I

In the high reaches of the Bear River Mountains of Northern Utah the leaves of the big tooth maples are turning red, and the sky arches a rich blue over the campus of Utah State University. I think of my own college student days, the world opening before me with continents of thought and feeling, a library of books to read, professors who had dedicated their lives to art, literature, and writing. One of my them, a bearded Thoreau scholar and nature poet, brought his violin to class and played Bach’s “Chaconne in D.” He seemed a kind of sacred, enlightened gypsy, like Chagall’s Green Violinist.

II

In the classroom where my students sit, I see hair styles, faces, colors and patterns of clothes, hear the tenor and pitch of their voices, this collage of images and meanings that have never come together before, will never come together again.

III

Percy Bysshe Shelley said that poetry’s real purpose is “to remove the scales of familiarity from our eyes.” The work is to not become habituated to the people and landscapes and things we see every day, to not go around on automatic pilot, failing to see and hear what’s around us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that “To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.”

The leaf-pattern of the ash tree’s shadow on my writing desk.

IV

The art of writing begins with the art of staying awake, to what is around us, inside us–on this canyon cliff, in this hospital room, at this auto repair garage.

The word “Buddha” means “the awakened one.”

V

In Healing Into Life and Death, Stephen Levine describes a meditation he uses to reawaken repressed traumas associated with parts of the body that are experiencing great pain or have been psychically deadened.

He has the person he is working with gently let their attention move through the body, allowing awareness to come to the hurt places.

The break-up of frozen emotions, though painful, facilitates healing, and often the re-awakening of one part of the body and its frozen emotions triggers a profound, more global awakening of perception and awareness.

One of his clients said:

 A miracle happened the other day. I walked into the kitchen, sat down at the table, and looked up and saw the wall. I just saw the wall! I was just here in my body, in the world, in my heart. I saw the wall as if for the first time. I was just here. It was the most wonderful experience of my life! (p. 138-39)

VI

“Few adult persons can see nature,” Emerson said. “Most persons do not see the sun.”

VII

A tall stand of grasses not far from my car moves in evening sun and summer air, long green spears with golden seed-tips sway. I am watching them. Crickets chirp in the pines behind the house, fireflies blink. That grass, that landscape, those pines and fireflies anchor me to the moment.

VIII

It is hard to sit on a boulder and look out at the world for more than a few minutes without the distractions of pulling out a snack, a drink, a book; it is hard to sit at home without calling a friend or turning on the TV or connecting to the Internet. We get uncomfortable, start to itch, fidget. Memories rise up. In a poem called “Black Oak,” Mary Oliver stands in a forest looking up at the oak, as it starts to drizzle. She wants to stay and look, but feels the itch to move: “Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from / one boot to another — why don’t you get going?”

If we can sit through the itch, the boredom, and the anxiety, which just might blossom into a storm of feelings, we will find that all these pass through us, returning us to the moment, to the landscape around us and more space opens within us. We stop running away from what’s happening inside and can begin to have a look around.

IX

Stephen King writes horror because in moments of great intensity — crises, accidents, fearful encounters — time seems to slow down. We see then in a preternatural clarity. Ordinary details become illuminated in clear, slow-moving focus.

We are taken into a deeper level of “being-in-the-world.” We feel things through our eyes –the rock, the trees, the hawk, sunlight, the grass, the wall–participating in tactile communication with what Buddhist teacher Thich Nat Hahn calls “interbeing.”

Jonathan Edwards, the scary eighteenth-century Puritan theologian authored the sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” but he had a brighter, sensitive, devotional side. He wrote that when a person undergoes a conversion experience, a “new sense of the heart” is awakened within them, a new sense through which one can perceive spiritual truths.

X

Things are no longer inert objects but presences in whose life we participate.

XI

Poet David Bottoms says all poems are about two things — life and death, but that they’re really about one thing — death.

XII

Poets and artists, like cave dwellers at Lascaux, leave images of a world passing before them. This father, this daughter, this oriole, this fawn.

XIII

When I was young, I started watching crows, saw the iridescent shimmer of their wings, the way they are enamored of glitter, live in families, and live in our world, never surrendering their wildness. I began writing about them. Before long, I had a chapbook — A Calendar of Crows — a crow for each month of the year.

XIV

The Lost Verse

In your birthday present aquarium
Hypostomus plecostomus rests in the lap
of the Buddha. His body divided bow
and stern, half black, half a pale tangerine,
like a yin-yang cigar, or a half-lit submarine.

An algae eater, all day he’s been sucking
the scum off the Buddha’s body,
cleaning that great roundness,
hands and feet, face and arms,
while Gautama sits there, two feet under
without breathing.

All about them shimmer the spangled host
angels, firemouths, prayer-flag gouram’s,
neon tetras, pearlfish,
a water filter their only choir.

And all the while Mister Plecostomus
lies content, knowing
how the lost verse said,
Blessed is the scum of the earth,
for it shall adorn the body of God.

XV

In the film Il Postino, Mario says he wants to be a poet and Pablo Neruda tells him to walk the ocean shore until he thinks of a metaphor. For hours, he tries in vain. But later, when Neruda recites a poem about the sea, Mario reports that listening, he felt he was tossing on the sea of words. He asks Neruda whether the whole world is a metaphor for something else.

Mario woos his beloved with metaphors: her smile is a butterfly, her hair vines and stars, her laugh a rose, a sudden silvery wave.

XVI

Everything in the world is sacred, the ant as well as the eagle, the scum as well as the stars.