a larger tree. The cambium layer of our present life is connected to branches and deep roots.

Within one’s own town there are many intersecting worlds and histories, so much we don’t know about the stories of the land around us, as well as each other’s stories and the stories of our ancestors. How do we begin to hear the stories of the land we walk on, the stories of ancestors that were never told. George David Haskell spends a great deal of time listening to trees. “To attend to a tree’s song is therefore to touch a stethoscope to the skin of a landscape, hearing what stirs below,” he writes in his article published in the Scientific American article “Ten Ways to Listen to Trees.” Haskell describes listening with one’s hands, feet, as well as nose. “Gusts of wind sonify plant diversity,” Haskell explains. “Oak’s voice is coarse-grained, throaty; maple’s is sandy and light. These differences have their origins in plant evolution and adaption. Drought-resistant oak leaves are thicker, tougher than the water-hungry maple. The different sounds of trees on a dry mountain ridge and in a moist forested hollow speak to the particularities of the ecology of each place.” These are fine distinctions, ones that come with close attention nurtured over time. I can’t help but wonder how I might better understand my own relationship to the world around me if I reached more often to touch the branches and roots of my life, attended more fully to the different textures beyond the boundaries of my current comprehension, listened more carefully inside the silences of history.

We often don’t know the stories of trees and see them as strangers on the street, explains Haskell in an interview with Sam Mowe titled “Listening to Trees.” “It often takes an act of will to learn these stories because, in general, cities present trees as passive, municipal objects that are completely stripped of their stories. We need to swim upstream against that tide to find their stories and, therefore, start to belong to each other.” The article ends by suggesting the following as a way to begin to transcend our emotions’ and minds’ limitations and to grow in awareness of our connection to life’s web: 

Pick a tree.
Commit to return to it again and again.
Bring an enthusiastic openness of your senses to the tree.
Don’t think it will lead to enlightenment, insight, or sacrament.
Try and visit the tree in various weather conditions.
Notice how different people interact with the tree.
Notice your own thoughts and experiences.

A similar practice could be followed in connection with ancestors on a family tree. Pick an ancestor. Select an object, photo, or word to represent the ancestor. Make a place for the object, photo, or other chosen reminder and place it in a location where you can greet your ancestor every day. If you want, light a candle or bring an offering. Without any particular expectation, spend a few moments just being present in remembrance of that life. Notice your thoughts and emotions.

Before getting on my bicycle yesterday afternoon, I received a text saying my pregnant niece was going into labor. A new child was about to enter the world. Climate change, combat between Israel and Hamas, missile strikes on Ukraine, ongoing hate crimes, rising inflation—this is the world new children are born into. While these many alarming things are going on, Danielle LaPorte via Mary Standing Otter highlights other aspects of our interbeing that are simultaneously occurring that are sometimes overlooked,

Something is being invented this year that will change how your generation lives, communicates, heals and passes on…
Some civil servant is making sure that you get your mail, and your garbage is picked up, that the trains are running on time, and that you are generally safe.
Someone is dedicating their days to protecting your civil liberties and clean drinking water.
Someone is regaining their sanity.
Someone is coming back from the dead. 
Someone is genuinely forgiving the seemingly unforgivable.
Someone is curing the incurable.

For all the heart-breaking realities present in the world, giving birth to a child is an affirmation that despite its many hardships, challenges, and the probability of suffering, life is immensely precious. Around us everywhere we have reminders of the long roots and branches of life that allow us to stand beneath their arms and marvel at the wonder of life. 

All of us living now will someday become ancestors. I ask myself, what kind of ancestor do I want to be? What am I doing now to participate in creating the kind of world I will pass on and the stories that will be told? Walking under the ancient limbs of the Angel Oak, leaning into its trunk I sensed the astonishing thing it is to be alive. I hope to pass on that sense of wonder and the knowledge that life is a gift.

As Mary Oliver wrote in her poem, “When Death Comes,”

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Histories of Home

“Our work is to call each other home, to call to one another’s spirits and say, “This is for you. This is what it means to be human, to love and be loved. Let’s learn from one another as we go.”

Kaitlin B. Curtice, Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day

Recently, I travelled to Cheyenne, Wyoming via Fort Collins, Colorado. Though I never lived in Wyoming, I have ancestors who once did, and I wanted to experience what it felt like standing on that earth and to absorb some of the history of this part of the US through being there. Traveling across the landscape to get to Cheyenne, I felt the wide embrace of the grassy plain, and a calm, deep presence of the earth’s steadfastness. The sky holds you inside its rich, blue center and presents you with its expansive heart. There’s a sense of oneness between earth and sky, as when looking out over the ocean where the sea meets the sky.

In Cheyenne, I could sense a part of American history still alive there that one is less aware of when living far from that part of the US. Wyoming’s history plays an important part in the creation of present day US. After the US Civil War, the US government wanted people to move into Wyoming and Nebraska and settle there. The Homestead Act gave people 160 acres of land for a small fee if the independent farmer would live on the land and cultivate it for five years. Building the railroads was fundamental to that effort. Homesteaders needed supplies, and the railroads brought supplies to them. The US government gave extensive grants of land to the railroads in order to encourage settlement, 175,000,000 acres, an area greater than one tenth of the whole of the US. Building the railroads decimated the bison that roamed the plains. Buffalo Bill was hired by the Kansas Pacific Railroad Company, and is reported to have killed more than 4,000 buffalo. Former trappers, turned to hunting the buffalo as well. 200,000 buffalo were killed annually, nearly annihilating the population. Native tribes depended on the buffalo for sustenance. As Gilbert King’s Smithsonian article “Where the Buffalo No Longer Roamed,” states, “By the end of the 19th century, only 300 buffalo were left in the wild.” The decimation of the buffalo in turn decimated the way of life for the plains Indians.

Driving in the final stake of transcontinental railroad drove a stake into the heart of Native Americans’ ability to sustain their way of life. As King’s article states, “Sheridan acknowledged the role of the railroad in changing the face of the American West, and in his Annual Report of the General of the U.S. Army in 1878, he acknowledged that the Native Americans were scuttled to reservations with no compensation beyond the promise of religious instruction and basic supplies of food and clothing—promises, he wrote, which were never fulfilled.” Native people were stripped of their culture, forced to assimilate for survival, in turn this resulted in the US winning its war against Native Americans and their possession of the land.

Cheyenne is known as one of America’s windiest cities. It’s perhaps less well known that in 1882 Cheyenne was the wealthiest city per capita in the world. Wyoming was a lucrative location in those early days, where cattle barons sunk millions of dollars into their deep pockets with the extensive herds they owned. Electric lights brightened streets, and the city had an opera house and a men’s club serving fine food, liquor, and fancy cigars. In 1886 and 1887, however, subzero temperatures and blizzards killed thousands of cattle at one stroke, an event referred to as the Great-Die Up, bringing an end to cattle drives across free range.

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What we become isn’t usually the result of a single story. We live in an interconnected world. We inherit layered histories and stories as well as layered silences. Our understanding of who we are and how we connect with the world around us is lifelong work. While bison and Native American populations were being exterminated and crushed the women’s suffrage movement was also occurring. In 1869 women in Wyoming were the first in the US to receive the right to vote.

As Potawatomi American writer Kaitlin B. Curtice points out, in Simian Jeet Singh’s interview with her on “Anti-Racism as a Spiritual Practice,” America is “a settler colonial state and it’s difficult to reckon with.” Coming to terms with our past is and what it suggests is challenging. Nevertheless, in recognition of the difficult and problematic history regarding how America came into being, I want to better understand and respond to the place I inhabit in American culture and what that means for how I should live.

Coming home to ourselves means in part to understand what our home is and the forces and people that came together to create it. As May Sarton writes in her poem, “Now I Become Myself,” it takes “Time, years, and many places;” perhaps one will be “dissolved and shaken,” as she describes as well. History is complex, our own, and that of a nation or a culture. We are many worlds in one body. Louise Dunlop, in her book, Inherited Silence, writing about how the difficult and uncomfortable history of how America came into being writes, “Settler people experienced a different wounding in this terrible history. We, too, need healing practices to transform the shame and trauma we carry and continue to pass on. That shame is the root of our silence. We need songs poems, inspiration, spiritual practices, and affirmation that make it positive to acknowledge our history.”

Our very existence depends on the support the natural world offers us, as well as the support of people all around us and what we’ve inherited from those who came before us though we may not even know their names or be aware of their actions. I come from a line of settlers, though much of their personal stories I don’t know and have only learned from reading about the history of the time period, the area, people’s histories, and oral stories. Because I know little of my ancestors’ stories, and because they didn’t tell their stories, as a way to try and understand their lives and their challenges, I’m imagining what those stories might be and am writing them. I’m calling to the spirits of my ancestors, so to speak, saying, “This is for you. I’m reaching to understand more of what it means to be human. I want to learn from you.” Recently published in Waterwheel Review, “Remembering Adella,” is written in the voice of a great aunt imagining the voice of her mother, a woman of the grasslands.

Your story may not connect to a grassy plain or rich blue sky. Your story might be rooted in the tropics, a cityscape, snowy mountain or desert, but all stories touch each other on our great web of interbeing of life on this planet. Whatever your story, I wish for you to find a way to be at home, that all wounding from your past be healed, that you find peace with yourself and with those around you. I leave you with this 1888 Antonio de Torres guitar piece, “Home,” played by Andrew York, and a photo from my home in California.

Finding Home

“Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of the moon and the colors of the dawn and dusk.” –Barry Lopez

For some time, I’ve thought living in a village would be ideal. Because villages are small, it’s easier to get to know one’s neighbors and to feel a sense of community. A village would be walkable, making it potentially easier to get things one might need such as groceries. Additionally, often the land where villages are located holds stories of human life moving back in time that give the location character. I’ve loved the villages I’ve visited when traveling: Alvito, in southern Italy, Mystras, Greece, Luang Prabang Laos, Villa de Leyva, Colombia, and Antigua, Guatemala. Each one is filled with interest and beauty.

When I moved back to the US after living abroad for over two and a half decades, I wanted to find a village or small town of character in America to visit or possibly to live in. Several small towns I was aware of are Deadwood, South Dakota, Stillwater, Minnesota, Taos, New Mexico, and La Conner, Washington, though there many other locations throughout America with interesting small towns.

Only a couple of blocks long and a few blocks wide with a population of 1,802 people, I’d never heard of the small community of Graton, California until a little under a year ago. Its small size makes the village very walkable, and in a county known for its good food, the village of Graton has three excellent restaurants known and enjoyed by people in the area. The main street has an art gallery, real estate office, a small liquor/ convenience store, and a couple of antique shops, as well as a few other businesses, and is only a couple of miles from an abundance of other amenities in nearby Sebastopol. 

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Previously, a railroad came into Graton that has now been converted into the Joe Rodota trail where people can walk or bike beneath oak trees and alongside vineyards as well as a small portion of the Atascadero Creek. Recently, a young local set up an afternoon stand on the side of the path selling his homemade horchata and chocolate chip cookies. This time of year, walking the trail brings the delight of inhaling the sweet scent of ripe blackberries.

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Though there are virtually no sidewalks and no city landscaping, Graton is a generally welcoming place with an attractive common area maintained by local citizens known as the Graton Green. Because residents often see each other walking around town or the trail on a regular basis, people often greet each other when passing by.

Located directly off the Gravenstein Highway, beauty surrounds Graton with grape vineyards and apple orchards. The highway got its name because of the history reaching back 200 years of Gravenstein apples grown in the area. One story is the apples were brought in by Russian explores who planted the apples up the coast at Fort Ross. In Ariana Reguzzoni’s  interview with the former poet laureate of Sonoma County, Iris Jamahl Dunkle in The Press Democrat, tells a different story about how the Gravenstein apple came to the area in her poetry book, There’s a Ghost in this Machine of Air, explaining the fruit arrived from “the orchards of Italy, where Prince Carl of Denmark vacationed and first tasted the fruit. He brought it back to northern Germany, where it was grafted and bred to withstand ocean travel and, eventually, brought to the shores of Northern California by settlers.”

Once a central location for processing Gravenstein apples, this historical photo depicts how the plant in Graton looked in 1909, and here you can see those who sorted and packed the apples, and those working to process the apples. Apples dried in Graton were sent to troops in WW2. Good for cooking in pies and applesauce, the Gravenstein doesn’t keep well in storage and was typically commercially processed through drying it or converting it to applesauce. Now that apples can be transported more easily and don’t have to be dried to be preserved, the Gravenstein apple is no longer in demand. While there’s still an apple processing plant in Graton, many of the apples processed there come from Washington state. As Dunkel describes in her poem in the Cider Press Review, “Sweetbitter,” the fruit connects people “to the stories that still whisper on the low roll of a long travelled / sea where salt, like history, lingers on the air.”

Like other cities and villages across America, the land where Graton is located originally belonged to native tribes. In Sonoma County, the native people’s presence of the Cost Miwok and Southern Pomo was recorded by both Russian and Spanish explorers as early as the late 1500s. During the period of the Spanish missions and Mexican occupation of the land, the Coast Miwok and Pomo people were used in servitude for labor. Though their lands were taken from them, the tribes preserved their heritage and cultural identity even after the US federal government no longer recognized the tribe. Through their perseverance and Coast Miwok leader Greg Sarris’s effort, the tribal status was reinstated in 2000. As explained on the Graton Rancheria website, “Since the land of the original Graton Rancheria was transferred to three distributees, now deceased, the only land still belonging to the tribe was a one-acre parcel held in private ownership by one Coast Miwok family.” In 2013 the Graton Resort and Casino located in Rohnert Park south of the village of Graton opened. (A fuller history is available  on the tribe’s website.) 

The land we live on supports us, but often we don’t know much about that land. Commonly, the earth has become merely a backdrop on which human activity plays out. Though we benefit from the land’s gifts, we frequently don’t know the history of the area we inhabit, the stories and myths associated with it. We seldom don’t know what plants and animals are native to our area or what helps them thrive.  When in a relationship with another human, we listen to each other’s stories and respond. We share time, celebrate accomplishments, and learn to take care of each other’s needs. The land has its own way of being, its language and presence. When we see ourselves as in a relationship with the land, we can learn how to understand and respond to it, similarly as we would in other relationships. In his book, Becoming Story, Greg Sarris writes, “Land is a richly layered text, a sacred book, each feature of the natural world was a pneumonic peg in which each individuals could see a story connected to other stories and thus know and find themselves home.” (View Sarris’s book trailer here.) 

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The place any of us chooses to live, be it a village or an apartment house in an urban location, is not only a physical address with a human history. It is as Sarris describes, “a richly layered text” connected to other stories and places, including the plants and animals that live there and the geologic and geographic history that brought it into its current state. We are affected by the land we live on, even if we aren’t particularly aware of it. Our inner life reacts to the outer world.

In Barry Lopez’s book, Crossing Open Grounds, Lopez writes, “The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes.” There’s a lot of fear in people’s response to information shared regarding the effects climate change will have on our planet. Instead of fear, what if we focused our response on developing a personal relationship with the specific piece of earth we live and walk on? Now is a good time to purposefully notice the plants around us and call them by name, and learn something about their behavior and what they like. Now is a good time to learn the names of animals in our environment—the birds that visit our balcony, perhaps, or the mammals that used to inhabit the area before urbanization took hold. Now is a good time to listen to the various languages and sounds of the earth, to nurture a friendship with the other and more than human world. 

David George Haskell offers a wonderful practice for helping us learn how to do that. “Sound,” writes Haskell “…carries within it the imprints of deep time. Listening roots us in the stories of the ancient Earth.” On Emergence Magazine’site, Haskell invites us to participate in several playful listening practices. One suggestion is to pause for five minutes at “pre-selected intervals” at different times of the day and to “send our sensory awareness out into the world to see what stirs.” Afterwards, he recommends reflecting on the shapes of the sounds.

Wherever you live, I hope you find ways to nurture your sense of belonging and friendship with the land you walk on and call home.

Beauty and the Magic of Art

What Tony Taught Us

The young men on the boat rushed by Napoleon wrasse, lionfish, 
and other marvels—so much life they missed where you glided at sixty feet 

in their hurry to get to one hundred feet, though less life can be seen
that deep. But they wanted to photograph themselves there.

Your dive buddy was an older man who lingered over rocks browsing,
gazed into crevices, poked his head under ledges and went slowly. 

Now we go slowly too. 

Bringing magnifying glasses, we examine scales on coral trout, 
contemplate a dart fish’s translucent eyes, peer inside corals’ mouths, 

studying their miniscule movements, explore the color glowing inside
a nudibranch’s skin, its wavering gill, and its cerata’s spunky fringe.

We move along leisurely, mesmerized by appearances and activities.
The point of diving is to observe, to look deeply, to let go into being

a stranger, and to absorb a world not your own, to immerse yourself
in amazement, soak in its presence, let yourself become one with it. 

To notice, to see, and to see again. 

Anna Citrino, from Buoyant

Beneath the ocean’s surface is a world of wild beauty. It’s a place worth moving through slowly because moving with slowness allows one to see more. A central focus of diving is simply to experience the sea’s environment and what presents itself there. Something amazing might appear, or it might not, but the diver is on the lookout for what might surprise or awe. What looks like a stone might be a fish if you look carefully. Tiny seahorses might be hiding on a piece of coral. Observing coral feeding is fascinating. As the poem above describes, “The point of diving is to observe, to look deeply.” When we take time to look closely, allow ourselves to sink into a quiet space of being with what we observe, we can often notice details we otherwise wouldn’t. Simone Weil wrote, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” If unmixed attention is prayer, then diving is a kind of prayer. A diver’s entire body is attentive to the world the diver is immersed in. To dive is to purposefully let go into an unfamiliar world that functions in an entirely different way. Simply witnessing the variety of life in the sea is astonishing.

Artists, too, are keen observers whose work requires focus. A skilled artist brings the world alive for us in a new way, allows us to see it more fully. New Mexico artist Joseph Galvan has been carving lucite for several decades, and a number of his pieces include under water scenes illuminated from below, such as these fabulous jelly fish. Something I especially love about this work in lucite is how the subjects seem to float in clear water. Galvan’s jelly fish carvings are full of interesting texture, their forms alive with a sense of fluid movement. Looking at the carving feels something akin to watching actual jellyfish.

People’s creative efforts enrich our lives. They bring meaning, and help us to be more fully aware of the world around us and how others are experiencing it. We need more beauty in the world, are hungry for it. Like other artists, Joseph Galvan brings beauty to our lives. To do creative work over long periods of years is challenging and demanding. It takes a great deal of fortitude, resolve and prolonged focus to bring one’s imaginative vision to fruition. The earth, too, is in an ongoing creative process. Think of the millions of years it has taken for the natural world to evolve into places like Yosemite, Uluru, and the Great Barrier Reef! When we see natural beauty or we look at great art, it changes us because such observation reaches directly into the heart and touch us with life.

Gregory Wolf, in his essay “The Wound of Beauty,” on Image, Art, Faith, and Mystery site states, “Beauty also has the capacity to help us to value the good, especially the goodness of the most ordinary things. The greatest epics, the most terrible tragedies, all have one goal: to bring us back to the ordinary and help us to love and to cherish it….That is the magic of art. It may spread a huge canvas, it may be bold and baroque, but its essence is to remind us of the everyday and to transmute it into a sacrament.” Scuba diving isn’t the only experience that helps reconnect one to the wonder of being alive. I hope you find the practices or experiences that bring beauty into your life and that help you recognize the preciousness of even the seemingly simple things of life such as water in all its wonder. As Wolf suggests, the ordinary experiences of life are beautiful when we have eyes to see them.

Anna

This coming June 9, at 5:00 pm Pacific Time I will be reading from Buoyant my book of poems about diving. If you would like to participate in the Zoom meeting, send me a message and I will send you the link.

You can order Buoyant from Bellowing Ark Press here.

Invitation

The ocean regulates and influences climate, produces 70 percent of earth’s oxygen, and approximately 94 percent of the world’s wildlife are found in the ocean. June 8 is World Oceans Day.

I’m inviting you to a poetry reading from my book, Buoyant (Bellowing Ark Press) 5:00 pm Pacific Time June 9 in celebration of the ocean waters and of diving. I’ll be reading together with Jacqueline Hill who will be reading poems on a variety of topics, also a Bellowing Ark Press author. If you’d like to attend, send me a note (contact details are on this page) and I will send you the link.

During the reading, you’ll encounter manta, whale shark, and shoals of fish. The reading will last one hour and will include music and underwater photos. I hope you can join.

I donate half the cost of the book to the 5 Gyres organization for anyone who purchases Buoyant directly from me. The 5 Gyres organization works to reduce plastics in the ocean by advocating for better regulation of plastic use and disposal, as well as conducting research to find viable solutions for reducing the plastic entering the oceans. If you would like to purchase, Buoyant, send me a private message and I can send you the book. (See contact information on this page.)

Even Dolphins Like the Blues

The water was cold—enough to make one’s head ache, 
but we were told dolphins there liked singing, 

so, we swam inside the icy water singing with mouths closed,
humming tunes loudly as we could, hoping for a visitation.

Then they came, dolphins whirling around us in circles
as if on a rotating carousel, their bodies dipping 

and bobbing, squeaking along with the tune.
We spun and twirled with them, dancing together

as we could, dizzy with delight, until the chilly water
motivated us to climb back aboard the boat.

When a dolphin neared the ship, a friend called out
“Get your harmonica!” and you played a few riffs 

from the blues. A dolphin wheeled from the water,
tossed his body into a pinwheel, spinning flips

as long as the music continued. What do we know
of the world around us, how life waits for us 

to offer it our attention, rising to greet us from
hidden wild places? What might our world become,

what joy embodied if we more often
offered the music rising from our soul?

What others have said about Buoyant:

In Anna Citrino’s lyrical new poetry collection Buoyant, she guides us through a magical, alluring, ever-changing world of the sea and its denizens, many of whom she encounters on scuba dives at close range and with heart-stopping clarity and vision. The poems are sensual and full of wonder, “… break(ing) us open with surprise, with awe—/enough to allow us to grow humble, vulnerable/ enough that we could rise from the water/ wanting to learn how to live.”  –Gail Entrekin, Editor, Canary (canarylitmag.org)

With vivid, precise and loving description, we are introduced to creatures we may or may not know, or perhaps will see now in a different light. – Magdalena Montagne, poet, author of Earth My Witness

In Buoyant, It is not only the eyes Anna appeals to but through the ear she brings the sounds of the sea. —Tom Postlewaite, Montessori educator and sailor

I recommend this book unreservedly to anyone who enjoys fine poetry or has interest in the rich life of the sea. —Michael L. Newell, author of Diddley-Bop-She-Bop, Making My Peace, and Meditation of an Old Man Standing on a Bridge.  

Her scientific observations become mesmerizing meditations as she blends beginner’s mind with a mystic’s appetite for wonder. –Mary Quillin, poet

Anna Citrino carries the reader fluidly and vividly through coral gardens brilliant with living color. Her words take you on vibrant journeys. A poet diver who has plied ocean shoals slowly, with purpose to observe glorious biodiversity. –Dr. Martha Began Crawford, science educator and dive enthusiast 

Stepping Into Spring

“The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.” –Tennessee Williams

With the abundance of rain this year here in California, spring has been a long time coming. While it was still raining yesterday, today it’s sunny. Eventually, sun and warmth arrives. Seasons change. I’ve been dreaming of wildflowers that will appear on the hillsides. I’m remembering the abundance of flowers in gardens I experienced while living in the UK, and am watching for flower seeds I planted months ago to break through the earth and grow.

Five and a half hours south of me and 60 miles east of San Luis Obispo in the central part of California, lies the Carrizo Plains, a vast grasslands and the home of some of the largest concentration of rare plants and animals in all of California. In the year of a super bloom when there has been abundant rainfall and the conditions are right, the Carrizo Plains is also the home to some of the most incredible display of wildflowers one can imagine. Take a look. I dream of standing in the midst of that radiance. I want to revel in the wonder of their presence, want to be wrapped in the sight of that beauty’s embrace.

Given the severity of problems in the world, it might seem frivolous to speak of flowers. What is the value of flowers in comparison to the serious topics of loss and despair we find in the news day after day? There’s so much division in the world, so much violence and the threat of violence. The Guardian reports one recent news host here in America who told his audience it’s “probably not the best time to give up your AR15s.” In Tennessee representatives are expelled for participating in a protest for gun control after a deadly shooting in Nashville. The violence done to other humans, however, isn’t separate from the violence done to the natural world.

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While flowers might on the surface seem frivolous, unnecessary to the pragmatic requirements of every day life and unrelated to the violence around us, in actuality flowers are necessary to our existence. Flowers add not only beauty to our lives, they’re also essential as a food source for pollinators like hummingbirds, bats, moths, and bees. These pollinators are responsible for major amounts of our food such as soy, fruit, nuts and grains. Seventy of the top 100 food crops are pollinated by bees. According to the Center for Food Safety, together these 100 food crops supply 90% of the world’s nutrition. “We can’t produce nutritious food in this country without bees,” says a longtime agricultural entomologist working for the USDA in The Guardian article, “‘Bees are Sentient,’ Inside the Stunning Brain of Nature’s Hardest Workers.” In the 2021-2022 growing year, however, 39% of commercial bee colonies collapsed. The previous year’s loss of 39.7% was the highest mortality rate on record. Those studying the cause of bee colonies collapse think that the use of pesticides on commercial farms and monoculture farming are central factors contributing to their loss. Both human loss and the collapse of bee colonies are symptoms of systematic imbalances and blindness toward the interconnection of all life.

When we nurture the earth, it nurtures us. Renewal isn’t always easy though. Tending a plant or working in a garden is a good teacher of this reality, as Ken Weisner describes in his poem, “The Gardener.”

You get down on your knees in the dark earth—alone
for hours in hot sun, yanking weed roots, staking trellises,
burning your shoulders, swatting gnats; you strain your muscled
midwestern neck and back, callous your pianist’s hands.

Weisner clearly communicates how creating a garden and bringing new life into being is a lot more than watching blossoms unfold. Before the blossoms there is significant amount of hard and humbling effort. You’re down on your knees in the dirt with the worms. It’s hot, as Weisner describes, or it’s wet, and sometimes before you finish work, your shoulders start to ache or your back. Why do it, some might say. Why do we change or try to begin anything new when it takes so much effort? When you’ve pulled the weeds and prepared the earth and finally see life eventually emerge after a long period of continuous nurturing, it truly feels wondrous. This is why. You sense your connection to the wonder of existence. When you see new life emerge from the earth, you feel the life in yourself as well. Weisner explains sense clearly at the end of his poem.

And when a humble sprout climbs like a worm up out of death,
you are there to bless it, in your green patch, all spring and summer long,

purified by labor, confessed by its whisperings, connected
to its innocence. So when you heft a woody, brushy tangle, or stumble

inside grimy, spent by earth, I see all the sacraments in place—
and the redeemed world never smelled so sweet.

Beholding the earth’s green patch all summer that you worked hard to bring into being, blessing it with your effort, as Weisner states, does indeed feel sweet.

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I don’t know why people sometimes hold values that function to work against their own best interest. I do know I want beauty to persist. I want to live so that my actions nurture beauty and help it to thrive. In the small garden I’ve started, I’ve noticed how steadfastly the violas and daffodils persist despite the ongoing downpour of rain. Though they seem fragile and delicate, flowers have a way of holding up, a way of returning despite what the many ways the environmental conditions limit them. They want to persist and do.

Why is it that so many long to travel so they can stand in the midst of wildflowers, wanting surround themselves with their vibrant color, so much so that places like Elsinore in Southern California had as many as 100,000 people came in 2019 to see the area’s poppy strewn hills on a single weekend day, as this article in the Guardian reports? Perhaps it’s because standing in a garden in full bloom feels something like standing on holy ground.

Yes, I’m longing for flowers, banks and blankets of them. I want to walk under arbors showered with rose blossom or wisteria. I yearn to wander fields wild with yellow, golden poppies, or the pink hum of owls clover. Rich wands of purple delphinium, the orange staccato of pimpernel, the large timpani statement of a sunflower, soft melody of a ranunculus folding me into its round center, the sweet violin perfume of violet lifting me into its delicate music–I want the entire world of flowers to embrace me. I want to stand in and walk amongst flowers. I want to grow flowers. I want to wake in the morning and tell them how beautiful they are, how grateful I am to be alive in a flowering world where bees go on working.

Gardens are sanctuaries that bring us sweetness after months of winter and hard work. I hope you can find a meadow, a hillside, some small glen or garden to visit or tend. I hope you find your own way to hear the flowers humming with bees, to absorb the music of their color and the life of bees. I hope you hear, smell touch and see all the ways life is reaching out to you this day, and that you find a way to become new.

Wrapped in Green

I arise today
Through the strength of heaven:
Light of sun,
Radiance of moon,
Splendor of fire,
Speed of lightning,
Swiftness of wind,
Depth of sea,
Stability of earth,
Firmness of rock.
From St. Patrick’s Breastplate Prayer

After living indoors for weeks because of winter storms bringing record snowfall and ongoing rain or or working inside for months, when finally able to walk outside in the green world, we feel its life-giving qualities. Today, a pause between atmospheric rivers, was just such a day, making it possible to wander down a path in our area we’ve not walked before. It’s a delight to take a path, not knowing exactly where it goes, simply to follow it and see what presents itself. Wild flowers, leaf-perfumed air, and birds gliding through got me thinking about how the weather affects the weather of my inner garden. After a walk at Helen Putnam Regional Park, the weather in my inner garden is one of calm skies with soft light with the chance sprinkle of blossoms.

There is much to be said for the wonder of desert lands, the exquisite form that desert worlds reveal. Desert scapes bring us in direct contact with the Earth’s elemental shape, the magnificence of mineral texture, as in this overview in Saudi outside of Jeddah. As beautiful as the desert is, after months of gray skies and the hope of spring in the air, right now I’m longing for green. 

Nature’s green offers tranquility, calm, and restores a sense of wellbeing. New research at Cornell indicates that spend as little as ten minutes a day in nature can help college students feel happier and reduce mental and physical stress. Robert Jimison’s CNN article “Why we all need some green in our lives” states that a “2016 study found that living in or near green areas was linked with longer life expectancy and improved mental health in female participants. Another eight year study of 100,000 women showed that those “who lived in the greenest areas had a 12% lower death rate than women living in the least green areas.”

Lucille H. Brockway’s, “science and colonial expansion: the role of the British Royal Botanic garden,” clarifies how Britain, (and the West in general) has historically viewed the plant world as an object to be manipulated for bringing economic advantage. Michael Moore’s film, Planet of the Humans, directed by Jeff Gibbs, further demonstrates this idea, emphasizing the dire situation we have brought ourselves into as a result of not living in union with nature in a regenerative way. When the natural world is viewed as merely a backdrop, our spirits become impoverished. It takes time spent in the natural world to be able to hear its language. In his poem, “The Language of Trees,” Eran Williams writes,

 

When we hear the language of trees,

will we hear the season’s pulse,

and find the heart’s beat is but an echo?

 

Nurturing our relationship with nature, as with any relationship, helps us understand its language and way of being. Observe something closely across a period of time, and you will hear the nuances of its voice, discover  its moods in greater depth and detail. We grow in recognition of how our life is connected to the natural world. 

 

There’s a variety of ways we might nurture a relationship with the natural world. Santa Cruz’s Brighton and Jim Denevan’s sand art could be a starting place to encourage you to create our own environmental art. To begin more basically, you could choose to draw a few lines on paper that represents the textures of the sounds around you, or you could photograph patterns or textures in nature, or write a dialog with a neighborhood tree or back balcony flower. You might create a piece of music based on the tones or rhythms in a the landscape or skyscape, or simply create questions about something seen or heard. Alternatively, you might begin learning the names of plants in your neighborhood, find out if they are native or nonnative plants and why that might matter. You might join together with others to go on walks or to appreciate something in nature such as ferns, rocks, or clouds as do those who have joined the Cloud Appreciation Society.

 

 

As we search for a closer connection and understanding of the natural world, we gradually grow into relationship with it. Nurturing a connection to the natural world nurtures our inner landscapes and garden. When we take care of the earth, it takes care of us. In her poem, Today’s Book of Delights, after Ross Gay, Teresa Williams writes

 

He is right; if we choose to look,
we just might believe it’s there
in the first chirp of the day and the body awakening to hear it,
in the black wings weaving through champagne leaves,

 

This image is a beautiful one, the kind of image we hope to meet when we go out into nature, but recognizing our connection to the natural world also includes embracing the whole of what it means to be part of the natural world. As the poem concludes, Williams writes about delight even in the midst of diminishing life,

 

or each small note from the universe
and its cheerful persistence, even today,

with a new tumor on the back of my dog’s leg,
to encourage delight
in her oblivious exuberance, and let that be

what sustains me.

 

How difficult it is sometimes to keep on tending our inner gardens when pain or rain, storms and sorrows keep coming. As Willams writes, however, observing and listening to the small notes from the universe can help sustain us.

 

Let the sounds of the Sea of Japan and the gibbon calling in Indonesia carry you across the world. Listen to the sounds of cicada in the Australian bush, or millions of monarch butterflies taking flight in Mexico (flight starting at about 3:40 seconds into the video,) or nightfall on the Zabalo River in Ecuador (scroll to the bottom of the screen page.) Did you know corn “talks” as it grows and that ice can sing as can sand dunes? Listen to the voice of dunes in Colorado and Morocco.  David George Haskel, author of The Songs of Trees, writes how plants help define acoustic quality of a landscape and he has recorded sounds of trees in different time zones and different parts of the world. You can listen to his recordings of a cottonwood at Confluence Park, Denver, and a Green ash in Sewanee, Tennessee or record sounds in your own neighborhood. Rain taps on the roof, wind rustled branches, frogs serenades in spring, there are so many ways nature brings the world alive with sound. Scientists are doing some very interesting things with translating electrical impulses from plants into music. Listen to the rings of a tree as a camera reads the grooves and turns them into notes,  and find a new way to perceive the natural world. Also truly amazing is how you can hear various sounds of our solar system and a compression of 760,00 years of the universe via instruments that pick up and translate radiation belts, solar flares, the big bang into sound. We only have sound here on Earth because Earth has an atmosphere. We can explore more of the planet and universe’s sonic scapes  or listen to how Harvard scientists have translated 400 light years across the Milky Way, the Crab Nebula, and the Supernova 1987A into sound.  The garden of life is immense and imbued with marvel.

 

Poets listen closely to the world around them, interpreting what they mean for how they might take us into the heart of ourselves and the world we inhabit. In the 1994 film, Il Postino, the characters of the postman and Pablo Neruda record the local sounds of their island, with the purpose of helping the postman use metaphor to write a love letter. The earth speaks to us. Listening closely to the earth helps us to write a love letter to being alive.

What are the sounds of your home that have written themselves on your heart? Acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton says the art of listening is dying but we can open our windows or doors or simply sit calmly in our house and listen. What love letter of the earth do you want to hear over and over. When you listen to your heart’s garden what does it tell you? As Louis Armstrong’s song reminds us, it’s a wonderful world with so much to explore.