I would give my all
to this one and only blooming,
every cell attentive
to soil and sunshine
in my sweet suckling
desire for water and light.
Perfume and pigment to petal, please,
then welcome, hummingbird,
butterfly, and bee
to my prodigal promiscuity.
Pollen to pistil,
let us give and take our fill
as if night will never fall
or winter ever come.
What do you hear, Mary Camille?
On this first morning of the Labor Day weekend
I hear the roll of tires on asphalt
even through my double-paned windows.
I hear the mourning dove’s coo,
here I am, and where are you?
I hear the rumble of the espresso machine
like a locomotive grinding up a mountain grade
and the hiss of the frother,
spoon clinking against cup.
I hear the thump of squirrel paws
landing on the roof
and a rustling of privet leaves
on the limb he just leapt from.
I hear the silence
in a city without electricity,
the gurgle of receding floodwaters,
the last, labored rasp of the old woman
in the convalescent home.
I hear the clap and roar
of the departing helicopter,
the moans of those left behind,
barely make out the whisper
of a knife pulled from its sheath.
I hear the startled cry of the child
when another aftershock shakes her world,
the creak and clatter of shifting rubble,
the crinkle of plastic
as an empty water bottle is crunched
and tossed on a pile of trash.
I hear the crackle of wildfire
and roaring wind the fire itself creates,
the pop of exploding pinecones,
stamp of boots on earth,
a curse.
I hear the clackety clack
of the Giant Dipper gripping the track,
the cries of thrilled delight
when it crests the hill
and races gravity down.
I hear cheerful old tunes
on the antique organ
urging Looff’s painted ponies on
in their eternal loop,
the clatter of metal rings
tossed towards the clown’s gaping mouth.
I hear gulls and waves breaking,
sand lapping seawater,
the ocean’s own merry-go-round.
I hear the surf
like the heartbeat of the earth
I hear the surf.
Inspired by the poet’s question to himself, “What do you hear Walt Whitman?” in his poem “Salut au Monde!”
The privet, tipped
with lacy sprays
of tiny white blossoms,
drops petals like confetti
on the round table below.
I should sweep, but
halfway to fall,
I don’t want to let
the party end,
not yet,
not at all.
The rumble and buzz of cars
that blots out birdsong
is but one bleating sound
in a constellation of noise,
a devil (if I believed in the devil)-
designed distraction from
the voice in the cave
of my heart
that I do believe in.
So, I will arise and go now,
and go to New Camaldoli
and there a cell of silence seek,
a shady seat beneath
the fruiting fig tree, and
Mother Pacific,
O Father Sky,
a view of blue further than I can see.
Drench me in Your breezy quietude
and remind me in the cooing of the dove
that I am nothing if I have not love.
With appreciation to St. Paul (1 Corinthians 13:1-3) and W.B. Yeats (The Lake Isle of Innisfree)
If you realize you have enough, you are truly rich.
Tao te Ching
Of all the places I might go on my spring break as pandemic restrictions began to lift earlier this year, I chose Joshua Tree National Park. I craved the austere beauty of the desert in a way I couldn’t explain, but when I arrived in that wide-open wild landscape of dry sand and iconic rock formations, I realized that the book I was reading, The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here, must have sent me to the desert to look for role models of how to use less.
Who would have guessed that a science book would turn out to be the perfect reading for Lent? A spiritual text is a more obvious choice, Abandonment to Divine Providence say, or Prayer in the Cave of the Heart, but The Story of More by Hope Jahren had been waiting on my to-be-read pile for months. I loved her funny, poignant memoir Lab Girl and was curious what a smart botanist with a good sense of humor would have to say about climate change.
For a book loaded with statistics, The Story of More is surprisingly easy to read, partly thanks to Jahren’s casual, engaging style, partly to how relevant and vivid her statistics are. Instead of stating coal and oil use in tons and gallons, for example, she paints a picture: “Since 1969, the nations of the globe have burned enough coal to fill a grave the size of Texas and a volume of oil large enough to fill Lake Pontchartrain three times over.” Or she simply puts things in perspective: “waste of edible food has increased such that it now equals the amount of food needed to adequately feed all of the undernourished people on Earth.” Statistics like these break by heart.
So maybe I should have said that her book is readable instead of easy to read because in fact, reading it was hard, hard in all kinds of ways – painful to acknowledge the species that have gone extinct, frightening to consider devastating heat waves and crop failures, uncomfortable above all, to recognize our greed and waste and that we might need to change. When I say our and we, by the way, I mean those of us who live in the 36 countries of the OECD (including North America, Europe, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan). We’re the ones using the most energy and throwing food away.
Step by step Jahren takes us through population growth, the ways we grow (and waste) food, and how we make and use energy – not to make us feel guilty, but to explain how we got to climate change. She writes clearly, and even if the book is disturbing to read, it’s easy to understand. Ultimately, it’s hopeful because Jahren has ideas, just as her subtitle promises, for where to go from here. She sums them up in a simple motto: use less, share more. That motto is what made this book the perfect read for a season of fasting and almsgiving and maybe subconsciously what sent me to Joshua Tree looking for inspiration.
There, where the Mojave meets the Colorado Desert, plants and animals have evolved to survive in hot sun with little water. In contrast, as a human being I needed to slather on sunscreen, wear a shade hat, and drink at least a gallon of water a day. So how do desert flora and fauna do it? The Joshua tree, according to Blue Planet Biomes, turns its spiky leaves upwards to catch any moisture in the air and stores the water in its fibrous limbs and trunk; it also has an extra root system for storing surplus water. Human beings don’t have eons to evolve our physiology to that degree, but maybe our ingenuity can save us.
Consider the tobacco moth caterpillar that naturalist Bernd Heinrich describes in his essay “Reading Tree Leaves.” In the Mojave this caterpillar grabs tight with its rear legs to the stem that attaches a jimsonweed leaf to the plant’s stalk, reaches its forelegs out to the tip of the leaf, and nibbles away at the edge while using the remainder of the leaf for shade, its own little green umbrella.
Climate change can feel so overwhelming that it’s paralyzing. At the end of her book Jahren suggests that the reader choose just one issue to focus on, one that tugs at your heart or that you worry about when you can’t sleep at three in the morning. Maybe it’s world hunger or ocean pollution, national parks or green energy. Pick an issue that matters enough to you that you’re willing to make a sacrifice for it and start by learning more about it. That’s exactly what I plan to do in future blog posts.
Which environmental issue is calling to you for action? Please reply in the comments!
Ann Thomas is a freeelance writer and illustrator living in Portland, Oregon.
We’re all in this together,
looking for the songs to sing
that will hold the world together.
We might look to the soldier or scientist
to save us,
but the hero sits in silence before dawn,
looks out the window at the moon
slender and radiant in her old age,
and listens,
listens below ticking clock
and hooting owl,
listens beyond the whisper of candle flame
and the tinkle from the bells
the ants wear round their feet.
Deep in the earth,
deep in the cave of her heart,
angels sing,
and the poet transcribes.
Originally published in Second Wind: Words & Art of Hope & Resilience.
Turn off the TV
and silence your phone.
Outside your window
soft rain shimmers
like a silver veil.
Listen to its serenade,
drops hitting leaves,
splashing into the birdbath.
Then attune your ears
to the silence under
this murmur and patter.
What do you hear?
The Lord of the Dance
calling to you,
ephphatha!
Be opened!
After reading Mark 7:32-34. Title from “The Winter Apple” by David Whyte. Just published in my parish newsletter, Holy Cross Community Voices.
I found Lauren Elkin’s book Flaneuse in the travel writing section of Bookshop Santa Cruz, but it is pleasantly hard to categorize: part memoir (a young woman leaves suburbia for the big city and eventually a life abroad), part musing on culture and feminism, part travelog. As any francophone could tell from the title, the focus is on walking. I don’t alas speak French, so I needed Lauren Elkin’s translation of flaneur: one who wanders aimlessly. She concentrates on the woman walker, the flaneuse, whom she defines specifically as “a determined resourceful woman keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.”
Elkin herself fits this definition, and so do the women she writes about in her homage to the cities of New York, Paris, London, and Venice, to seeing them on foot, as a woman. (She writes about Tokyo too, but her relationship with that city seems as fraught and unfortunate as her relationship with the man she followed there.) Because my bent is towards literature, I especially enjoyed the chapters about Virginia Woolf in London and George Sand in Paris in which Elkin skillfully blends their relationship to those cities with her own, mixing literary reflections with travelog and memoir.
That doesn’t mean, however, that I didn’t also appreciate her forays into art, history, and politics. Reading about revolution and the history of the protest march in Paris, I found an explanation for the impulse that pulled me into the streets of Santa Cruz on January 21, 2017 even though I wasn’t sure what difference the Women’s March would make. “Marching is an instinctive response to feeling wronged, or desperate, or compelled to make a statement,” Elkin writes. I felt all three of those things after the 2016 election. “It makes us feel stronger to be part of a group,” she continues. “It feels good. Marching is a political act, but it’s a social one as well. We … feel we belong to something bigger than us.” I marched that day with my mother and my sister, friends, neighbors, and strangers, while my best friend joined over 470,000 people in Washington, D.C. and millions marched around the world. It did feel good, but Elkin recognizes the risk too. She describes participating in a march in Paris that splinters when the police block the street. She inadvertently follows a group of anarchists and ends up as part of a mob. “I felt uneasy. It was too easy to be led who knows where, by who knows whom, to do who knows what.” Her accidental experience stands in sharp contrast the mob that overran the Capitol on Wednesday. The insurrectionists might think that Trump led them there to stop the certification of an election he falsely claimed was stolen, but I can’t help thinking how satisfying the sight of that rampage on the house of the American people must have been to anarchists everywhere.
My motto is solvitur ambulando, it can be solved by walking. Like Martha Gelhorn I find flânerie “as necessary as solitude: that is how the compost keeps growing in the mind.” But I’m not a city person. Although I’ve meandered happily in Paris, London, Istanbul, and New York, in truth the city quickly becomes overstimulating for me, oppressive even and exhausting. I have to retreat to a hotel room to recover or better yet to the country where I can walk a quiet lane or a path in the woods. Yet Elkin managed to sweep me up in the romance of flaneuse-ing around a city, and maybe precisely because the pandemic has put it out of reach, I now fantasize about flying to Paris with a pair of comfortable shoes and my notebook. Paris is where Elkin has made her home and the city she writes most about, a city whose streets I too have wandered many times over the last forty years, with friends and sweethearts, with my sisters and by myself, so I’m seduced equally by Elkin’s evocative writing and my own memories.
“There is a sense of the city you can’t plot on a map or a phone,” she says, and I long for that elusive sense, to roam aimlessly, to trust where my feet and chance might take me. What would I observe this time, “keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city,” as I strolled through the Marais or the Luxembourg Gardens? When I got tired and overstimulated, what would I write as I sat in a café people-watching and drinking café crème?
Yet here comes my inner realist to rein in the romantic. It’s January, the weather is miserable, maybe I’ll wait till summer. For now, I’ll sit with a notebook here at home, enjoying the view out my window of the winter garden and armchair traveling with an accomplished writer who knows how to share “the liberating possibilities of a good walk.”
On the winter solstice a few friends joined me on my patio, all of us masked and sitting in a circle several feet apart, for an afternoon of writing together. The nights were cold that week of the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, the mornings crisp, but at one-thirty on the sunny patio it was too warm for us to believe that winter had really arrived.
Sarojani looked up and asked Barbara, the painter, “What color blue is this sky?”
“Cerulean,” she answered.
We took off sweaters, put on broad-brimmed hats, and I read John O’Donohue’s poem “In Praise of Fire” as a blessing for us and also as a prompt for the writing we would do together:
As short as the time
From spark to flame,
So brief may the distance be
Between heart and being.
For thirty minutes in the Santa Cruz sunshine, we labored over notebooks and laptop, seeking that secret inspired place in each of us that might birth a poem, that could reveal the depths of what we really know. On the shortest day of the year the sun dips quickly, and cool shadows were spreading across the garden as we shared what we’d written. My poem began
May each new drop of light
in the lengthening days
fall into the dark well
where anyone might forget
the names we are called to say.
Even in the dark
may we remember …
“You write a lot of prayers,” Barbara pointed out when I finished and then, noticing John O’Donohue’s book on the table, asked, “What’s the difference between a prayer and a blessing?”
Well, that’s easy, I thought, but as I tried to formulate an answer, I was flummoxed. Are they the same? Is a blessing a form of prayer? Kim suggested that a prayer is offered, a blessing is bestowed. After they left, I pulled my Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary off the shelf and looked up the verb to bless. Maybe part of the reason I was confused when I tried to answer Barbara’s question is that blessing carries multiple meanings:
To pray has fewer definitions in my dictionary:
As I’d thought, there is overlap between these two actions. To invoke divine care or to praise God is both to bless and to pray, but that first definition of bless, to hallow or consecrate by religious rite or word, seemed to stand alone.
In my Catholic tradition the power to consecrate rests in the hands of the ordained priest. I learned this at age eight when I made my First Holy Communion. Only the priest can perform the sacramental rite that turns ordinary bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ. Yet he clearly isn’t a magician. He calls on the power of God to make the bread and wine holy. Only through divine action does transubstantiation take place. I think my first instinct was correct, blessing is a form of prayer, and so was Kim’s, a prayer is offered, a blessing bestowed.
The day I put on my white lace dress and veil to make my First Communion, my grandmother gave me a rosary as a gift. After Mass my mother took me to our pastor to ask for his blessing on it. He made a Sign of the Cross over the beads while saying some words I couldn’t quite hear, maybe something like this prayer I found online: may those who devoutly use this rosary to pray be blessed, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. “Amen,” my mother finished, and I quickly copied her. Although I wouldn’t have used Merriam-Webster’s words to describe what happened, it was clearly something special, yet now that I think about it, not so different from one of the very first prayers I learned, grace before dinner: Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts …
Objects and buildings, animals and people may all receive a blessing, and John O’Donohue believes that as human beings we each have the power to give a blessing too. “I never doubted that I could bless,” Kim shared during our gathering on the winter solstice, but despite learning to say grace from an early age, as a Catholic it took me a long time to realize, and I thank the role models who showed me that I too could perform this priestly act. Over the years I have joined in a blessing way for a pregnant mother, led ritual cleansings of new homes, laid hands on sick friends, blessed travelers, knit prayers into shawls, and anointed women with water from Brigit’s sacred well in Ireland.
“It would be lovely if we could rediscover our power to bless one another,” John O’Donohue says in his book To Bless the Space Between Us. “Despite all the darkness, human hope is based on the instinct that at the deepest level of reality some intimate kindness holds sway. This is the heart of blessing.”
At the end of an apocalyptic year, still in the midst of a global pandemic, at the beginning of what will likely be a hard winter, I believe with John O’Donohue that an intimate kindness prevails, and I call on this kindness to bless you and keep you. When you find yourself in darkness, may it shine upon you.
After the light
beams into the inner chamber
on the shortest day,
after the souls of the dead have departed,
silence fills the hollow space
like the beat of the drum just did.
The underland will feed it
like a candle perpetually snuffed,
scent of melted wax and burnt wick
in the dark.
Above, nights pass
and days come
in the temple of time
that makes equals of us all.
The earth blooms into spring,
flowers and fruits through summer,
and releases once more into fall.
On that first winter day,
when the priestess returns
before dawn,
lint and tinder in her pouch,
but guided by memory and touch,
this is what she hears:
the silence of stone.
No words, no message,
just the time-nourished silence.
Rebirth is the gift of the deep,
to return as servant once more –
lover and light-bearer,
priestess and poet reborn.
The Kingdom of Enough 