In spite of the pre-grief I wrote about in early September, I am falling into the pleasures of fall. September is always exciting because it's a signal to learn new things. So I've been reading Walt Whitman's remarkable Specimen Days, a kind of journal-ish autobiography, to see if he doesn't have a place in the second half of the book of poetry I'm working on: Nature's Culture; Culture's Nature. Whitman thought he could hear spring, which I've already written a poem about. He also felt that nature helped him recover from a stroke he had in the later years of his life and regularly "wrestled" with a sapling tree near a brook he frequented, often bathing in the brook and then having a dance with the sapling. I'm often terrified of the task I've set myself: writing poems about a handful of eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth century naturalists. What can I say that they haven't said? But then I just get caught up in learning about them, caught up in how our ways of seeing need the prompts and inspiration of people who didn't live in our wired world. So yes, I'm terrified. But I'm also learning.
I'm also reading some essays by John Burroughs, the man who helped care for Whitman at the beginning of his stroke, collected in The Art of Seeing Things. Burroughs is almost didactic about the pleasures--I know, that sounds like an oxymoron, but I don't think it is--of taking the time to really see the world. He talks about the necessity of loving the world and loving the act of seeing:
"Love sharpens the eye, the ear, the touch; it quickens the feet, it steadies the hand, it arms against the wet and the cold. What we love to do, that we do well. To know is not all; it is only half. To love is the other half....Love is the measure of life: only so far as we love do we really live. The variety of our interests, the width of our sympathies, the susceptibilities of our hearts--if these do not measure our lives, what does?"
What we love defines the quality of our lives. That's good advice for a 75-year-old writer who is undertaking something she's not certain she can pull off. Perhaps it's good advice for all of us.
Burroughs's advice certainly applies to autumn, which gives us a different palette. We have to look more carefully and more often to see its beauty, the way some leaves become more bronzy, the way trees withdrawn their energies into themselves, leaving ghostly gold behind them. The leaves of the wild roses on the bank of Wascana Creek become more ruddy--an entirely new shade of green. The Crayola green we've seen on the trees all summer becomes more subtle, revealing ochres and bronzes and ruddy tones that, paradoxically, are fresh and new to our eyes. And if we have to look more carefully, we slow down.
And I take pleasure in feeling a little bit like a bear, ready to withdraw. I find myself opening drawers or closets and thinking about what I really use or wear and how I can make them work a little better--as if I were a bear preparing her den. This morning, leaving the house to grocery shop, I loved the changed smell of the garden, how the smell of leaves mixed with a hint of the smell of lightning on the air and the smell of rain. Coming home, knowing that rain was forecast for the entire day, I thought "Lovely. I've got a baby quilt to work on, a Halo quilt I can hand piece while listening to music, and I can make good headway on Middlemarch," which I'm re-reading to appreciate the profound humanity and sympathy of George Eliot's narrator. She even manages to be sympathetic to Casaubon, though that didn't lessen my relief, for Dorothea's sake, when he died.
The other part of autumn I love is the way the light changes. It comes into my rooms in different ways, prompting me to see a house I've lived in for 35 years in different ways, to even ask questions of light. Why does the light coming in through the leaves of my crab apple tree resolve into roundish shapes? Two nights ago, Bill and I went for a walk through our neighbourhood rather than on the creek bank. I think I wanted the comfort of elm-enclosed streets, the dim light of evening pierced by scenes in living rooms. I wanted to see the gardens people had put in, but to see them in the half-light. I also noticed how many people in Cathedral Village have added art to the sides of their garages. I ran into a former colleague and had a lovely chat. I thought about community.
Because the last week has been awful. Frankly, the last few months have been especially awful geopolitically speaking. Israel's attack on Hamas in Qatar and its further incursion into Gaza, where people are starving. The military exercises in China organized by Xi and attended by Putin and Kim Jong Un. Russia sending drones to Poland. The ongoing war in Sudan--more starving people-- which Anne Applebaum calls a pointless war. Charlie Kirk's assassination. Trump intoning about how leftists and Democrats practice political violence and he's going after all their organizations. (Never mind that the assassin was a disaffected Republican.) Trump and ICE. Trump and the National Guard. There are two things going on here that I can't quite get my head around. One is how untruth is not only given credence, but is multiplied by the algorithm. Second, there's something going on in the chess match that is nations' relationships with one another that I can't grasp, some terrifying shift. Or something about the permission given to men--yes, men--who have been allowed to become despots. I can't take it in.
So, like a bear, I've wanted to hibernate. But something kept prompting me to think about the places where we live. There's the nation state, which seems in good shape here in Canada, but fubar other places in the world. As a species, at this historical moment, we're not electing good leaders. What is driving this tendency?
There are our communities. Probably each of you has a different Venn diagram showing where you have a sense of belonging. Maybe it's your city or neighbourhood enhanced by belonging to an organization or union, further enriched by your belonging to a group of people who loves the things you love--the Stitchers' and Weavers' Guild or the Saskatchewan Writers' Guild here where I live. Here we keep conversations open--something that's being threatened around the world by censorship or polarized political climates where voices are silenced. Here we celebrate what we have in common--regardless of how different we are. Really, if all you do in this terrible time is keep conversations happening, that will be a worthwhile act of resistance.
The third place we live in is art or nature. Nature always tells us the truth, and it's a truth we need to attend to. We can find a way to be co-conspirators with nature. Art keeps dialogue and rebellion alive, challenging, affirming, prompting us to ask questions. This is where we go to keep our souls alive, whether it's to measure the changing greens or admire Eliot's truthful, broad-minded narrator in a time of grievance and lies.
But if you've been reading my theory-of-everything list of the places where our lives unfold with even a hint of critical thinking, you'll say I left something out. The media. Our cell phones. But they've hijacked our sense of what is real and reasonable. They don't report the fact that in the last decade 100 million children have been lifted out of extreme poverty. Or that the yellow mountain toad is coming back to Australia and the Jaguar to Mexico. Or that carbon emissions seem to have peaked. Even the responsible media, like The New York Times, has weaponized the limbic system in my brain that latches on to news that makes me frightened or makes me angry. Several times a day, they are in my email inbox with "Breaking News!" I've stopped opening them. Rather than doom-scrolling, I'm going to be a bear, and see which berries are just now getting ripe. I'm going to keep reading Middlemarch, and keep working on that baby quilt. There is hope. You just have to stop your ears against some things, as Odysseus did, and focus on the journey you are choosing to take. And remember what John Burroughs said and how it resists our war- and hate-filled world: "Love is the measure of life: only so far as we love do we really live. The variety of our interests, the width of our sympathies, the susceptibilities of our hearts--if these do not measure our lives, what does?"
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