They Paved Paradise!
“There is only one question / How to love this world.” ~ Mary Oliver
Mary tells us how with this three line poem, from “Sometimes:”
Pay attention
Be astonished
Tell about it.
The writers and poets whose words are in this column TELL. Mother Earth deserves planetary justice. We must embrace and practice, “radical pastoralism,” no clear-cutting, fracking, continent-long pipelines, DDT, light pollution, or water dismay.
I’m on a roar. This has been coming on for some time, and I’ve peaked. It is a poet’s job to be brave.
I’m reading Thomas Rain Crowe’s, Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods. I’m taking his writing class at the Arboretum. The class is Writing In Place. After our first session, I feel responsible for every parking lot in Asheville!
The poetry books on the shelf next to my desk are huffing and puffing to jump into my hands.
Now I have offended Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, James Wright, William Cullen Bryant, Thoreau, Emerson, AND Hopkins because they aren’t on my list. They each want to get a word in – or a poem.
To pay attention means to Stop. Look. Listen. When Mary Oliver wrote her fist line, “Pay attention,” I wish she’d included an exclamation point.
Mr. Crowe asked us to consider our bio-region. This is Eden, and the garden is disappearing faster then you can quote e. e. cummings’ poem, “i thank you god/for most this amazing day.”
The last line of Wendell Berry’s poem, Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front, ends with “Practice Resurrection.” Read the entire poem this month and pat yourself on the back when you join Green Works.
Writers, make yourself heard! I’m listening.
From Luther Burbank
“Think of yourself as nature. Nature is our only reliable and authentic teacher.”
Time
Slow down!
Where are you going in such a rush?
To the supermarket of your last dime?
Is the sound of pencil-lead on paper
too much for your ears?
At fifty miles per hour
the butterfly on the rose by the side of the road
is as invisible
as a wish for the answer to prayers.
As you run through your best years
watching the road.
Faster than the speed of life.
~ by Thomas Rain Crowe
Quiet Waters
There are quiet waters
where a berry dropped
by a bird flying
starts ripples that
from the center of the pond
spread in concentrics, dying
in silence at the feet of the blue reeds.
I now know where these waters are.
~ by Eugene McCarthy
blake
saw them glittering in the trees,
their quills erect among the leaves,
angels everywhere. we need new words
for what this is, this hunger entering our
loneliness like birds, stunning our eyes into
rays of hope. we need the flutter that can save
us, something that will swirl across the face
of what we have become and bring us grace.
back north, i sit again in my own home
dreaming of blake, searching the branches
for just one poem.
~ by lucille clifton
From Thomas Merton
What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone
in the forest at night, cherished by this
wonderful, unintelligible,
perfectly innocent speech,
the most comforting speech in the world,
the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges,
and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollow.
It will talk as long as it wants, this rain.
As long as it talks I am going to listen.
From Sallie McFague
“We must decenter ourselves as the goal of creation and recenter ourselves as the caretakers of our planet.
“If justice means, most basically, fairness, then ecology and justice are inextricably intertwined, for on a finite planet with limited resources to support its many different kins of beings, both human and non human, sharing fairly is an issue of the highest priority.
“We are dealing with a wily, crafty enemy: ourselves, as the perpetrators of our ecological crisis.”
From John Muir
“No American wilderness that I know is so dangerous as a city home with all the modern improvements. One should go to the woods for safety, if for nothing else.”
From T. S. Eliot
“Where shall the world be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.”
From Aldo Leopold
This was written in 1948. “Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization. Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow. The Wilderness Society was organized in 1935 ‘for the one purpose of saving the wilderness remnants in America.’ The Sierra Club is doing yeoman work toward the same end.
“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of man.”
Resources
- Sallie McFague, The Body of God: an Ecological Theology, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1993.
- E.M. Foster, The Discipline of Solitude.
- Annie Dillard, The Annie Dillard Reader, Harper Perennial, 1944.
- Wendell Berry, Timbered Choir, Counterpoint, Berkeley, 1998.
- lucille clifton, the terrible stories, BOA editions, 1996.
- Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, Oxford University Press, 1949.
- Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi.
- Thomas Rain Crowe, Zoro’s Field, University of Georgia Press, 2006.