How to write a nature poem

My dear friend Jessica Brown and her husband Simon, recently made a short instructional video about how to write a nature poem: Seeing Eyes: How to Write a Nature Poem. Although they wrote it for a children's art festival, anyone, no matter their age, can enjoy and learn from it. The video is filmed in Ireland, where Jessica lives. I hope you'll watch it and maybe then write a poem! But even if you never write a poem, watching and listening to Jessica may inspire you to view the nature all around you differently, to have "seeing eyes."

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[Photo: Nearby beauty]

The Clean Daughter by Jill Kandel: A memoir of adventure, grief, and mercy

My friend Jill Kandel has just released her second book, The Clean Daughter: A Cross-Continental Memoir (North Dakota State University Press). Her new book is a memoir that tracks a couple different aspects of Kandel’s life. It is about her cross-cultural marriage, Jill from North Dakota and Johan, her husband, from the Netherlands. It is about living in other foreign cultures, with Johan’s job taking them to live in Zambia and Indonesia. (If you’ve read my blog for awhile you may remember that I wrote a post about her first book, So Many Africas: Six Years in a Zambian Village.) It’s also about Jill’s difficult relationship with her father-in-law, Izaak, a “judgmental and arrogant” man who made a controversial final decision about his life. This is the thread that interested me the most.

Years after her father-in-law died, Jill set about trying to learn more about who he was and why. She spent years researching, traveling, talking to relatives and family friends. She uncovered the story of his life as a teen and young man as Nazi Germany took over the Netherlands and the years of recovery after Germany was defeated. She learned of her father-in-law’s heroism, his generosity of spirit in those dark days. Although the hurt she experienced from her father-in-law never completely went away, she came to see her father-in-law in a new light. She came “[t]o see him as human, both frail and strong, with foibles, faults, quirks, and grace.” She came to see her own judgments and arrogance in relation to him. Her story made me wonder about the unknown stories of people with whom I’ve had trouble relating. The stories of people whom I’ve judged. The stories of people I haven't paused to consider.

Just this last week my father and I have spent time thinking about and discussing a woman in our family ancestry about whom we only knew a bit of story. We started probing those few lines of story. We started wondering about and talking about what that story would have required of the woman. The shape of her life has now grown in substantial magnitude in my mind from what it was before. Whereas this woman had been little more than a name on our family tree, now she was a woman of great strength and bravery. We spent a couple hours; Jill spent years.

In the final pages of The Clean Daughter, Jill writes, “I’m learning to value mercy and to extend grace to both Izaak and myself.”

Setting my alarm

I’ve once again set my phone alarm clock to buzz every morning at 8:45. I first set this alarm after the shootings at Sandy Hook school in Newtown in December 2012. I had the alarm set for a long while but then lapsed into skipping it, then forgetting, and then the new habit was gone. Then came the Boston marathon in April 2013, and I set it again. I set it again after the Charleston shooting in 2015. Each time, I confess, I've let the practice eventually fade. After Uvalde, it’s time to set it again. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, please follow this link to a short essay I wrote for the “Good Letters” blog of Image Journal back in 2013. Then, please, would you also set your alarm?

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[Photo: taken of a toy dinosaur, no doubt lovingly placed, on a retaining wall I sometimes pass when I walk.]

Among the birch trees

I recently went to The Museum of Russian Art, which if you’ve read my blog for a while you may remember some prior posts about this beautiful place (which has had a Ukrainian flag prominently painted on the front of the building for the last couple months). The first painting I saw on this visit landed my attention and my affection as well. I’ve been thinking about it for several weeks. It’s called “Among the Birch Trees” by Akhmed Kitaev in 1962. I hope you’ll click this link to see the painting before you read further.

The painting seemed at first to be a picture of a forest of birch trees. Beautiful cream, gray, and brown bark, bright green leaves, long lean trunks. But then I saw the woman. If you clicked the link above, do you see her now too? Peering out from behind one of the trees is a woman. Was she posing? Or did the artist capture her as she was walking through the forest and just emerging from behind a tree? It almost seems as if she was hiding behind the tree and just now emerged to say, “Here I am!” There’s something playful about her. See the tilt of her head. Look closely and find the bouquet in one hand and the single flower in her other hand. She wears a clear plastic rain coat and a clear plastic rain hat held under her neck with a pink plastic tie, and a black purse hangs over her wrist. Her rain gear all has a pinkish hue. She wears a watch and a dress, not pants. Her hair is dark and worn typical of the 1960s.

She looks like an ordinary middle-aged woman of her time and place who went out to do some shopping on a rainy day, but instead of walking down gray sidewalks on a gray street to a neighborhood store, she instead stepped into the forest and there takes a stroll gathering flowers and being flirtatious with the beauty of the birch. I like to think that she is playing hooky from her errand to the store. That she ditched the errand and strolled boldly into the forest. Maybe she enacted a stealth walk, veering only at the last minute away from the store and toward the forest lest anyone notice. Maybe she hid around corners of buildings, kept her head down, bent over more than necessary to tie her shoe or fix a stocking to escape the questioning gaze of a neighbor or coworker. When the coast was clear, she made a dash into the forest and hugged the birch. She breathed deeply. Lifted her face to the sky. Leaned back against a tree and rested.

Or maybe she was simply taking the long way to wherever she was going. Adding joy and rejuvenation to her day wherever and whenever she could. I much like that idea as well. I love this painting and hope you’ll look at it awhile. Maybe you’ll come up with your own story about the woman in the painting.

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[Photo: A slice of the painting described in the post. Click through to enjoy it in full!]

Public Joy

The current issue of Comment magazine is on the theme of "gift logic." Drawing on the teaching of Jesus, wisdom from St. Basil, the book The Gift by Lewis Hyde, and others, the essays in this issue invite us to consider gift "as a way to engage with the world."

In the essay, "Subverting Two-Pocket Thinking with Public Joy," Tim Soerens introduces the concept of "public joy."

Public joy gets at the pulsing, hopeful, brimming-with-possibility kind of energy that by its very nature requires equity and justice, and celebrates both individual and collective agency. So what is the economy for? If we view our economic life through the lens of grace, then perhaps we could say the purpose is to maximize public joy.

If we remember that we are the creatures (not the Creator) and that all is gift, then of course we all need to orient ourselves toward this grand project of public joy, which necessarily includes everyone. To love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and strength and to love your neighbor as yourself means that all our many gifts should be oriented toward the mission of creating as much public joy as conceivably possible.

This essay offers much to think about. How does my life/my work contribute to public joy? Of course, the use of joy here doesn't mean temporary laughter or an hour or two of enjoyment but joy of the deep and abiding variety, peace, "a visceral pairing of words that taps deep into the biblical idea of shalom."

This month at my work, the team I'm part of has been given the assignment of coming up with our individual goals for the year ahead. I'm a medical writer and so am thinking about how my skills best serve the needs of medical providers and their patients, the needs of the company for whom I work, as well as my own personal needs and interests. This essay introduces the question, How does my work increase public joy, or the potential for public joy? It's an interesting and important question and one I hadn't thought about before. How does the manner in which any and all of us spend our days increase—or offer the potential for increasing—public joy?

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This post was first published in my monthly newsletter, “Dear Reader.” Subscribe here.

Malcolm Guite Reflecting on C.S. Lewis's "Learning in Wartime"

Malcolm Guite, poet and Anglican priest, offers on YouTube periodic musings and readings from his study in the UK. In his latest video from this past week, Guite reflected on C.S. Lewis's essay "Learning in Wartime"—originally delivered in December 1939 as a radio address in which Lewis advised his students on how to live in times of war—and then drew connection to today. The video is 16 minutes long and is well worth a listen.

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[Photo: Coming home this from the Ash Wednesday service at my church, I passed The Museum of Russian Art. This locally- and privately-owned museum has the largest collection of Russian Art outside of Russia. It’s very beautiful, and I’ve written about it several times. I was pleased to see this banner they’ve placed on display over their usual exhibit banner, the yellow and blue of the Ukrainian flag.]

Opening a Window

One weekend day in mid-January, a day when the temperature suddenly spiked to just above freezing after so many cold and subzero days, my husband and I went for a drive in celebration of the gift of the day. The sun sparkled in a way that seems to happen only in the winter. (Did you know that the earth is closer to the sun in early January than at any other time of the year?) The sky was brilliantly blue, with the snow reflecting all the light from the sun back into the sky.

I opened the sunroof window.

Oh the joy! We lifted our faces.

You should have seen our smiles. Our delight. The moment lasted only a short while before the car got too cold and I had to close the window. The temperature eventually dropped. Clouds eventually came. Snow. It was, after all, still winter. But that day’s invitation to open the window and turn my face to the light, to the sun's warmth, has stayed with me.

A short while later I opened a book of poetry that I’d bought a year earlier but never yet read, How to Love The World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, edited by James Crew. Here was a poem called “Promise” by Barbara Crooker, and this is how it began:

The day is an open road
stretching out before you.
Roll down the windows.

Ten more lines follow, and I’d include them all if not for wishing to respect the poet’s copyright, but these lines were what struck me. The third line in particular.

Roll down the windows.

There’s been so much heavy news the last couple years. So much heavy news the last couple weeks. Maybe you also need a prompting to open a window, literally or metaphorically, and turn your face to the sun. Let in the warmth, let in the light, the freshness; let what has gone missing return.

Opening a window in the middle of a very cold season is an act of joy, which means hope is present, because don’t we all hope for joy?

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[Photo: at a local nature center, thaw circles emerging around plants that soon will be green again.]

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This post was first published in my monthly newsletter, “Dear Reader.” Subscribe here.