Whatever you are thinking, feeling this November 6th morning, I wish you both solace and hope today as we march forward into the unknown. Let’s do it together, with the power of words and art to uplift.
“The Peace of Wild Things
by Wendell Berry (1968)
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
From The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (Counterpoint, 1999)
I’m a big fan of poet MaryOliver (1935-2019). Her passion for the natural world intertwined with intense human emotion both inspire and challenge our assumptions.
Credit: Orion Magazine
“Wild Geese” (2004) is one of her most popular and often quoted poems. When I reread it recently, I thought it particularly suited for our times.
American culture is rife with public scrutiny, shame, ridicule, and censorship. Daily messages of outrage tell us that we don’t measure up. We are condemned for our beliefs and even whom we love.
“Wild Geese” is a reminder that you are enough. You don’t need to live someone else’s definition of what is “good”.
You can move past your mistakes. Each day begins anew. No matter your err of yesterday, the sun still rises and sets.
You need not be weighed down by guilt or shame. You can fly wild and free.
WILD GEESE
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
April 2021 marks the 25th anniversary of National Poetry month.
The honorary month was first created by the Academy of American Poets in partnership with Jonathan Galassi, President of Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1996.
Poetry has been my pandemic companion. Comfort, connection, and inspiration.
With spring comes hope. Let’s celebrate!
Join me in spirit at the Academy’s first virtual gala celebration, Poetry & The Creative Mind. Enjoy an evening championing the power of poetry in our culture and lives.
Date: Thurs., April 29th, 7:30 pm. Event chair, Meryl Streep.
Registration free. Donations appreciated. Proceeds go toward poetry education programs and materials for classroom teachers. Register here.
David Whyte’s, “What To Remember When Waking“ is one of my favorites and seems just right for today.
*. *. *
In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake, coming back to this life from the other more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world where everything began, there is a small opening into the new day which closes the moment you begin your plans.
What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough for the vitality hidden in your sleep.
To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others. To remember the other world in this world is to live in your true inheritance.
You are not a troubled guest on this earth, you are not an accident amidst other accidents you were invited from another and greater night than the one from which you have just emerged.
Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window toward the mountain presence of everything that can be what urgency calls you to your one love? What shape waits in the seed of you to grow and spread its branches against a future sky?
Is it waiting in the fertile sea? In the trees beyond the house? In the life you can imagine for yourself? In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?
Thank you fellow artists, writers, bloggers, educators, dancers, poets, philosophers, musicians, homeschoolers, trauma survivors, family and friends, near and far for your virtual hugs, kind words, and listening ears.
Thank you for finding creative ways of connection during this Corona pandemic. Thank you for sharing your art and spreading light and hope to others.
I’m still in survival mode, trying to get my bearings. Absorbing unwelcome changes. Surrendering to uncertainty.
In times of crisis, the great poets and writers can offer us solace and momentum.
I leave you the words of W.B. Yeats, from The Celtic Twilight(1893), a lyrical tribute to Irish folklore.
Please let me know how you are doing.
I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world…
EVELYN KRIEGER 