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This week, I soaked in as much of the natural world as I could. I worked in the garden, read books in my hammock, and sat outside with the hens.
We need the sunshine, the fresh air, the sound of birds. Nature provides us with all these things and more. There are benefits to both our physical and mental health. You don't have to take my word for it, University of California Davis published an article two years ago outlining how being in nature can help improve our thinking, our physical wellness, and our mental health. They provide specific ways, and give ideas for how to get more nature into your life. Link to the article is here.
Many famous and favorite poets write about nature and the benefits thereof. Some from long ago, and some more recent. One of my favorites is Mary Oliver. It's easy to imagine her going out every day of her life, being in nature, then coming home to write about it.
Emily Dickinson didn't do much socially, but she spent her time communing with nature, and writing about it. One year I wrote a poem a day inspired by a poem by Ms. Dickinson. Her work makes me want to spend more time outdoors and more time writing poetry. Here is one of hers:
A Bird Came Down the Walk (she didn't title her poems, they are titled after her first lines)
A Bird, came down the Walk -
He did not know I saw -
He bit an Angle Worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,
And then, he drank a Dew
From a convenient Grass -
And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass -
He glanced with rapid eyes,
That hurried all abroad -
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought,
He stirred his Velvet Head. -
Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers,
And rowed him softer Home -
Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
Leap, plashless as they swim.
-- Emily Dickinson
Another poet, famous for his nature poems is Walt Whitman. (He's also known for writing long ones.) Here's one:
As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life
1
As I ebb’d with the ocean of life,
As I wended the shores I know,
As I walk’d where the ripples continually wash you Paumanok,
Where they rustle up hoarse and sibilant,
Where the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her castaways,
I musing late in the autumn day, gazing off southward,
Held by this electric self out of the pride of which I utter poems,
Was seiz’d by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot,
The rim, the sediment that stands for all the water and all the land of the globe.
Fascinated, my eyes reverting from the south, dropt, to follow those slender windrows,
Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten,
Scum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left by the tide,
Miles walking, the sound of breaking waves the other side of me,
Paumanok there and then as I thought the old thought of likenesses,
These you presented to me you fish-shaped island,
As I wended the shores I know,
As I walk’d with that electric self seeking types.
2
As I wend to the shores I know not,
As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck’d,
As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me,
As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer,
I too but signify at the utmost a little wash’d-up drift,
A few sands and dead leaves to gather,
Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift.
O baffled, balk’d, bent to the very earth,
Oppress’d with myself that I have dared to open my mouth,
Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I have not once had the least idea who or what I am,
But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d,
Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and bows,
With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written,
Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath.
I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single object, and that no man ever can,
Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart upon me and sting me,
Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all.
3
You oceans both, I close with you,
We murmur alike reproachfully rolling sands and drift, knowing not why,
These little shreds indeed standing for you and me and all.
You friable shore with trails of debris,
You fish-shaped island, I take what is underfoot,
What is yours is mine my father.
I too Paumanok,
I too have bubbled up, floated the measureless float, and been wash’d on your shores,
I too am but a trail of drift and debris,
I too leave little wrecks upon you, you fish-shaped island.
I throw myself upon your breast my father,
I cling to you so that you cannot unloose me,
I hold you so firm till you answer me something.
Kiss me my father,
Touch me with your lips as I touch those I love,
Breathe to me while I hold you close the secret of the murmuring I envy.
4
Ebb, ocean of life, (the flow will return,)
Cease not your moaning you fierce old mother,
Endlessly cry for your castaways, but fear not, deny not me,
Rustle not up so hoarse and angry against my feet as I touch you or gather from you.
I mean tenderly by you and all,
I gather for myself and for this phantom looking down where we lead, and following me and mine.
Me and mine, loose windrows, little corpses,
Froth, snowy white, and bubbles,
(See, from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last,
See, the prismatic colors glistening and rolling,)
Tufts of straw, sands, fragments,
Buoy’d hither from many moods, one contradicting another,
From the storm, the long calm, the darkness, the swell,
Musing, pondering, a breath, a briny tear, a dab of liquid or soil,
Up just as much out of fathomless workings fermented and thrown,
A limp blossom or two, torn, just as much over waves floating, drifted at random,
Just as much for us that sobbing dirge of Nature,
Just as much whence we come that blare of the cloud-trumpets,
We, capricious, brought hither we know not whence, spread out before you,
You up there walking or sitting,
Whoever you are, we too lie in drifts at your feet.
--Walt Whitman
If we take time to sit outdoors, or to sit by an open window if we don't have other access, breathe in the air, listen for birds, search with our eyes for butterflies, ladybugs, bees of all sorts, our day slows down. If we write about the experience, it is extended. We have a better chance of remembering it.
Our lives are made up of moments. During this time of resistance to the fascism looming, it is more important than ever to take time to breathe. To spend time with nature. As Emily Dickinson said, Forever is Composed of Nows. Here is the link to the (not long) poem.
I'll leave you with a poem of my own:
I am a summer day, I am
the night. My stardust molecules
float through the air disturbing
no one. Bees, butterflies, the petals
of a lavender rose greet me
as if I bring the dew, and
perhaps I do.
My eyes are as misty as the non-existent clouds,
my breath as easy as the breeze
of dawn.
We are all pretty people;
in the fullness of summer
we brook no madness.
--Sandra de Helen
Who are your favorite poets? How do you spend time in nature? Do you spend time each day screen-free? Do you have time to think, to daydream?
We have a wide variety of birds that come to our yard and feeders, every size from a ruby throated hummingbird to a bald eagles. Every color. Because they are not common in my yard, I saw one yellow finch on the cat nip bushes. I need nature like the air I breathe.
Sandra, I write this sitting in our living room, the patio door open, a net curtain keeping the insects out, looking across the garden. I can hear and see birds but I can’t compete with Alberta (that is some backyard she has!)! At 15, with my second week’s pay, I bought a paperback copy of English poet John Betjeman’s collected works. At 70, Susan bought me a hardback edition to replace my battered paperback copy. He wrote a lot of poems about Middlesex and my side of London as well as girls and women like Susan. He remains my ‘Desert Island’ poet, but Leonard Cohen runs him close. As for screen down time, you invariably follow lunch and BBC lunchtime news and The Guardian quick crossword with Susan, as do a select few others. We watch time shifted TV 6-9pm. Never live. There would be more hours in the day if I did not sleep so much!
A P.S. Lovely foot and I fall out of bed, so how you manage a hammock impresses me greatly. By the way, which one the girls is the headless one? 🐰