How to Love the World Read online

  It can be painful to be so open to the world (“You may have to break your heart”), but as Bass points out, it is more than worth it “to know even one moment alive.” What truly lifts us back into the flow is noticing each small thing that sparks our senses, whether it be “the sound of an oar,” “the smell of grated ginger,” or simply “warm socks.”

  Invitation for Writing and Reflection

  What seemingly small joys bring you back to that “sudden rush of the world” even in the midst of worry or fear? How does it feel when gratitude and hope reawaken the heart to what’s around you?

  Mark Nepo

  Language, Prayer, and Grace

  Language is no more than the impressions

  left by birds nesting in snow.

  Prayer is the path opened

  by a leopard leaping through the brush.

  And grace is how the water parts for a fish

  letting it break surface.

  Jane Hirshfield

  The Fish

  There is a fish

  that stitches

  the inner water

  and the outer water together.

  Bastes them

  with its gold body’s flowing.

  A heavy thread

  follows that transparent river,

  secures it—

  the broad world we make daily,

  daily give ourselves to.

  Neither imagined

  nor unimagined,

  neither winged nor finned,

  we walk the luminous seam.

  Knot it.

  Flow back into the open gills.

  Patricia Fargnoli

  Reincarnate

  I want to come back as that ordinary

  garden snail, carting my brown-striped spiral shell

  onto the mushroom which has sprouted

  after overnight rain so I can stretch

  my tentacles toward the slightly drooping

  and pimpled raspberry, sweet and pulsing—

  a thumb that bends on its stalk from the crown

  of small leaves, weighed down by the almost

  translucent shining drop of dew I have

  been reaching and reaching toward my whole life.

  Linda Hogan

  Innocence

  There is nothing more innocent

  than the still-unformed creature I find beneath soil,

  neither of us knowing what it will become

  in the abundance of the planet.

  It makes a living only by remaining still

  in its niche.

  One day it may struggle out of its tender

  pearl of blind skin

  with a wing or with vision

  leaving behind the transparent.

  I cover it again, keep laboring,

  hands in earth, myself a singular body.

  Watching things grow,

  wondering how

  a cut blade of grass knows

  how to turn sharp again at the end.

  This same growing must be myself,

  not aware yet of what I will become

  in my own fullness

  inside this simple flesh.

  Farnaz Fatemi

  Everything Is Made of Labor

  The inchworm’s trajectory:

  pulse of impulse. The worm

  is tender. It won’t live

  long. Its green glows.

  It found a place to go.

  Arrange us with meaning,

  the words plead. Find the thread

  through the dark.

  Susan Kelly-DeWitt

  Apple Blossoms

  One evening in winter

  when nothing has been enough,

  when the days are too short,

  the nights too long

  and cheerless, the secret

  and docile buds of the apple

  blossoms begin their quick

  ascent to light. Night

  after interminable night

  the sugars pucker and swell

  into green slips, green

  silks. And just as you find

  yourself at the end

  of winter’s long, cold

  rope, the blossoms open

  like pink thimbles

  and that black dollop

  of shine called

  bumblebee stumbles in.

  Nancy Miller Gomez

  Growing Apples

  There is big excitement in C block today.

  On the window sill,

  in a plastic ice cream cup

  a little plant is growing.

  This is all the men want to talk about:

  how an apple seed germinated

  in a crack of damp concrete;

  how they tore open tea bags

  to collect the leaves, leached them

  in water, then laid the sprout onto the bed

  made of Lipton. How this finger of spring

  dug one delicate root down

  into the dark fannings and now

  two small sleeves of green

  are pushing out from the emerging tip.

  The men are tipsy with this miracle.

  Each morning, one by one,

  they go to the window and check

  the progress of the struggling plant.

  All through the day they return

  to stand over the seedling

  and whisper.

  Danusha Laméris

  Aspen

  They tower above the hilltop,

  yellow leaves rustling the air

  in a kind of muffled conversation.

  And when a breeze bends

  their upper branches

  they tilt sideways

  in the gesture of attentive listeners.

  And so, we sit together in silence,

  old friends who don’t need to speak.

  Though sometimes they murmur

  amongst themselves,

  the kind of banter that once

  soothed me as a child

  drifting off to sleep

  while my parents carried on

  upstairs, talking after dinner

  with their guests.

  Now, a red-winged blackbird

  lands on a slender branch

  and is lost among shuffling leaves.

  Now, a cloud passes overhead—

  my mother’s silk scarf

  trailing on the wind.

  Is this what it is to be alone?

  This being with my tall,

  branched sisters?

  Then let me sit

  in their lengthening shadow

  as the day wanes,

  and the hours of my life wane,

  and the evening starts to fall,

  and the night comes

  with its quiet company of stars.

  Margaret Hasse

  With Trees

  for Norton Stillman

  Something I’ve forgotten calls me away

  from the picnic table to tall trees

  at the far end of the clearing.

  I remember lying on grass

  being still, studying forks of branches

  with their thousands of leaves.

  While trees accrued their secret rings

  life spread a great canopy

  of family, work, ordinary activity.

  I mislaid what once moved me.

  Today I have time to follow

  the melody of green wherever it goes,

  a tune, maybe hummed

  when I was too young

  to have the words I wanted

  and know how a body returns

  to familiar refrains.

  Now like a child, I sit down, lie back,

  look up at the crowns of maple,

  needled spruce and a big-hearted boxwood.

  Fugitive birds dart in and out.

  In the least little wind, birch leaves turn

  and flash silver like a school of minnows.

  Clouds range in the blue
sky

  above earth’s great geniuses

  of shelter and shade.

  Kim Stafford

  Shelter in Place

  Long before the pandemic, the trees

  knew how to guard one place with

  roots and shade. Moss found

  how to hug a stone for life.

  Every stream works out how

  to move in place, staying home

  even as it flows generously

  outward, sending bounty far.

  Now is our time to practice—

  singing from balconies, sending

  words of comfort by any courier,

  kindling our lonesome generosity

  to shine in all directions like stars.

  Heather Newman

  Missing Key

  The doors are locked and I’m searching for a way in.

  I circle my house intent on finding a crack in the system

  I painstakingly created, a loose bolt, a faulty window.

  It’s still light in Vermont but in one hour the sun will dip

  behind the mountain, temperatures will fall, and I may still

  be stuck outside, cursing. There are friends. There are neighbors.

  Or I could resolve nothing, sit on the cool grass and wait.

  On my iPhone, I view my furious attempts to break in

  recorded on the outdoor cameras. There are family members

  who hold a key, but rescues have never worked for me in the past.

  I consider places for lost or hidden keys. They say gratitude is a key.

  Solitude is a mountain. There are pines, cedars and hemlocks,

  a range against the mango-magenta horizon,

  a red-tailed hawk circling its prey.

  Michael Kiesow Moore

  Climbing the Golden Mountain

  Silence is the golden mountain.

  —Jack Kerouac

  Listen. Turn

  everything

  off. When

  the noise

  of our lives

  drifts away,

  when the

  chatter of

  our minds

  sinks into

  that perfect

  lake of nothing,

  then, oh

  then we can

  apprehend

  that golden

  mountain,

  always there,

  waiting for

  us to be

  still enough

  to hear it.

  Laura Foley

  To See It

  We need to separate to see

  the life we’ve made.

  We need to leave our house

  where someone waits for us, patiently,

  warm beneath the sheets.

  We need to don a sweater, a coat, mittens,

  wrap a scarf around our neck,

  stride down the road,

  a cold winter morning,

  and turn our head back,

  to see it—perched

  on the top of the hill, our life

  lit from inside.

  Jacqueline Jules

  Unclouded Vision

  Her lenses, implanted

  to uncloud aging eyes,

  sparkle now like a bit

  of glitter on a card,

  rhinestones on a T-shirt.

  Twinkle in her eye. An old cliché.

  Common long before

  surgery was routine, suggesting

  joy or affection—intangibles

  that lift heels off concrete,

  make us notice yellow petals

  pushing through sidewalk cracks.

  My grandmother

  now visits museums again,

  marvels at details, stops to read

  each acrylic label on the wall.

  Danusha Laméris

  Improvement

  The optometrist says my eyes

  are getting better each year.

  Soon he’ll have to lower my prescription.

  What’s next? The light step I had at six?

  All the gray hairs back to brown?

  Skin taut as a drum?

  My improved eyes and I

  walked around town and celebrated.

  We took in the letters

  of the marquee, the individual leaves

  filling out the branches of the sycamore,

  an early moon.

  So much goes downhill: joints

  wearing out with every mile,

  the delicate folds of the eardrum

  exhausted from years of listening.

  I’m grateful for small victories.

  The way the heart still beats time

  in the cathedral of the ribs.

  And the mind, watching its parade

  of thoughts, enter and leave,

  begins to see them for what they are:

  jugglers, fire swallowers, acrobats,

  tossing their batons into the air.

  Reflective Pause

  Grateful for Small Victories

  In “Improvement,” Danusha Laméris recounts the rare experience of a part of her body actually getting better with age and invites us to celebrate the good news with her. “So much goes downhill,” she says, reminding us of the body’s fragility and vulnerability. Yet she also urges us to be “grateful for small victories,” for the fact that the heart carries on “in the cathedral of the ribs,” and that the endlessly busy mind keeps sending out its “parade of thoughts.” I love the way the speaker of this poem seems to detach from her own anxieties and intrusive thoughts, even playfully seeing them as “jugglers, fire swallowers, acrobats” meant to entertain, and not to be obeyed. And in her question, “What’s next?,” I also hear the willingness to have hope that other things in her life, and in the world, might begin to improve as well.

  Invitation for Writing and Reflection

  Write your own celebration of your “small victories,” things you managed to accomplish no matter how slight they might seem. Whatever your list, try to capture that same sense of gratitude and joy for things that went well for you.

  Jack Ridl

  After Spending the Morning Baking Bread

  Our cat lies across the stove’s front burners,

  right leg hanging over the oven door. He

  is looking into the pantry where his bowl

  sits full on the counter. His smaller dish,

  the one for his splash of cream, sits empty.

  Say yes to wanting to be this cat. Say

  yes to wanting to lie across the leftover

  warmth, letting it rise into your soft belly,

  spreading into every twitch of whisker, twist

  of fur and cell, through the Mobius strip

  of your bloodstream. You won’t know

  you will die. You won’t know the mice

  do not exist for you. If a lap is empty and

  warm, you will land on it, feel an unsteady

  hand along your back, fingers scratching

  behind your ear. You will purr.

  Wally Swist

  Radiance

  Over your gray and white oval marble-top kitchen table,

  the meeting of our eyes makes the room grow brighter.

  Our faces, layer after layer, become so vibrant

  the light appears to crest in waves.

  We have become changed by it, nothing can be

  the same after it. When I bend down to touch

  the shape of deer tracks in the damp sand, it is in

  the same way I place my fingers over your body.

  When I stand beside a freshet in a meadow

  the sun catches the rings of the water’s long ripples

  in the wind, that is the same glimmer we hold

  when our eyes meet in the kitchen over

  your gray and white oval marble-top table.

  Every day for the rest of my life, yours is the face

  I want to see when I awake in the morning.


  Kristen Case

  Morning

  Against all probability our bulbs have blossomed,

  opened their white rooms, given their assent.

  I pull myself from your breathing to take a closer look.

  It happened overnight.

  Outside a flock of birds folds and unfolds its single body.

  I start the coffee. Light comes

  from impossible directions.

  You are still asleep.

  I cup the curve of your skull with my hand.

  Alive, sleeping.

  Light rises on the flame-colored bricks.

  Ross Gay

  Wedding Poem

  for Keith and Jen

  Friends I am here to modestly report

  seeing in an orchard

  in my town

  a goldfinch kissing

  a sunflower

  again and again

  dangling upside down

  by its tiny claws

  steadying itself by snapping open

  like an old-timey fan

  its wings

  again and again,

  until, swooning, it tumbled off

  and swooped back to the very same perch,

  where the sunflower curled its giant

  swirling of seeds

  around the bird and leaned back

  to admire the soft wind

  nudging the bird’s plumage,

  and friends I could see

  the points on the flower’s stately crown

  soften and curl inward

  as it almost indiscernibly lifted

  the food of its body

  to the bird’s nuzzling mouth

  whose fervor

  I could hear from

  oh 20 or 30 feet away

  and see from the tiny hulls

  that sailed from their

  good racket,

  which good racket, I have to say

  was making me blush,

  and rock up on my tippy-toes,

  and just barely purse my lips

  with what I realize now

  was being, simply, glad,

  which such love,

  if we let it,

  makes us feel.