The newest issue of the young journal, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts is now published. It can be read online, or downloaded as a pdf for free. My own poem, inspired by Wallace Stevens koanic classic, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” can be found on pages 42-43. I am thrilled to have my work, especially this poem, included in this journal.
Pensive, published twice a year by Center for Spirituality, Dialogue, and Service (CSDS) at Northeastern University in Boston, is currently accepting submissions for its fifth issue. The deadline is May 15, 2022.
A friend who is creating a pollinator meadow in her home brought my attention to the April 3, 2022 article in the New York Times about a movement in Appleton, Wisconsin, begun two years ago, now is becoming nationwide. It is called, “No-Mow May.” By chance this week I saw two minutes of a local news broadcast, and the lead story was the adoption of “No-Mow May” by households in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina.
After only two years, the data is very encouraging. This small practice of restraint is allowing the increased health, diversity, and vigor of that workhorse pollinator, bees. This kind of news is the kind we need in April on Earth Day–one simple but powerful step that all of us can consider taking right now and in the sweet spring days ahead. My poem today (“No-Mow May”) is a mediation of this set of ideas and actions. The photographs above come from the warmer April of 2017. The ones below from our chilly house and garden here in 2022.
Wedding Dress and Apple Blossoms (Photo: Leslie Schultz)
There really is no one quite like Mary Oliver (1935-2019), and her book, American Primitive (Back Bay Books, April 30, 1983) contains a poem I have almost gotten by heart (but not quite!) “John Chapman” both sums up and enlarges the familar story of an American legend, Johnny Appleseed. In a similar way, for me Oliver has seeded my mind with images and new understanding of the natural world.
JOHN CHAPMAN
He wore a tin pot for a hat, in which
he cooked his supper
toward evening
in the Ohio forests. He wore
a sackcloth shirt and walked
barefoot on feet crooked as roots. And everywhere he went
the apple trees sprang up behind him lovely
as young girls.
No Indian or settler or wild beast
ever harmed him, he for his part honored
everything, all God's creatures! thought little,
on a rainy night,
of sharing the shelter of a hollow log touching
flesh with any creatures there: snakes,
raccoon possibly, or some great slab of bear.
Mrs. Price, late of Richland County,
at whose parents' house he sometimes lingered,
recalled: he spoke
only once of woman and his gray eyes
brittled into ice. "Some
are deceivers," he whispered, and she felt
the pain of it, remembered it
into her old age.
Well, the trees he planted or gave away
prospered, and he became
the good legend, you do
what you can if you can; whatever
the secret, and the pain,
there's a decision: to die,
or to live, to go on
caring about something. In the spring, in Ohio,
in the forests that are left you can still find
sign of him: patches
of cold white fire.
Mary Oliver
Background for My Poem, “Seva”:
Coneflower in Full Bloom (Photo: Leslie Schult)
The word “seva” comes from Sanskrit. It is pronounced “SAVE-a.” In Yoga philosophy, it means selfless service, the kind done without any expectation of recognition, reward, or even the satisfaction of knowing it was effective.
I have been thinking about this a lot, lately, especially as regards to planetary interconnectedness. Perhaps this kind of selfless service is the most enlightened form of self-interest, too? Sometimes, I think, selfless service means getting myself out of the way so that I can see the next right thing to do and then do it!
I wish that I could have photographed the goldfinch itself, but here are two images of her temporary perch and feeding station.
I was introduced to the poetry of Seamus Heaney when I was in graduate school. Even though money then was extremely tight, I bought two slender paperback collections of his poems then, Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Field Work (Farrar, Straus, Giroux; 1979). As you can see from the photograph of the remaining volume, I read them and read them almost into tatters. When Heaney spoke at the Guthrie in Minneapolis 1996, shortly after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, I was thrilled to be in the audience. (Thank you, MPR, for archiving the recording of his talk that day!)
His work undoubtedly stands the test of time, and I continue to see new facets of his understated brilliance and expansive vision each time I read a poem anew. Oddly, I don’t see any direct influence in my own work. Maybe it is so pervasive I am blind to it? Or perhaps Heaney is so much part of the soil of Ireland (in addition to being a citizen of the world) that he cannot be imitated? I don’t know. But I thought that this morning I would share the opening lines of his homage elegy poem to Boston’s own Robert Lowell. This poem is simply called “Elegy.” In opening my copy to it today, the spine shattered, which I find somehow appropriate.
Elegy
The way we are living,
timorous or bold,
with have been our life,
Robert Lowell,
the sill geranium lit
by the lamp I write by,
a wind from the Irish Sea
is shaking it--
here where we sat
ten days ago, with you,
the master elegist
and welder of English...."
Seamus Heaney
Background on My Poem for the Day, “Letter to a Yellow Chair”:
I am very excited to be included in the pages of the fourth issue of Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts. The journal was launched in 2020 as a project of the Center for Spirituality, Dialogue, and Service of Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. The link will take you to the home page, and from there you can look at the first three back issues. That issue will be published on Friday, April 22, 2022. The evening before Pensive is holding a hybrid launch party, and I was honored to be asked to participate by reading my poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Koan.” If you would like to tune in, the link to the Zoom event is: https://northeastern.zoom.us/j/99958817522 or you can use the QR code above.
(Please note that the times listed are U.S. Eastern Standard Time.)
