Mid-March in Nashville is - right now anyway - mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful, to borrow from e.e. cummings. Never thought I would love mulching and pruning and weeding under cold, grey skies. But there is something about spring-cleaning a yard, a house, that is making this weather kind of magical. Transformative. I'm grateful and pleasantly surprised that I've learned to love it. I mentally drifted back this morning to springs in Chapel Hill a few years ago. Nonstop rain for weeks. The only thing to do, it seemed, was to buy a solid pair of rubber boots and stride through all the puddles on the way to class. So, too, with this Nashville weather. Jumping into it seems the best way. I would have missed so much if I had stayed indoors the last few months. A sidenote: I'm kind of stuck on Emerson's "Nature" essay, which I'm teaching to my seniors. He says all this, too, and so much more eloquently, but maybe I'm just understanding it for the first time myself.
"Long Afternoon at the Edge of Little Sister Pond"
by Mary Oliver
As for life,
I'm humbled,
I'm without words
sufficient to say
how it has been hard as flint,
and soft as a spring pond,
both of these
and over and over,
and long pale afternoons besides,
and so many mysteries
beautiful as eggs in a nest,
still unhatched
though warm and watched over
by something I have never seen -
a tree angel, perhaps,
or a ghost of holiness.
Every day I walk out into the world
to be dazzled, then to be reflective.
It suffices, it is all comfort -
along with human love,
dog love, water love, little-serpent love,
sunburst love, or love for that smallest of birds
flying among the scarlet flowers.
There is hardly time to think about
stopping, and lying down at last
to the long afterlife, to the tenderness
yet to come, when
time will brim over the singular pond, and become forever,
and we will pretend to melt away into the leaves.
As for death,
I can't wait to be a hummingbird,
can you?
No comments:
Post a Comment