"As you remember and record,
 you pass the story, and the memory,
 back through the heart once again."

C. Chambers, 2004

Do you remember the stories our teachers asked us to write on our 1st day back in the fall? “What I did on my summer vacation.” Here is a much abbreviated list of some of the things I was doing on mine.

I also found myself reading each day, as I’m sure you did too, about wars, storms, droughts, fires, human inequities, species extinction, and the authoritarian drum beat that threatens this and other nations. I heard the lies, deceit, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and just plain disrespect that masquerade as news and wondered at the ease with which so many have been seduced into believing that false painting of “reality.” Sometimes it has been hard not to succumb to a numbing, paralyzing despair.

Theodore Roethke writes so beautifully:

In a Dark Time

“In a dark time, the eye begins to see,

I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;   

I hear my echo in the echoing wood—

A lord of nature weeping to a tree.

I live between the heron and the wren,   

Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul

At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!   

I know the purity of pure despair,

My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.   

That place among the rocks—is it a cave,   

Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!

A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,   

And in broad day the midnight come again!   

A man goes far to find out what he is—

Death of the self in a long, tearless night,   

All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.   

My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,   

Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?

A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.   

The mind enters itself, and God the mind,   

And one is One, free in the tearing wind.”

from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. 

“What,” Roethke asks, “is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?”

My mentor Judith-Kate Friedman added, “What is health but facing circumstance with presence?”

Spending time with the beauties and marvels of this creative Earth helps keep me present, grounded, aware of my place and my responsibility as one of the myriad, wonderfully diverse participants in the on-going emergence of the world. It helps me face my/our circumstances with true presence. It helps me, in Roethke’s words “climb out of my fear” and stay open to wonder and possibility.