3 April 2023 – When Nature Touches Us – Nature 05

When Nature Touches Us

Everyone has experienced it. Sometimes we long for it. Unexpectedly, it suddenly touches us without our merit or our prayers. And yet, we are in it and of it, with it, and of it. Nature – it is everything and we are everywhere abiding in it, and it in us. There is no separation. Only survival. The blood in our body and the sparks in our brains are natural occurrences.

Nature is everywhere, of course – chamomile flowers peeping up from sidewalk cracks. A glacier pushed to melting. A robin’s work of nest-building makes a perfect rocker for her cheepers. A dog sneezes. A brown oak leaf rocks toward the earth. Green and yellow ivy cling and creep up a brick wall. Nature.  A quote from the 2022 U.S. Poet Laureate, Ada Limón, states confidently, 

“I didn’t sign up for anything limited when I chose poetry. “I signed up for something that is about trying, on some level, to harness the unsayable.” 

Nature resonates in this statement more than most writing subjects. It is like looking at ourselves from the front of our own eyeballs. We see everything and nothing simultaneously.

Most of you know that I live in a grand ol’ Forest in far northwestern Minnesota, facing north where another whole country stretches toward the North Pole. I live with my Beloved Husband, our German Shepherd, Willa, and our Shelty, Sancho. We live more obviously “in nature” than most. That may be why we feel blessed by every touch of wind, every sound of needles cascading, and the tastes of sweet wild strawberries.

I’m going to stop my introduction here because I could go on indefinitely about this nature that is everyone, including us.

Before we take a poetic dive, a reminder that Monday’s – and for that matter, any day at Wannaskan Almanac, we invite you to join us by submitting your own work – poems, of course, but any piece of prose as well, that you would like to see in print. We welcome you to our small but mighty group of contributors. If you need a little inspiration, Mondays do have a changing theme each month:

April – Heroes

May – Being Human

June – Home

See you around the poetic corral where writers exchange inspirations while sipping ginger ales with the occasional Guinness hidden in the back pocket of one of the Almanac regular contributors.

Preparing for Residential Placement for My Disabled Daughter

Jennifer Fanklin

My life without you—I have already

seen it. Today, on the salt marsh. 

The red-winged blackbird perched 

in the tallest tree, sage green branches

falling over the water. She sat there

for a long time, doing nothing.

As she lifted up to fly, the slender branch

shook from the release of her weight.

When the bird departed, it seemed

the branch would shake forever

in the wind, bobbing up and down.

When it finally stopped moving,

the branch was diminished,

reaching out to the vast sky.

Snail-Picking

Onyedikachi Chinedu

The weatherman reports rain

to a crew of snail-pickers through an old TV.

They stand on the elevated porch,

holding plastic buckets and torches,

preparing for the long walk.

Behind the houses, on the football field,

blades of grass will soon wet.

The snail-pickers know this.

They walk onward

through the field for snails,

witnessing the vanishing of human voices.

Absolute stillness abounds.

The owl and bats on the succulent stalks,

the rubbish and snails,

within a few meters of a dead mouse.

Now, at the center, they fade

into a singularity: one man and one woman

to a section, torching for the hard,

brown shells. The young beams

reveal the slimy trails.

One snail picked up.

It could take minutes

to find another. Even hours.

They search, reducing their voices.

Attempting to fool the boy in the field,

they retreat into the night, slowly, leaving

him with the task of searching.

The cloudy sky strengthens

the discordant dialects of the frogs

and crickets. A rustle in a thicket.

The sudden realization

he’s alone with nature’s tricks.

In almost harmony with the owl’s screech,

the stems swish again.

maggie and milly and molly and may

E.E. Cummings

maggie and milly and molly and may

went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang

so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star

whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing

which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone

as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)

it's always ourselves we find in the sea

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud 

William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

Background:

Jennifer Franklin is the author of If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, 2023). The recipient of grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts/City Corps and the Café Royal Cultural Foundation, she is the program director of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and a professor in the creative writing MFA program at Manhattanville College.

Onyedikachi Chinedu is a queer Nigerian poet. They are currently an undergraduate at the University of Port Harcourt in Choba, Rivers State, Nigeria. “Poems come quietly to me. When they do, it requires a lot of rewriting to find clarity, even after months of letting the poem ‘sit’ on the page. This one is about a memory that is dear to me. I think it was from snail-picking that I got money to buy Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at a young age, in a small, rural town in Benin, Nigeria. So, like all recurring memories, it was necessary to tell a retelling, to concretize every bit of action in words. It’s a blend of imagination and reality, as literature can do so much with clauses and phrases.”

Edward Estlin Cummings, who was also known as E. E. Cummings, e. e. cummings and e e cummings (October 14, 1894 - September 3, 1962), was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. He wrote approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays, and several essays. He is often regarded as one of the most important American poets of the 20th century. Cummings is associated with modernist free-form poetry. Much of his work has idiosyncratic syntax and uses lower-case spellings for poetic expression.

William Wordsworth was one of the founders of English Romanticism and one its most central figures and important intellects. He is remembered as a poet of spiritual and epistemological speculation, a poet concerned with the human relationship to nature and a fierce advocate of using the vocabulary and speech patterns of common people in poetry. The son of John and Ann Cookson Wordsworth, William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumberland, located in the Lake District of England: an area that would become closely associated with Wordsworth for over two centuries after his death. He began writing poetry as a young boy in grammar school, and before graduating from college he went on a walking tour of Europe, which deepened his love for nature and his sympathy for the common man: both major themes in his poetry. Wordsworth is best known for Lyrical Ballads, co-written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and The Prelude, a Romantic epic poem chronicling the “growth of a poet’s mind.”

Wordsworth’s deep love for the “beauteous forms” of the natural world was established early. The Wordsworth children seem to have lived in a sort of rural paradise along the Derwent River, which ran past the terraced garden below the ample house whose tenancy John Wordsworth had obtained from his employer, the political magnate and property owner Sir James Lowther, Baronet of Lowther (later Earl of Lonsdale). Wordsworth’s last major work in prose represents a return to his earliest interest in the land and scenery of the English Lake District. For Wordsworth, poetry, which should be written in “the real language of men,” is nevertheless “the spontaneous overflow of feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

Exploration 1: Try Me! Try Me!

Silence – 

Spend a period of time in a quiet place in nature to experience silence. Can you connect with the silence that is there even when there are sounds? What interrupts the experience of silence? Does being in silence create any sense of discomfort? Do you want to distract yourself from it? Does the silence allow your mind and body to rest more in stillness and quiet? 

Tricycle Magazine, Spring 2023

Exploration 2: Pick Me! Pick Me!

A Day in Nature –

Take a day to be alone in nature. Select a location where you are not likely to be interrupted by many people. You can divide the time between periods of contemplative sitting and gentle walks. In sitting meditation, cultivate an open attentiveness toward the present moment. You can focus on the inner experience of breathing and the sensations of the body. Or you can pay attention to the experience that arises from sitting outside—the touch of the breeze on your skin, the physical connection with the earth, the sounds of birds, animals, and the wind, and the fragrances in the air. Try meditating with the eyes open, allowing the eyes to be soft and receptive with a wide field of vision while maintaining awareness of the other senses, especially hearing.

While walking, let go of any goal-orientation. Simply let yourself walk slowly, carefully, with full awareness of the space you are walking in. Let go of any intention to get anywhere. Listen to whatever draws you in the landscape—a particular tree, rock, stream, or a vast open vista. Or perhaps a lizard or beetle draws you into a conversation. Let your senses be wide open and receptive. Give little attention to your thoughts and instead keep turning to your inner and outer environment. If you begin to feel spacey or unfocused, resume sitting meditation, centering attention upon the breath. The less you do outwardly, the more will open to you.

Tricycle Magazine, Spring 2023