Denise Levertov, “Annunciation”
 
We know the scene: the room, variously furnished,
almost always a lectern, a book; always
the tall lily.
Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings,
the angelic ambassador, standing or hovering,
whom she acknowledges, a guest.
 
But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions
courage.
The engendering Spirit
did not enter her without consent.
God waited.
 
She was free
to accept or to refuse, choice
integral to humanness.
 
____________________
 
 
Aren’t there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?
Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehending.
More often
those moments
when roads of light and storm
open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from
 
 
in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.
God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.
 
____________________
 
 
She had been a child who played, ate, slept
like any other child–but unlike others,
wept only for pity, laughed
in joy not triumph.
Compassion and intelligence
fused in her, indivisible.
 
Called to a destiny more momentous
than any in all of Time,
she did not quail,
  only asked
a simple, ‘How can this be?’
and gravely, courteously,
took to heart the angel’s reply,
the astounding ministry she was offered:
 
to bear in her womb
Infinite weight and lightness; to carry
in hidden, finite inwardness,
nine months of Eternity; to contain
in slender vase of being,
the sum of power–
in narrow flesh,
the sum of light.
Then bring to birth,
push out into air, a Man-child
needing, like any other,
milk and love–
 
but who was God.
 
 
This was the moment no one speaks of,
when she could still refuse.
 
A breath unbreathed,
Spirit,
suspended,
waiting.
 
____________________
 
 
She did not cry, ‘I cannot. I am not worthy,’
Nor, ‘I have not the strength.’
She did not submit with gritted teeth,
raging, coerced.
Bravest of all humans,
consent illumined her.
The room filled with its light,
the lily glowed in it,
and the iridescent wings.
Consent,
courage unparalleled,
opened her utterly.
-Denise Levertov, from A Door in the Hive, copyright 1989 by Denise Levertov. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Bloodaxe Books, UK.
 
 
“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action. As there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.”
-Martha Graham, in a quote remembered by Agnes de Mille
 
POETIC THEMES
            Of all the major Christian holidays, the day marking the visitation of the angel upon Mary is the only one centering around a woman. Levertov’s insidious first line: “We know the scene.” Oh, and how.
            Let me just say now: to wrestle with this poem is hard. Really hard. It’s a Christian poem celebrating the ostensible power of consent in the idea of a virgin mother. The costs of this myth, with its violent regime of white female purity, have been catastrophic—part of the weaponry of colonialism that has left so.many.people.destroyed. Lingering with this poem uses more parts of me than I’m comfortable using.
            I want to join Levertov in disrupting the narrative of Mary’s “meek obedience,” in favor of the notion that God “did not enter her without consent.” I really want to. I want to believe that “She was free / to accept or to refuse,” and I wholly agree that this freedom is a “choice / integral to humanness.” But y’all… it feels like such a stretch, in spite of the beauty of her languaging.
            An ethic of toughness shames us for turning away “in a wave of weakness” from what we might not want to take on. Levertov associates “no” with despair and the relief of the ordinary. To blunder through the hard questions about power and yielding, we could revisit our own stories of pressured consent. After all, most of us would respond in the affirmative to Levertov’s central question: “Aren’t there annunciations / of one sort or another / in most lives?” How could we design some fresh strategies for imagining openness, receptivity, and the power to take in otherness?
            Levertov reconfigures Mary’s consent to bring something sacred into the world as the power of creativity. The visitation of the divine is muse-like, an instantiation of literal inspiration: taking in spirit, breathing it in, to gestate it and birth something new. There is something so soothing about this reconfiguration of openness. It’s a recognizable, gender-neutral experience of being “opened…utterly” by a form of power that is distinctly outside of us - "other.”
            Speaking of “courage unparalleled,” I’d like to bring Martha Graham to the stage. Isn’t it ironic that the movement legacy of this non-procreative woman is the contraction? Creativity requires radical openness, for Graham as for Levertov. Maybe we could divorce the idea of creation from actual pregnancy and childbirth, to reconfigure springtime themes that inhere in the Annunciation. Mary is known, in Christian thought, as the Queen Bee, the ubiquitous symbol of fertility, rebirth, and a transition from rest to work. Listening for the buzzing of the divine voice in our ears might sound like Graham’s “vitality” or “life force” or “quickening that is translated through you into action.” It’s a call to listen, a call to “keep the channel open,” “clearly and directly,” to stay “open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you.” This is, for Graham, the divine visitation. Graham and Levertov lead us to consider what we are being asked to open ourselves to.              
           What is the work we are being called to undertake? Sometimes the call to create appears as Levertovian “moments when roads of light and storm / open from darkness,” and other times it appears as an itch that needs scratching, Graham’s “queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest.” This is more like the feeling of something waiting to get free of us. Either way, if we don’t respond to the call of our work in the world, we are given the stakes. Levertov’s assertion that “the gates close, the pathway vanishes” is echoed by Graham: “it will not exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it.” This is an angle that configures creativity from a process of output to an art of input. Perceiving the generativeness of the spring in this way draws the focus away from producing or amassing resources, and toward openness and receptivity.
            I want to witness Queen Bee Mary as a figure who reinvigorates time-worn clichés about fertility with a courageous openness to our work in the world. I really do. But it’s not easy to neutralize the painful associations that attend a figure who has caused a world of harm, even for someone like me whose religious upbringing didn’t feature Mary. But if we can listen for the divine buzz, maybe with practice we might come to witness openness and receptivity with new eyes. Perhaps it could even help revise the idea of a “work ethic” as a collaborative, celebratory promiscuity: pollinating and cross-pollinating sweet, sticky stuff to spread more life around!
 
 
PRACTICE
            I began offering humming as a closing practice in my somatics classes before I learned that it soothed the vagus nerve. I just knew it was helpful to bridge the gap between the quiet mindfulness practices and the way we show up in the world. Opening eyes, greeting one another, and making sounds in the space seemed to help us all import the qualities we were cultivating into the rest of our lives and interactions. So I settled on humming together—no wrong notes, no scripted rhythm, just humming for the length of our exhale and then starting again.
            Yoga calls this practice “bee breath” (brahmani pranayama). Much of the power of Sanskrit, particularly the “Om,” is attributed to vibration, and when we hum, we actually feel it vibrating the skull, the sinus cavity, and the brain—our second womb. To summon our bee powers speaks to all the themes I’ve been playing with here. It’s pretty empowering to watch, over time, as a practice builds our capacity to calm our inner state, sedimenting a fresh foundation from which to put something new out there. Over time, the clean categories of input and output get kerfuffled even further: the quiet buzz of a hum is a form of output that, when removed, makes us aware of all that inhabits the silence that we didn’t take in before. When the avant-garde composer John Cage first entered an anechoic chamber (a room designed to deaden sound), he identified two distinct concurrent sounds, and the engineer told him that one corresponded to the nervous system, the other to blood flow. This can be a whole practice unto itself. 
            Would you be willing to test out humming, perhaps at different registers and tones, as a way of clearing fresh inroads to the brain? Then you might pause in the stillness and listen to the white noise until you hear not just the static buzz, but a lower register, like a bottom-end bass tone. It can be deeply centering to toggle the attention between the bass and the “treble,” if that’s what you want to call the static sound. It can also allow for an experiential reconfiguring of what’s inside and what’s outside the soma. Deep listening is a practice of opening up to the messages that might be reaching out for us. Might you then differently hear the messages reaching out for you? What else in your life helps clear the pathway for visitation, inspiration, communion? Are there other ways you might cultivate the openness and receptivity that invite spirit in?

​Robert Frost, “Putting in the Seed”
You come to fetch me from my work to-night
When supper’s on the table, and we’ll see
If I can leave off burying the white
Soft petals fallen from the apple tree.
(Soft petals, yes, but not so barren quite,
Mingled with these, smooth bean and wrinkled pea;)
And go along with you ere you lose sight
Of what you came for and become like me,
Slave to a springtime passion for the earth.
How Love burns through the Putting in the Seed
On through the watching for that early birth
When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed,
The sturdy seedling with arched body comes
Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.
Robert Frost, “Putting in the Seed” (This poem is in the public domain)
 
 
Octavio Paz, “Proem”
At times poetry is the vertigo of bodies and the vertigo of speech and the vertigo of death;
  the walk with eyes closed along the edge of the cliff, and the verbena in submarine gardens;
  the laughter that sets on fire the rules and the holy commandments;
  the descent of parachuting words onto the sands of the page;
  the despair that boards a paper boat and crosses,
  for forty nights and forty days, the night-sorrow sea and the day-sorrow desert;
  the idolatry of the self and the desecration of the self and the dissipation of the self;
  the beheading of epithets, the burial of mirrors; the recollection of pronouns freshly cut in the garden of Epicurus, and the garden of Netzahualcoyotl;
  the flute solo on the terrace of memory and the dance of flames in the cave of thought;
  the migrations of millions of verbs, wings and claws, seeds and hands;
  the nouns, bony and full of roots, planted on the waves of language;
  the love unseen and the love unheard and the love unsaid: the love in love.
Syllables seeds.  
“Proem” by Octavio Paz, translated by Eliot Weinberger, from The Selected Poems 1957-1987, copyright ©1986 by Octavio Paz and Eliot Weinberger. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
 
 
Muriel Rukeyser, “Elegy in Joy” (excerpt)
We tell beginnings: for the flesh and the answer,
or the look, the lake in the eye that knows,
for the despair that flows down in widest rivers,
cloud of home; and also the green tree of grace,
all in the leaf, in the love that gives us ourselves.
The word of nourishment passes through the women,
soldiers and orchards rooted in constellations,
white towers, eyes of children:
saying in time of war What shall we feed?
I cannot say the end.
Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings.
Not all things are blest, but the
seeds of all things are blest.
The blessing is in the seed.
This moment, this seed, this wave of the sea, this look, this instant of love.
Years over wars and an imagining of peace. Or the expiation journey
toward peace which is many wishes flaming together,
fierce pure life, the many-living home.
Love that gives us ourselves, in the world known to all
new techniques for the healing of the wound,
and the unknown world. One life, or the faring stars.
“Elegy in Joy” by Muriel Rukeyser, from Elegies, copyright ©1949 by Muriel Rukeyster. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. 
 
 
POETIC THEMES 
            The ancient Babylonians and Persians marked the turning of the year sometime around the vernal equinox. In my neck of the woods, at least in the moment of global warming in which this book was written, around now is generally considered a safe time to plant seeds, especially if you are looking to harvest edible things in the summer. But there are many ways to plant a seed, as these poems illustrate.
            Frost’s “Putting in the Seed” represents gardening as solitary labor through which “Love burns” (his wife making him dinner is not configured this way). The petals he’s fingering are pretty suggestive: “not so barren quite, / Mingled with these, smooth bean and wrinkled pea.” Hm. “Putting” (an odd, neutral choice of verbs for this otherwise sexy poem) seeds into the ground is seen to be the demonstration of his “springtime passion for the earth.” He is such a “slave” to passion that he may or may not decide to come eat the dinner prepared for him. His wife is, however, invited to the early birth, when the “sturdy seedling” will shoulder its way into the world.
            Contrast this to Octavio Paz’s expansive vision of planting seeds. A poem about the action of writing poetry as an analogy for seed-planting would seem to point to a certain self-reflexivity. The horizon expands and expands further in the far-reaching scope of what poetry can be: vertigo cliff-walk of bodies, speech, and death. Words parachuting onto the page are depicted in Biblical proportions of sorrow and despair, which would seem to aggrandize the poet. But then, admitting this “idolatry of the self” is itself a kind of desecration. And in this play of expansion and contraction, the small self of the poet is dissipated into something much larger. Poetic creation is figured here in terms of destruction, before anything new can be possible: epithets are beheaded, rules and commandments are set on fire. Even the poem’s nostalgic homage to the ancient world of Plato and Epicurus forces open the Western ancient world to include the gardens of Netzahualcoyotl.
              Language isn’t configured as the poet’s spawn, a product of his labor pains, but instead as something wild, set free, far beyond and outside of him. Verbs migrate with “wings and claws,” nouns are “bony and full of roots,” language is a sea of waves. The mystery of creation isn’t an act to be claimed or owned here. For Frost, the middle of the sonnet holds the love act that breeds its creation: “Love burns through the [capitalized act of] Putting in the Seed.” But love only emerges at the end of Paz’s poem, so mysterious as to be invisible, unheard, and unspoken. The involuted line “love in love” comes back to the final, solitary, italicized line: “Syllables seeds.” The poem created, for Paz, is what comes before, like a proem. The love for creation seeds, in turn, more love.
            Is it far-fetched to perceive in “Elegy in Joy” echoes of the watery despair, engendering love, roots and flame of “Proem”? Rukeyser’s articulations of a liberal politics might owe just as much to Octavio Paz as her poetry does. I’ve only dipped a toe in it, so I’m not the one to say. But in the foreword to her translations of his early poetry, she describes finding in his work a fusion of politics and art: “In coming to the poems of the young Octavio Paz, I found that voice of the meeting-place for which many of us were looking in those years. Meeting-place of fever and the cold eye, in a passion which could hold together with his own arms the flying apart of his own time.” She describes, in the foreword, how translating him transformed her. Her grace and humility in admitting her limitations, not being of Mexican descent, exemplify a keen awareness of the messiness of intersubjectivity ahead of its time. She recounts her awkward “stumbling” through the task of bringing the full range of meanings, carrying Nahuatl as well as Mexican nuances. She confesses to having made many “mistakes in my frenzy and ignorance,” and speaks directly to appropriative violence: “…the traces of my attempt to move from this poetry toward an English poem have left wounds, scars where we need healing.” She closes the foreword by restating her conviction that “The translator must be exposed to this extent; fully, that is”; ending not with her own conclusions, but with Carlos Fuentes’ description of Paz’s “lucid expression of Mexican tragedy.”
            But back to “Elegy in Joy”! Rukeyser’s elegies were her response to the confusion of World-War-II-era America. They are part of an oeuvre that, like Paz’s, wrestles with the nitty-gritty of a commitment to pacifism in the context of savage political realities. And this poem is the last of the elegies. It is the work of a mature poet and anti-fascist activist, no longer naive to the ways of the world. As such, this poem swims in grief, aware of its own limitation in offering nourishment or answers to wide-eyed children in wartime. Still, it isn’t an elegy for joy, but an elegy in joy. Like a small raft on the flowing river of despair, joy persists in new beginnings. The “green tree of grace” gives a blessing in the form of a seed. The seed here is configured as a metaphor standing for new beginnings, of whatever kind, which we are called to nourish and which in turn promise nourishment. Anything sullied, tainted, made toxic by ordinary human cruelty, can be recreated: “Not all things are blest, but the / seeds of all things are blest.”
             After spending “Years over wars and an imagining of peace,” the nowness of the present moment is the seed for peace, an instantiation of “fierce pure life.” All of us collectively caring about the broken world, “which is many wishes flaming together,” holds the possibility for our “expiation journey / toward peace.” The first word of the poem is, after all, WE. Frost’s labor of love in sowing a seed creates new life, configured as progeny. Paz’s poem is the creative seed that generates a love so expansive that the smallness of humanity disappears in it. For Rukeyser, Love itself appears to be the nourishing seed that "gives us ourselves": we are recreated in and through the very notion of beginning anew. The blessing of “this instant of love” makes possible “new techniques for the healing of the wound, / and the unknown world.” And then the magnificent final line about the reach and import of each mortal incarnation, as far-flung as any surrealistic sweep of Paz’s imagination: “One life, or the faring stars.”
 
 
PRACTICE
            The most literal way of exploring your relation to seed-planting would be… um… to plant an actual seed. Frost’s poem is the most grounded in embodied movement and earthy detail. You could come back to earth by feeling the dirt under your fingernails. Or you might instead plant an emblematic talisman, a meaningful object of some kind, referencing the magic of something you’re ready to birth this spring. You could mark it with a stone, dig it up at the end of the summer, wash it off, and see what has come into the world through you. Or you could render the action of planting a seed metaphorically, as Paz does with the analogy of writing, through some creative act. It seems very fitting to mark the new year by generating something new, and perhaps it could renew your love for painting, or journaling, or dancing. Or you could “nourish beginnings” in Rukeyser’s way, through letting grace drop its seed in a single act of loving. Who needs you in this moment? How could you contribute to healing the world’s wound by reaching out to them in love?

William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All (by the road to the contagious hospital)"
I
By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast-a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines--
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches--
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind--
Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined--
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken
 
By William Carlos Williams, from Selected Poems, copyright 1985 by the New Directions Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Carcanet Press, UK.
 
 
Jane Hirshfield, “Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me"  
The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?
I count, this first day of another year, what remains.
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands.
Can admire with two eyes the mountain,
actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles.
Can make black-eyed peas and collards.
Can make, from last year’s late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.
Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light.
For four years, I woke each day first to the mountain,
then to the question.
The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old,
and still they surprised.
I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea,
brought postcards and stamps. For four years, each day, something.
Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.
Today, I woke without answer.
The day answers, unpockets a thought from a friend
don’t despair of this falling world, not yet
didn’t it give you the asking
 
“Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me” © Jane Hirshfield, used by permission of the author, all rights reserved.
 
 
Jane Hirshfield, “Today, When I Could Do Nothing”
Today, when I could do nothing,
I saved an ant.
It must have come in with the morning paper,
still being delivered
to those who shelter in place.
A morning paper is still an essential service.
I am not an essential service.
I have coffee and books,
time,
a garden,
silence enough to fill cisterns.
It must have first walked
the morning paper, as if loosened ink
taking the shape of an ant.
Then across the laptop computer—warm--
then onto the back of a cushion.
Small black ant, alone,
crossing a navy cushion,
moving steadily because that is what it could do.
Set outside in the sun,
it could not have found again its nest.
What then did I save?
It did not move as if it was frightened,
even while walking my hand,
which moved it through swiftness and air.
Ant, alone, without companions,
whose ant-heart I could not fathom--
how is your life, I wanted to ask.
I lifted it, took it outside.
This first day when I could do nothing,
contribute nothing
beyond staying distant from my own kind,
I did this.
 
“Today, When I Could Do Nothing” © Jane Hirshfield, used by permission of the author, all rights reserved.
 
 
POETIC THEMES
           Thinking Feelingly begins with the first week of March. I have no idea where I actually started writing the book, but it wasn’t on March first (as convenient as it would be to start writing on what was New Year’s Day according to the old Roman calendar).
         When I started writing, it was with the intention of relearning how to analyze poetry, and new skills only emerged with practice. My first go-round for March week 1 was about William Carlos Williams’ “Spring and All,” and its downward camera sweep from the inchoate sky, down through the muddy fields, and then further down to the underground roots and the life that is quickening there. I find in this poem the elemental movement Chinese medicine perceives in the spring: from water (chill, mud, wind, sky) to wood (as “one by one objects are defined” from vague “stuff” to the precise, stiff carrot leaf). I do feel this transition physically, emerging “sluggish and dazed” from winter but intuiting a kind of potential quickening somewhere deep inside. It’s kind of the perfect description of the beginning of a book, no?
            I’d love to use Williams’ neat camera sweep to describe the way I wrote the book: the dark, formless, introspective months of gestation yielding to action and disciplined doing! But y’all... creative work is never like that. Growing something new is a mess. It’s a muddy, bleary-eyed swing back and forth. Like the weather—one day we are all action, the next we are hunkered down with tea and hot pad. One day we get a glimpse of OurNextBoldMove and the next it’s mush again. The learning curve in writing these entries was steep, as I resisted the inclination to wrestle dissonance into neatness and tried instead to stay true to the limits of my own perceptive reach and my sensual reckoning with a poem’s overflow. The truth is always richer than the tidy anyway, and the actual progress of spring isn’t a clean transition from chaos to form. It’s kind of a mess.
            So I’d like to engage a different poem to start, one that speaks to the aims and intentions of starting something new, rather than clean and masterful execution. Jane Hirshfield’s poem for the New Year poses a question rather than answering it—the question this world is asking each one of us: “what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?” Instead of answering this question, the speaker builds an altar to it, bringing salt and postcards and stamps. Waking without answers to the daily question, admitting the limitations of the power to turn stone to apple and war to peace, the poet instead counts “what remains.” In doing so, the poem becomes, itself, the altar it describes. We could say of the poem what its final line says of the world: “didn’t it give you the asking.”
            I’d like to borrow Hirshfield’s question as the “thought from a friend” that this New Year’s Day “unpockets”: what can we make or do to create change in the world? We don’t yet need a perfect answer, and my book sure isn’t one. I tried to remain stubbornly open to the shifting modes of inquiry in writing and in rewriting entries as I find new poems or can’t afford to anthologize old ones. As a result, many entries contain within them the movement from familiar modes of close reading to stranger, more unwieldy ones. Maybe we could just be in this queer flux between mud and emergence, without concretizing what precisely we are growing just yet.
            But enough with the self-reflexive stuff! If you’re looking to define your own springtime action, Hirshfield has an equally forgiving poem about opening our spidey senses to the hunches from the world on what needs doing. She released “Today, When I Could Do Nothing” in the middle of the disorientation of Covid lockdown. Many of us had coffee, books, time, a garden, and “silence enough to fill cisterns.” And yet we, unlike Hirshfield’s unfrightened ant, weren’t doing so hot. If we weren’t one of the brave fighters on the front line, if we could “contribute nothing beyond staying distant from [our] own kind,” we had time aplenty to scan around for the small action. Saving an ant, who may not have been saved otherwise! These lines mark the sacredness of the small action—the local, the humble, the compassion-driven effort. That truth sticks around longer than any pandemic could. What do you do when you feel powerless? Check in on your mom. Get groceries for your sick friend. Write that letter to your city official. Pet your dog. Challenge a hometown acquaintance to talk through some racist shit. Oh, and pet your dog some more.
            But/And! Some hours need to be devoted to letting the creative field lie fallow so it can birth new life. We can only generate solutions to the mess of our world by returning to the ant’s pace for a time. If we are gentle with ourselves and our pacing, merciful in defining the blossoming thing within us that could maybe help this planet of ours, we just might find an answer one of these spring mornings. The human hand that moved the ant “through swiftness and air” is contrasted to the insect’s own slow progress, from newspaper to laptop (warm!) to cushion—“moving steadily because that is what it could do.” The poem was and is an invitation to move steadily, deliberately, with attention to warmth and ink and softness. Our contribution may just be a small thing, but together small things can carry the heaviest loads.
 
PRACTICE
             Maybe you could Just.Plain.Slow.Down. Simply fetching coffee at an ant’s pace is incredibly instructive. Or if you’re drawn to the messy springtime transition from underground stirrings toward form and structure, you might embody it! Seated or in slow movement, try exploring a dividing line at the waist, where upper-body movements are isolated from the stillness of the lower body, as though it were buried underground. Attend to the specific angles in your orientation to space—to the edges and corners of the room around you, ceiling, floor, and furniture. The amygdala likes to know where it stands, so to speak, and will be helped by clear, symmetrical, determined planting of the feet, legs, and hips. 
             Perhaps, in your breathing, you might embody the elemental up/down play of spring more subtly. Picture your underground lower body gripping down on the exhale and then inhaling the stem of the spine, chest, and skull upward, as though everything above the waist were reaching up for the sun. Perhaps close by visualizing one small action from your week, tantamount to ant-saving. It’s only a beginning. You could just remain open to hunches from the world around you about what your winter hibernation might yield this spring, what might be coming into definition for you. How could you take action to give it what it needs to emerge?

Billy Collins, “Aimless Love”​

This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.
 
In the shadows of an autumn evening,
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor’s window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.
 
This is the best kind of love, I thought,
without recompense, without gifts,
or unkind words, without suspicion,
or silence on the telephone.
 
The love of the chestnut,
the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.
 
 
No lust, no slam of the door--
the love of the miniature orange tree,
the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower,
the highway that cuts across Florida.
 
No waiting, no huffiness, or rancor--
just a twinge every now and then
 
for the wren who had built her nest
on a low branch overhanging the water
and for the dead mouse,
still dressed in its light brown suit.
 
But my heart is always standing on its tripod,
ready for the next arrow.
 
After I carried the mouse by the tail
to a pile of leaves in the woods,
I found myself standing at the bathroom sink
gazing down affectionately at the soap,
so patient and soluble,
so at home in its pale green soap dish.
I could feel myself falling again
as I felt its turning in my wet hands 
and caught the scent of lavender and stone.

Billy Collins, “Aimless Love” from Nine Horses: Poems by Billy Collins, copyright © 2008 by Billy Collins. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. 
 
 
Dorianne Laux, “Heart”

The heart shifts shape of its own accord--
from bird to ax, from pinwheel
to budded branch. It rolls over in the chest,
a brown bear groggy with winter, skips
like a child at the fair, stopping in the shade
of the fireworks booth, the fat lady's tent,
the corn dog stand. Or the heart
is an empty room where the ghosts of the dead
wait, paging through magazines, licking
their skinless thumbs. One gets up, walks
through a door into a maze of hallways.
Behind one door a roomful of orchids,
behind another, the smell of burned toast.
The rooms go on and on: sewing room
with its squeaky treadle, its bright needles,
room full of file cabinets and torn curtains,
room buzzing with a thousand black flies.
Or the heart closes its doors, becomes smoke,
a wispy lie, curls like a worm and forgets
its life, burrows into the fleshy dirt.
Heart makes a wrong turn.
Heart locked in its gate of thorns.
Heart with its hands folded in its lap.
Heart a blue skiff parting the silk of the lake.
It does what it wants, takes what it needs, eats
when it's hungry, sleeps when the soul shuts down.
Bored, it watches movies deep into the night,
stands by the window counting the streetlamps
squinting out one by one.
Heart with its hundred mouths open.
Heart with its hundred eyes closed.
Harmonica heart, heart of tinsel,
heart of cement, broken teeth, redwood fence.
Heart of bricks and boards, books stacked
in devoted rows, their dusty spines
unreadable. Heart
with its hands full.
Hieroglyph heart, etched deep with history’s lists,
things to do. Near-sighted heart. Club-footed heart.
Hard-headed heart. Heart of gold, coal.
Bad juju heart, singing the low down blues.
Choir boy heart. Heart in a frumpy robe.
Heart with its feet up reading the scores.
Homeless heart, dozing, its back against the Dumpster.
Cop-on-the-beat heart with its black billy club,
banging on the lid.

Dorianne Laux, “Heart” from Smoke. Copyright © 2000 by Dorianne Laux. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions, LTD, boaeditions.org.
 
 
POETIC THEMES
            Let’s flip the script on our love objects this Valentine’s Day. Don’t worry, I’m not going to launch into a description of some kind of facile “self love.” Could anything be more sinister than the thriving “self-care” industry, with its pricey baubles and spa treatments and pleasure excursions that feed care right back into the mouth of the capitalist vortex? How instead might we use this holiday to renew our capacity for loving? These poems invite us to move away from the idea of love as aimed, directed, lusting or craving, and toward a notion of love as open receptivity.
            Billy Collins is the perfect poet to create some space for lightness and pleasure (surely this was an intention in placing Valentine’s Day at the heart of this gray month). “Aimless Love” takes us along on an adventure of falling in love with the world, opening our sense of what counts as lovable all around us. Collins’ humor charms us into falling for each and every object, from wren to dead mouse to clean white shirt. The change in feeling-state as we read one disarmingly sweet image after another is like being wooed, line by line, till we identify with Collins’ wonderful image of the heart as a bullseye target, waiting for Cupid’s next arrow. This focus on receiving love is what the poem actually enacts. In reading these lines we come to share his uncomplicated adoration for the highway that cuts across Florida, or the miniature orange tree. His disarming ability to render things lovable reaches a kind of perfection when the last stanza brings us to gaze affectionately along with him at a bar of soap, “so patient and soluble / so at home in its pale green soap dish.” He confesses, “I could feel myself falling again,” and we fall too. We can feel in our own hands the slippery stone, smell the wet scent of lavender. Perhaps Collins’ presumed aimlessness is a bit coyly disingenuous, as any good seduction always is: each line of the poem aims its arrow at the bullseye of the reader’s heart, transferring its sticky, sweet capacity for loving the world.
            Dorianne Laux takes this one step further, in a poem about falling in love with the ability to still fall in love. Learning how to dote on our heart’s capacities is fundamentally different from “self love.” It’s kind of like the far end of non-dual: we identify with what’s not us until we merge with it, achieving sufficient distance to perceive our own caring with tenderness. When the potential for love becomes the love object, the heart takes shape in natural and otherworldly form: from a sleepy bear to a curling worm to the afterworld maze of rooms and hallways for ghosts. The merging of self and other fold back in on themselves like a mobius strip, and we can fall back in love with our heart, one step removed.
                   Laux shapeshifts the heart from a mythical form with “its hundred mouths open” and “its hundred eyes closed” to the quotidian, lazy shape we take when watching movies bored. Laux seems to suggest the endless possibilities for our capacity to love, as the pace of her poem picks up to rapid fire and our heart shapeshifts from harmonica to tinsel to cement to broken teeth and on and on. One of these objects is bound to get under our skin, and by the end of the poem we are stuffed with images, maybe feeling a lot like the “Heart / with its hands full.” Whether via Laux’s wild artillery fire or Collins’ more drawn-out Cupid arrows, the images in both poems invite us to engage our heart’s capacity to fall back in love with the world. When we do, we don’t actually need diamonds or flowers or greeting cards, because we are already replete.
 
 
PRACTICE
            Riffing on the image of the heart as a bullseye, I’d like to adopt a psychodrama technique taught by Leticia Nieto. Nieto adapted this group exercise for individual practice to accommodate the online format of Transformative Change’s  Embodied Social Justice Summit. I’m adapting it further to synch with this week’s theme of the skills required for loving. Please note: this is NOT an exercise on the skills required for drawing. If, like me, you’re no artist, just use chicken-scratches like stick figures and simple symbols.
            *Begin by drawing a circle on a piece of paper, and at the bullseye, draw your heart.
            *Label it with a name that stands in for a special quality you identify in your soul of souls, or in a version of you from your past—one that is central to your capacity for loving but does not receive adequate reinforcement in your life (for example: vulnerability, courage, softness, confidence, trust, joy).
            *Identify the specific people or phenomena that have challenged or undermined this quality (what Nieto calls “the pulls”). Draw them outside the circle, and then draw lines connecting them to the heart at its center. It’s best to choose for these figures not vague, overarching phenomena such as patriarchal white supremacist culture, but its incarnation in the people places and things from your personal history. Like that creepy church your great-aunt dragged you to, or that vicious fourth grade math teacher. Wassup, Mrs. Avery.
            *“Resource the circle with auxiliaries,” in the language of psychodrama, by populating the inside of the circle with companions. (Like supportive figures from childhood; objects from nature, elements from your upbringing or ancestry; or communities you feel safe in. So much love to that Arizona hotel housekeeper who saw my 13-year-old Queer potential and introduced me to Suzanne Vega.)
            *Jot down a few key lines that encapsulate the demand or pressure being placed upon the heart quality by each figure outside the circle. (For example, the accusation that your laziness makes you unlovable; that if you cry, you’re weak; or that you’re worthless unless you win. I’d give my mom a line I still can’t shake, “Only boring people get bored.”)
            *Scan the field on this “map of pulls” to imaginatively place yourself at the center, holding the connective threads (as you would do in a live group exercise). Physically mime holding imaginary cords in your hands so that you can experience what it would feel like to let them go. To ritualize this, speak aloud the lines you have written—the pull being made—and enact the experience of actually physically setting the cord free with your hands, releasing that pull. You might become aware of which of these cords are particularly hard to let go—the more “gnarly elements” as Nieto puts it. These ties probably live deep in the body, wrapped up in personal and/or ancestral history. What is the energy or charge that arises when we dialogue with these pulls? What is the emotional quality or body sensation that comes up?
          Give yourself some time to breathe and integrate the experience.
          When I first did this exercise, the snipped cords recalled an early nightmare image of mine from some movie where an astronaut is floating alone into space after his line to the mothership was snipped. I’ve been balancing this feeling using a Kundalini yoga technique where you visualize a snakelike coil of energy at the base the spine, rising up the central axis of the body and winding around the heart center. Perhaps imagine the gnarly cords on your map instead as golden threads, and you are sucking them back into your body with each inhale, hoovering spaghetti style, reclaiming them and wrapping them around the spool of your Suzanne Vega heart, your boring-because-bored heart, your fuck-long-division heart. Give your heart some volume. Bolster it. Make it sturdy and real and thick. Maybe this process of heartbuilding will lend you new eyes for what’s lovely and enticing all around you. I think of love scenes you see in the cartoons, where somebody’s eyes shoot big hearts all over the place, usually with a sound that’s something like “A-OOOO-GA!” May you see your world this Valentine’s Day with Billy Collins aooga goggles.

Margaret Atwood, “February”​

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

Margaret Atwood, “February” from Morning in the Burned House. Copyright © 1995 by Margaret Atwood. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 
 
Tamiko Beyer, “February”

I’m climbing out of this season, fingernails ragged, belly soft. I tuck a stem of dried mint behind my ear to remind myself.
 
Once, I bared my shoulders. The bottom of my feet roughed up the dirt with their hard calluses. When I harvested arugula, it smelled of green spice—alchemical veins pulsing sun and dirt and water. I do remember this. I pinned summer light up in my hair and made no apologies for the space I took up—barely clothed and sun-bound.
 
Now, a ball of twine in the grey sky. The sun rolls low on the horizon. Hangs. Then dips back down again, wind howling us into night.
 
Inside the erratic rhythm of this wavering flame, I conjure the potent sky of the longest day. Seeds with a whole galaxy inside them. Cicadas vibrating in the alders.
 
But the sensation of joy slips too quickly into simulacra. Song on repeat. I never meant to find myself in such a cold place, my hair thinning against winter.
 
Once, red clover grew thick where today’s rabbit tracks pattern the snow. Clover said flow, clover said nourish, clover said we’ve got this.
 
I reel the memory out, let it linger on the horizon, then reel it back in. I play it out and reel it back in. Some kind of fishing, some kind of flying—again and again. I loosen the buckles of my mind. I take up space in the precision of my breath. I call us all back in.

Copyright © 2022 by Tamiko Beyer. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 31, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
 
 
POETIC THEMES
            This is a big turning point! Halfway through winter, this week marks the very beginning of spring renewal. Neo-paganism, claiming to draw from traditions reaching back as far as Sumerian and Egyptian cultures, celebrates Imbolc (arguably from the old Irish, “in belly,” referring to the pregnant ewes). The Gaelic tradition of St. Brigid’s Day honors the Christian saint associated with fertility. Groundhog Day calls upon animal wisdom to intuit just how long the icy days will last. Maybe all this celebrating doth protest too much… February, the very heart of winter, sometimes feels like Atwood’s “month of despair,” and most of us relate to the big smoke signal of her last line, “make it be spring.” If that’s where the poem ends, it begins by rhyming “dead” “head” and “bed” and the wonderful, irreverent line, “Winter. Time to eat fat.” We can all relate to this particular form of in-belly-Imbolc, which Atwood shamelessly extends from a craving for vinegar fries to the notion of eating our own young.
           The repetitive, insistent striving for a hockey goal—“Over and over / again, He shoots he scores!”—models a hopeful, if desperate, scooping up of the life principle. Humor, irreverence, and reoriented priorities aren’t just respite from the gloom, but part of a staunch belief in the possibility of renewal. Not much is as simple and quick as the sudden lift we get from a laugh. Chuckling at a cat’s pink bumhole is a radical practice that enthrones life and love in the face of all the forces that drag us toward stagnancy right now. Atwood’s cat and Pennsylvania’s own Punxsatawney Pete are undercover agents of the life force, which is stubbornly building somewhere underground. We may all have, like the month of February, “a skewered heart in the center,” but it continues to beat. Political climate irrevocably screwed? Covid got ya quarantined? A good belly laugh scoops the Imbolc right up into the heart. It’s love, Atwood tells us, that does us in and by implication saves us (from eating our young among other things). We can still cling to hope, as she does when she commands her cat to make it be spring already.
            The current of death rising back up toward renewal is configured differently in Tamiko Beyer’s “February.” Instead of externalizing the life principle as an animal, she herself embodies a human-out-of-hibernation beast: “I’m climbing out of this season, / fingernails ragged, belly soft.” The stem of mint behind her ear “to remind myself” transports us along with her back to warmer times. Spring starts in the roots: feet, dirt, and arugula’s “alchemical veins / pulsing sun and dirt and / water.” Deep down in the veins of the earth, underground interactions of sun, dirt, and water are creating new life. This elemental alchemy is central to Chinese medicine, in the transition from winter, governed by water, to the wood element of spring seeds and saplings. Wood stands in not just for vague hopes and dreams taking shape in the manifest realm, but also stands for the very principle of expansion and potential.
         The poem’s form mimics the way the stubborn, halting life principle is striving to expand and rise, continually swatted down by frost. After the introductory stanza about emergence and memory, each stanza takes us through the swing between past and present. Beginning with one word that throws out a marker of time like “Once” or “Now,” each section throws out some warm-weather phenomenon to be reversed by winter: “I pinned summer light up in my hair” becomes “in such a cold / place, my hair thinning / against winter.” Or winter hopelessness is reeled back in, as when rabbit tracks in the snow yield to the memory of red clover, murmuring hopeful encouragement about flow and nourishment and grit. We rise and fall with each stanza through “sunbound” summer memories reaching upward toward the “potent sky of the longest day,” down via the low, hanging winter sun that “rolls low on the / horizon” and “dips / back down again.”
            The final stanza of “February” offers a meta-reflection on these reversals, capitalizing on Beyer’s image of the sun as a ball of twine. Here at the end of the poem the metaphor appears fully developed: “I reel the memory out, let it linger on the horizon, then reel it back in. I play it out and reel it back in. Some kind of fishing, some kind of flying—again and again.” The “erratic rhythm” makes sense now: Beyer’s poem instantiates a kind of parabola, where an object thrown out against gravity returns in a symmetrical curve. 
          Maybe the parabolic line (a fishing term) is useful for thinking about the dip-and-rise of fishing for hope this month. After two springlike days, it’s snowing outside my window as I write this. Grr. The figure of the parabola is a nice way to imaging our actual breath, bringing the poem’s abstraction into concrete embodiment. We cast the breath out and draw it back in. This rhythm of breathing is the truest moment-by-moment tether to the life principle. The comforting cadence rocks us like the soothing words of Beyer’s red clover: “we’ve got this.”
 
 
PRACTICE
            How might we facilitate the returning current and, in Atwood’s turn of phrase, “get going / on a little optimism around here”? I think of the much-quoted line from Wendell Berry: “practice resurrection.” Here’s a resurrection practice for stimulating the parabolic turn in the energy system, dipping down to rise back up like Beyer’s fishing line. The Returning Current acupressure point relates to Hexagram 24 of the I Ching, which describes a turning point after a time of decay. Banished light returns. There is movement without force. The old is transformed and the new is introduced. Also known as Kidney 7, this acupressure point helps the downward energy turn around and ride back up toward the torso. Related to the power of rebirth, the physical point is used to stimulate childbirth. And isn’t the crowning of a baby’s head the perfect manifestation of spring, new life emerging from the mysterious darkness of the birth canal? Stimulating this acupressure point, about two thumbprints up from the inner ankle bone, might help renew the feeling of upward current. As you tenderly knead this spot, you might visualize loops of breath around the torso, inhaling from the pelvic floor up the spine and around the top of the skull, like reeling in the thread of energy, and exhale it down the front, as if playing out the fishing line again. 
            *Also* you might just need the remedy of laughter. I hate to say locking into a screen counts as embodied practice, but if you can’t watch a cat (or some other living thing you associate with the life principle), you might hunt for a few funny online videos of your favorite creature to study its magic. Does this beast have a superpower that might help you through the last bitter weeks of winter?

Yehuda Amichai, “A Pace Like That”​
I’m looking at the lemon tree I planted.
A year ago. I need a different pace, a slower one,
To observe the growth of its branches, its leaves as they open.
I want a pace like that.
Not like reading a newspaper
But the way a child learns to read,
Or the way you quietly decipher the inscription
On an ancient tombstone.
And what a Torah scroll takes an entire year to do
as it rolls its way from Genesis to the death of Moses,
I do each day in haste
or in sleepless nights, rolling over from side to side.
The longer you live, the more people there are
who comment on your actions. Like a worker
in a manhole: at the opening above him
people stand around giving free advice
and yelling instructions,
but he’s all alone down there in his depths.
​
“A Pace Like That” from The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, copyright © 1996 by Yehuda Amichai. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press Books.
 
 
Joy Harjo, “Speaking Tree”
I had a beautiful dream I was dancing with a tree.
--Sandra Cisneros
 
Some things on this earth are unspeakable:
Genealogy of the broken--
A shy wind threading leaves after a massacre,
Or the smell of coffee and no one there--
 
Some humans say trees are not sentient beings,
But they do not understand poetry--
 
Nor can they hear the singing of trees when they are fed by
Wind, or water music--
Or hear their cries of anguish when they are broken and bereft--
 
Now I am a woman longing to be a tree, planted in a moist, dark earth
Between sunrise and sunset--
 
I cannot walk through all realms--
I carry a yearning I cannot bear alone in the dark--
 
What shall I do with all this heartache?
 
The deepest-rooted dream of a tree is to walk
Even just a little ways, from the place next to the doorway--
To the edge of the river of life, and drink--
 
I have heard trees talking, long after the sun has gone down:
 
Imagine what would it be like to dance close together
In this land of water and knowledge. . .
 
To drink deep what is undrinkable.

From Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Joy Harjo. Copyright © 2015 by Joy Harjo. Used with permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
 
 
Danusha Laméris, “What Trees Dream Of”
This one thinks, let me be the slender bow
of the violin. Another, the body of the instrument,
burnished, the color of amber.
One imagines life as a narrow boat
crossing water,
a light mist of salt on the prow.
And still another— planed down to planks,
then hammered into shelter
toices vibrating through the rafters.
We do not notice their pleasure,
the slight hum of the banister
beneath our palms,
The satisfaction of the desk
as we tap our pens, impatiently,
upon its weathered surface.
They have ferried us
across rough seas
to lands that smelled of cinnamon
housed our senators,
who pace the creaky floors, debating,
carried arrowheads to pierce our enemies.
We have boiled their pulp, pressed it
into thin, white sheets of paper
on which we describe all of the above in great detail.
And when we die
they hold our empty forms
in bare cedar
until the moment—and how they long for this,
when we meet again in the blackened soil
and they take us back
in their embrace, carry us
up the length of their bodies
into the glittery, trembling movement of the leaves.

Danusha Laméris, “What Trees Dream Of” from The Moons of August. Copyright © 2014 by Danusha Laméris. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Autumn House Press, autumnhouse.org.
 
 
POETIC THEMES
            The Jewish New Year of the Trees marks the revival of nature in Israel, falling on the Hebrew calendar somewhere between late January and early February. The reason I’ve chosen it for our focus this week—besides the fact that there ain’t too much happening in the long, cold soup of January—is because we would do well to take our cue from an ancient faith that has managed to enliven a holiday to match our current ecological crisis. To be clear, nobody said Tu Bishvat is a major Jewish holiday. The holiday has created an environmentalist buzz globally, adopted across the diaspora as a day of agricultural awareness and tree planting. The needs of our planet beg us all to resist capitalism’s extractive approach to the earth and rehabilitate our intimacy with and reverence for nature.
            These three tree poems offer a range of modes of imagining the interrelationship between humans and the natural sphere. Although Yehuda Amichai is perhaps the most celebrated Israeli poet globally, “A Pace Like That” is hardly the most obvious choice for a reverential poem about a tree. Its frank, un-precious style underscores that Amichai is very much a secular poet. Nature here provides a practical model for human behavior: the speaker simply wishes to mimic the slower pace of his lemon tree. But there’s a slip-slide between the sacred and the profane: trees model a way of being whose slow deliberation is likened to the care we take with sacred things. Not the perfunctory daily flip of the newspaper, but the deciphering of an inscription on a tombstone. Not the troubled movement of rolling from side to side in our sleep, but the deliberate slow unraveling of a Torah scroll over the course of a full year.
         Then Amichai flips the script with his final metonymic link: the secret underground force of renewal and vitality coursing through the tree’s roots is like… a worker in a manhole. He fuses the quotidian—the people above him who “stand around giving free advice / and yelling instructions”—with the profundity and solitude of the final line: “he’s all alone down there in his depths.” In a glorious upset of our expectations for attributing soul wisdom to natural forces, the mysterious workings of nature are compared to the methodical, practical, skilled industriousness of a manual laborer.
            Compare this way of modeling human behavior after the livelihood of a tree to the mutual push me/pull you of Joy Harjo’s “Speaking Tree.” To speak the language of tree (which for Harjo is related to poetic language) is to understand the longing not only to root down but also to move. To hear the singing of trees is to understand yearning. But the human “longing to be a tree, planted in a moist, dark earth” first appears as the inverse of what trees long for: “The deepest-rooted dream of a tree / is to walk.” This dream, as Harjo translates from tree speech, is to walk not as a human walks, but away from the human: “even just a little ways, from the place next to the doorway— / to the edge of the river of life, and drink.” So the animism expressed here doesn’t show nature mirroring human emotion, but instead longing for independence from the realm of people to get closer to some primordial source. Unlike the human longing for tree-ness, conveyed in the epigraph quoting Cisneros—“I had a beautiful dream I was dancing with a tree”—the trees dream of dancing with one another: “Imagine what it would be like to dance close together.” Free. 
            According to Danusha Laméris, trees dream of something different. “What Trees Dream Of” is the very opposite of Harjo’s animism, where the natural realm craves its freedom from humanity. Laméris’ trees dream of nothing but humanity. They want to be our musical instruments, our boats, the beams that construct our shelter. The desk is satisfied with our tapping pens, the banister loves our sliding palms. In the form of benevolent protectors, they ferry us around and provide the material on which we write our histories. This comforting view of parentified nature reaches its apex in the poem’s glorious ending, about endings. Trees, in their afterlife as coffins, embrace the human corpse until there’s an elemental co-mingling: “and how they long for this, / when we meet again in the blackened soil.” These lines bring humanity into a deeply corporeal union with nature that is also transcendent, as the trees take us back, embrace us, and “carry us / up the length of their bodies / into the glittery, trembling movement of the leaves.” Here in the dead of winter, I like this tree dream of becoming a kind of posthumous human humus.
 
 
PRACTICE
            Perhaps to find our own animistic intimacy with the natural surround, we could revisit our broken genealogies for older ritual systems that regard trees with reverence. Are there approaches to trees as bearers of the numinous? Tree ceremonies for quarrel settling. Divining rods. Hearts planted in acorns. Griots in baobabs. The shunned oak. Perhaps we could all dip into a little research on how animism shows up in our ancestral histories and devise our own tree ritual this week!
          Alternately, you might revisit your personal history and call to mind your very favorite tree. What were the contours of your relationship to it? The birch tree grown from the spot you buried your first dog denotes one set of relational properties and powers, the huge pine whose branches held the tire swing another. Still another set of powers are to be found in the protective dark of the Japanese maple screening your windows from the world. Whatever you value in and draw from your tree friend is a good place to begin building your personal version of the numinous. In meditating on this, you could jot down a word description of the tree, or write your tree’s history, or a fairy tale where the tree is the protagonist.
         Or perhaps try to embody this tree, envisioning the central axis of your trunk, the rising sap, the symmetrical explosion of roots below and branches above. If you were to breathe like a tree, would you inhale from the foundation of the body that’s rooted to the ground, upward to the glittery, trembling leaves of uplifted fingertips, with the exhalation drifting down all around you? Or would the inhale pull from the skin of the scalp to feed some central ring deep in your trunk and then radiate out in every direction? 
         Whichever exercise helps you concretize what you value in nature, what would integrating those needs into your daily life look like, and how can you commit to establishing a practice around it?

Y'all, I just couldn't figure out a way to make a video of a cold shower without getting sued. So here's a photo of my last polar bear plunge. Ever!

Jane Kenyon, “Taking Down the Tree”​

“Give me some light!” cries Hamlet’s
uncle midway through the murder
of Gonzago. “Light! Light!” cry scattering
courtesans. Here, as in Denmark,
it’s dark at four, and even the moon
shines with only half a heart.
 
The ornaments go down into the box:
the silver spaniel, My Darling
on its collar, from Mother’s childhood
in Illinois; the balsa jumping jack
my brother and I fought over,
pulling limb from limb. Mother
drew it together again with thread
while I watched, feeling depraved
at the age of ten.
 
With something more than caution
I handle them, and the lights, with their
tin star-shaped reflectors, brought along
from house to house, their pasteboard
toy suitcases increasingly flimsy.
Tick, tick, the desiccated needles drop.
 
By suppertime all that remains is the scent
of balsam fir. If it’s darkness
we’re having, let it be extravagant. 
“Taking Down the Tree” by Jane Kenyon from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2005 by the Estate of Jane Kenyon. Reprinted with permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. 
 
 
Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man”

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
 
And have been cold a long time 
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
 
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
 
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
 
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Source: Poetry magazine (1921). This poem is in the public domain.
 
 
POETIC THEMES
            Christmas wraps up somewhere between January 6th and 19th, depending on where you are. Some places celebrate Three Kings Day, marking the visitation of the Magi; others focus on Jesus’ baptism. Even though most Americans don’t observe Epiphany, in the second week of January any small American town will be littered with mangy discarded trees by the side of the road: not-so-evergreen needles, residual tinsel or none. Something about this speaks to the psychological moment of the season. Earnest New Year resolutions clash against the holiday hangover. We dip into the leftover spice cake, reencountering the annual defeat of sudden transformations based on a randomly designated date on the calendar. After and in spite of all the shiny wrapping paper and blinky lights, we are faced with stark, barren reality: cold, darkness, solitude, and nature’s death. Acknowledging these winter realities requires a different spiritual skill set. For some of us, it feels like permission to release. We can let go of the ruse, among other things, and quiet the clamor toward something that is simply not there—at least not right now, in the dead of winter.
            Hamlet’s Denmark offers an apt psychological setting for early January. Jane Kenyon nails it. “Taking Down the Tree” takes us down into the Shakespearean closed world: maddening mental solitude, excruciating bereavement, cold betrayal, loss after loss, and a darkness where “even the moon / shines with only half a heart.” We are, for sure, taken down. The “closed world” is the term my father coined for the tragic corollary to Northrop Frye’s “green world.” These two paradigms are so user-friendly as to have been employed to describe contemporary phenomena as diverse as Cold War political discourse (in Paul Edwards’ book The Closed World) and digital bot taxonomies (in Mark Sample’s blog, samplereality). What’s recognizable, aside from any religious framework, is the closed world’s inward spiral imploding toward oblivion, a nightmarish perversion of cozy winter hygge. The movement of Kenyon’s poem from a desperation for light to the delicious ending—having extravagant darkness for dinner—is like the release of the insistent, exhausting cultural expectation for an optimistic holiday disposition. Slowly, piece by piece, like the “tick tick tick” soundscape of needles falling off the tree, we let our need for light fall off our shoulders and fingers and feet. I like to reverse the syllables of the word, and think of needles backward, as “less-need.” Dropping my need. To do, to change, to strive, to shine.
            At the same time, Jane Kenyon’s whole poetic oeuvre is a fight for optimism. Kenyon’s brand of depression is a furious, doomed hunt for light, especially in her late poems, which scour reality for any tiny quotidian detail with the potential to fend off despair. In “Notes from the Other Side,” she describes God as “mercy clothed in light.” “In the Grove: The Poet at 10” depicts a kid so worked up by the battle between the sun and a cloud as to feel a violent joy “hard to distinguish from pain.” That’s a pretty good description of the feeling state of Kenyon’s poetry. In a section of “Having it Out with Melancholy” entitled “Once There was Light,” Kenyon visualizes herself as part of the human family in the form of a “speck of light in the great / river of light that undulates through time.” But melancholy descends on her and yanks her out of the “glowing stream.” After this, she weeps for days. Sometimes divine light only appears in Kenyon’s poem as some kind of joke, as in “Dutch Interiors,” where the Holy Ghost only appears on gleaming cutlery or pewter beakers of beer, leading the poet to decide sourly that “Christ has been done to death / in the cold reaches of northern Europe.”
            And so we return to the frozen north of “Taking Down the Tree.” Our own desperation for light and change in midwinter is as fragile as the flimsy pasteboard case that holds the Christmas ornaments. And yet, in spite of their delicacy, the tin-reflected lights and ornaments reappear each year: the spaniel marked “My Darling,” older than its owner, and the jumping jack that survived dismemberment. They are testimonies to the durability of the memories we move “from house to house.” We handle them “with something more than caution”—perhaps we could call it reverence—then tuck them safely away again till next December. The tin-reflected lights and idiosyncratic, storied hanging objects are just markers—symbols of our stubborn, renewable hope. Christmas is made of our longing, and the echo of it remains like the residual scent of balsam fir, the actual earthy substance from which the little jumping jack was made.
            The ornament never falls far from the tree. I inherited from my mother a worldview I find in Kenyon’s poetry, characterized by a simple and definitional state of yearning. Some might call it depressive, particularly if they were fond of Melanie Klein. The first real theological battle with my father, at the dining room table when I was a tween, was about Milton. Not yet thirteen, just tasting the fruits of independent thinking, I wanted to defend the choice to pick the fruit. I argued that humanity only fully became human when we acquired separation from the divine. At thirteen, I probably didn’t reference Michael’s promise of a “paradise within thee, happier far” in Book 12 (12.587), but I think of it now. I still think that longing for contact with the divine creates the internal ethical and spiritual compass that defines our humanity. The human condition is literally woven out of yearning, a truth I could feel in my bones, even (and especially?) at that age. My dad countered with some very Christian interpretation and stormed away, which was anathema to his so-very-sanguine character. 
         But what’s remarkable to me is that the next day my father, knowing that his green world was not mine, gave me Wallace Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West.” I can’t afford to reprint this poem, but man oh man, the extravagance of its theology! It’s not an existential declaration about human potential in a godless world. It’s not about humanity bowing to a higher power, be it God or Nature, or reflecting its power through art. The “plungings of water” are meaningless in and of themselves, Stevens tells us, and the “high horizons” with their mountainous distances are merely theatrical. The poem’s scope is wider, encompassing a merging and a transcendence “beyond the genius of the sea,” beyond “the outer voice of sky and cloud,” beyond “the heaving speech of air.” It’s about the alchemy of longing, the melding of “the ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea” with the person singing to it, creating a sublime universe larger than both. The (feminine, my father would point out) mortal not only expresses but creates a whole world out of longing, spoken in “the dark voice of the sea.” The poem not only asks, but self-referentially remarks on its repeated asking, “Whose spirit is this?” The woman singing fuses with the originary Word of creation, as the chaos of ocean and deepening night organize themselves to become “the self that was her song.” I remember how my father would watch my mom saunter off alone to walk by the sea. He wasn’t part of it, this union, and he watched from the beach with a version of Stevens’ reverential wonder: “As we beheld her striding there alone, / Knew that there never was a world for her / Except the one she sang and, singing, made.”
            Stevens’ complement to this seascape of a woman entering the heart of longing is “The Snow Man,” a man entering the emptiness of cold. This poem is a celebration of “a mind of winter,” a perfect illustration of Stevens’trademark stance on the role of art (“Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself”). Instead of superimposing human notions of misery onto the cold or the sound of wind, we are encouraged to practice being “the listener who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and nothing that is.” This decimation of the self, of imagination, and of our personification of nature relates to Stevens’ negation of transcendence in “Sunday Morning,” which places Jesus within “the heavenly fellowship / of men that perish.” There is no beyond. Stevens’ winter mind finds expression this second week of January, exploring the porous line between pain and violent joy: in the cold reaches of Hamlet’s Northern Europe, folk celebrate Epiphany with ice swimming.
            Wim Hoff, known as “The Ice Man,” used cold exposure as a remedy for grief as his wife spiraled deeper into depression. As the darkness permeated her psyche, he says in his book, he moved his four children closer to her family to get parenting support. He was leading a trip in the canyons when she threw herself from the eighth story—freeing her from her demons, he writes. Hoff is not sure whether he was healed by his children or by the cold water that led his mind to stillness and functioned as a mirror to face himself. Anyway, that’s the context in which Wim Hoff’s school of cold exposure was born.
            I was born into a family whose genetics are riddled with depression and whose New Year tradition is ice swimming. Each January my daughters and I choose whether to join the ice swimming contingency. I’ve always felt torn. As someone who finds a way into spirit via the senses, I want to celebrate this gritty and stoical approach to pain and mortality. I do think, as Hoff claims, that the experience helps us enter deep parts of the mind. The cleansing rush, the feeling of total renewal, the symbolism of starting fresh in a culture sorely lacking in rituals with a physiological component—how can one resist? And it does seem logical that sensory extremes train us to withstand suffering. But might they teach us, instead, to transcend it? Is this alleged entry into the belly of what-it-is-to-be-mortal just one more version of spiritual escapism?
          As my teenage daughters wrestle with the epigenetic demons I gave them, it seems more courageous to prioritize quieter, humbler holiday traditions. We find new lights at CVS to replace the broken ones, then we pull from the flimsy cardboard the three matching red balls with our names written in gold glitter script, knowing that the fourth is hanging at their dad’s house. The glitter catches the light from the replacement strand, and inevitably I cry, and nowadays they know I’m crying. There is sorrow in the hanging of stockings, and we hold each other through it. This is grit.
 

PRACTICE
            Maybe we should just end with the fact of the sun’s return. We could simply remind ourselves that the light is increasing, a few minutes a day. Maybe what’s required to keep falling in love with life is out there. And for those we love, for the world that’s such a mess, we have to keep looking for it. What brightens us from the inside so that we might better help each other through the dark? I want to make an argument for a cold shower. Don’t close the book—just hear me out! I’m not asking you to Wim Hoff your way up Mount Everest in your small clothes. But the benefits of graduated cold exposure are not just scientifically proven, they are palpable with just one taste. If, part way through your next shower, you turn the water cold for just a few moments and then try it again after just a couple minutes, the second time feels so much easier. Compare this to most meditation strategies, which are for many people torturous for a significant period of time before sitting begins to actually feel good. Or the excruciating time it takes for foam rolling and massage ball mushing and Bengay burning to create any change at all. But in just one shower you can feel the changes in physiological processes like circulation and cortisol level. There is a palpable letting go, which seems to be the theme of January. Google the benefits of a cold shower, and just consider it, okay?

IF ANYONE KNOWS WHO CREATED THIS GORGEOUS IMAGE, PLEASE CONTACT ME SO I CAN IDENTIFY THEM!!! 
This week I recorded a guided meditation (please note this is an AUDIO FILE, not a video). Please click below to listen: