Perhaps people are needing some winter cheer this year more than usual – I’ve noticed lots of Christmas lights switched on early and various festive offerings around the place. In our house we don’t really mark Christmas but I do appreciate some light in the darkness around Solstice and New Year.
If you’d like to get in the Christmas spirit and celebrate Advent on 1st December, come along to the Candlestick Press launch of their Christmas pamphlets – Ten Poems about Angels and Christmas Stories – 7.30 – 9 pm. Most of the poets will be reading their poems from the anthologies plus another with a seasonal theme. You can find out more and book your free ticket here.
The whole earth is a great tablet holding the multiple overlaid new and ancient traces of the swirl of forces. Each place is its own place, forever (eventually) wild. A place on earth is a mosaic within larger mosaics – the land is all small places, all precise tiny realms replicating larger and smaller patterns.
Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild
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Culture is a mosaic too. The root of the word ‘culture’ comes from the Latin ‘to till, to worship’, the way we all come together to cultivate the ground of our shared being – we give it our attention as citizens, we want to improve it, refine it, according to our shared values. Like the farmer, who at the same time must work the land as if they’ll live forever and die tomorrow.
Facing the climate crisis, which is an existential one, a crisis of consciousness, imagination, we have to learn to accept the same paradox – how to live well, not knowing if we’re sitting at the bedside of a dying planet or serving as midwives for the birth of a new cycle of evolution, an unprecedented iteration of human possibility.
And experiencing this, cultivation has to happen on a personal level too, within our own individual mosaic – always starting where we are and cultivating enough kindly self-awareness to know the difference between a reactive fight, flight or freeze response and a creative one, open to possibility, regeneration and transformation. This has to be the more hopeful and helpful path to take – so that we can try to be the person in the room who makes being in that room better, not worse – less divisive, more diverse, honest and practically supportive.
Culture is the place where the individual and the collective meet and nature and ecology are not separate from that because it is who we are … and we know it creates a sense of community – where we can find strength and encouragement and the potential for deeper understanding and well-being, so we can make better choices together towards a sustainable present and future.
When we look at the climate and ecological crisis, we are looking at the past, the present and the future and how they all affect each other: this is the nature of Time, of the physics of cause and effect. When we know that, really know that, in our own bodies and bones, we see that every choice we make affects what will happen to our children, our grandchildren and their grandchildren and will not hesitate to stand in the way of any harm. As a representative of the older generation, this is my perspective – we are all mosaics within larger mosaics and, however overwhelming that may be, that’s the only place we can act from, as kin, within the enormous, tangled family of things.
On the edge of many precipices we are living in prophetic times, where the gifts of the ancestors are revealing possibilities for pathways forwards. But the path forward can only be traversed after reckoning with the past.
Our world goes to pieces, we have to rebuild our world. We investigate and worry and analyse and forget that the new comes about through exuberance and not through a defined deficiency. We have to find our strengths and not our weakness. Out of the chaos of collapse we can save the lasting: we still have our ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, the absolute of our inner voice – we still know beauty, freedom, happiness…unexplained and unquestioned.
Another mind is moving in me, a second nature that is as inseparable from me as my shadow, except that in relation to it I am the shadow and it the light. The dilemma I find myself in (if I find myself at all) is that this other is hidden from me in the same way that seeing is hidden from things that are seen. The work of meditative thinking is a collaboration between these two natures—the seer that remembers and the seen that always forgets. As in rowing, if you pull more on one oar than the other, you go round in circles, and, as in rowing, all I can see is what I have passed as I press forward toward a point that is hidden behind me.
Carl Lehmann-Haupt
The Double
I am tired, but she is not tired.
I am wordless;
she, who has never spoken a word of her own,
is full of thoughts as precise and impassioned
as the yellow and black exchanges of a wasp’s striped body.
For a long time I thought her imposter.
Then realized:
her jokes, even her puns, are only too subtle for me to follow.
And so we go on, mostly ignoring each other,
though what I cook, she eats with seeming gusto,
and letters intended for her alone I open with curious ease,
as if I, not she, were the long-accomplished thief.
You’re sitting here with us, but you’re also out walking
in a field at dawn. You are yourself
the animal we hunt when you come with us on the chase.
You’re in your body like a plant is solid in the ground,
yet you’re wind. You’re the diver’s clothes
lying empty on the beach. You’re the fish.
In the ocean are many bright strands
and many dark strands like veins that are seen
when a wing is lifted up.
Your hidden self is blood in those, those veins
that are lute strings that make ocean music,
not the sad edge of surf, but the sound of no shore.
Feathers in the Basket
Inside this new love, die.
Botanical 